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Frame And Fortune | Luck and chance encounters play a huge role in the fates of A Life in the Day’s Mark Jenkins, Michele Brown, and Amber Borotsik.

A LIFE IN THE DAY
Directed by Vanessa Sabourin. Written by Beth Graham. Starring Amber Borotsik, Michele Brown, and Mark Jenkins. Catalyst Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd). Until Feb 15. Tickets: $15-$18, available at (780) 409-1910.
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For an advanced mathematical concept, chaos theory has gained a surprising amount of traction in pop culture. The idea that a seemingly innocuous activity can have momentous consequences around the world has been thrust into the Hollywood limelight, most notably by a leather-clad Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, where he used it to predict raptor-murder (kind of), and in the already-forgotten Ashton Kutcher time-travel vehicle The Butterfly Effect.

So it’s particularly fitting that the new production from The Maggie Tree, an Edmonton-based company emphasizing the role of women in all aspects of theatre, should take as its subject a popular concept that, so far, has had no female spokesperson. Local actor/playwright Beth Graham’s A Life in the Day isn’t overtly feminist, but it is overtly chaos theory-ish: three omniscient narrators lead the audience on a fragmented, dreamlike tour of a small prairie town, showing in minute detail the hidden connections between its disparate residents. Dialogue is delivered in repeated fragments, and whole scenes evolve into stylish movement pieces, but there’s a fundamental lack of substance behind it that can’t be fully hidden. In fact, these flourishes kind of end up being the substance, and the result is unsatisfying, like a Christmas tree made entirely of tinsel.

My objections have almost nothing to do with Vanessa Sabourin’s direction or any of the three actors, who all do fine work bouncing between dozens of characters, from disgruntled married couples to booming Greek gods to a defecating cat. Daniela Masellis’s set design borrows a little too liberally from Tim Burton, with its distorted window frames and Victorian bric-à-brac, but still makes a kind of sense. What really irritated me was Graham’s script.

Let me preface this by saying that I firmly believe writing is the hardest part of theatre to get right, and that a faulty script is far more difficult to tolerate than a faulty actor. And it’s not so much that Graham’s script is bad — there’s a lot of technical skill in the way the mini-scenes run up against and overlap one another. It’s that it never much bothers with engaging the audience. The characters are simply conduits for Graham’s themes and metaphors, and the effect is akin to being asked to empathize with chesspieces. I couldn’t shake the mental image of this script as an abstract creative writing exercise, minutely tailored and workshopped to please other actors and playwrights while leaving the rest of the audience out in the cold.

This problem becomes most apparent during the sea change in tone that takes place near the climax. After systematically showing how chaos is everywhere and chance encounters are wrecking the townspeople’s lives, things turn on a dime just as a woman known only as The Outsider tries to drive her car into a lake — whereupon we’re led back through all of those seemingly hopeless situations and shown how, deep down, they’re actually going to turn out okay. Every one of them. I see the symbolism, but that doesn’t make the actual events being proposed any less ridiculous.

Nick Hornby once complained that “the literary world has a tendency to believe that the least consoling worldview is the Truth.” An essential observation, to be sure, though it’s also important not to lean too far the other way. A Life in the Day, even more improbably, does both at once.