ORANGE FLOWER WATER
Directed by Wayne Paquette. Written by Craig Wright. Starring Jesse Gervais, Twilla Macleod, Tracey Penner, Mark Stubbings. To Apr 19. Varscona Theatre (10329-83 Ave). Tickets available at the Varscona box office (433-3399).

“This is not fun,” says David Larson (Jesse Gervais), one half of the adulterous couple that motivates the drama in Craig Wright’s Orange Flower Water. He’s in the middle of a shitty, irrational argument with Beth Youngquist (Tracy Penner) about their future together, which is really just an occasion for him to say aloud all the resentful things he’s been thinking since their affair became known to both David’s brainy, brittle wife Cathy (Twilla MacLeod) and Beth’s loutish husband Brad (Mark Stubbings). No fun at all.

Arguably, Orange Flower Water—the mainstage maiden voyage of Wayne Paquette and John Sproule’s Blarney Productions—is not about fun. It’s mostly about how awful people feel even when they’re doing what they think is best for themselves, and it doesn’t stint on depicting the suffering everyone is forced to endure. The set, a double bed with a gauzy backdrop, accommodates chairs so the characters not currently engaged in the scene can sit and look on mutely at the emotional carnage wrought when Beth and David decide to leave their families in order to be together.

Well, to say they “decide” is a bit of an overstatement—rather, their hands are forced by Brad, who catches Beth out about being unfaithful and calls Cathy to tell her. As much as they want to put a halt to it and patch things up, the spurned partners only speed the dissolution of their respective households. No one gets off lightly, that’s for sure, least of all the audience.

Orange Flower Water presents a heap of challenges to director Paquette and his young-but-seasoned cast. The characters, the situations, the high emotional pitch of the whole play, if poorly handled, would be intolerable. Selfish people and the terrible things they do and say to get what they want—who wants to watch that for 90 minutes? Fortunately, Paquette and his cast seize on the play’s grim wit and the characters’ yearning for connection and meaning as much as the discord they sow.

The story unfolds as a series of long exchanges between pairs of characters—duets of discomfort, if you will. There are harrowing fights and sexual confrontations charged with anger and recrimination, painful small talk that gives way to even more painful frank talk and the overarching sense that, right or wrong, everyone involved is losing something irrevocably. 

These vignettes flow seamlessly with dreamy musical interludes in which the drama’s participants rearrange themselves onstage, and everyone at some point recites a note he or she has written that hints at the tenderness and generosity buried by years of stagnating marriage.

The performances and direction are uniformly fine, bringing a ring of truth to scenes that in lesser hands might otherwise seem histrionic or calculated to provoke. Wright, best known as a writer for TV shows like Six Feet Under and Lost, gets a little heavy-handed in his attempts to establish a metaphysical underpinning to all the angst, but Penner and MacLeod in particular temper the script’s more ponderous tendencies with raw, real characterizations. 

Stubbings, whose role is relatively small, is no less adept at locating the soul of the self-professed prick Brad than Gervais is at exposing the inner prick concealed in ostensible gentle soul David.

Tough as it often is to watch, Orange Flower Water is a promising start to Blarney Productions’ collective career. You’ve caught my attention with one intelligent, challenging show—now let’s see what else you can do.