Ethering the Storm - White Mills Theatre Company's Thrilling Collaboration with New Playwright Brendee Green

Tickets available

Much like the contained intensity of a therapy room, Limbo offers a venue parallel to reality in which the soul can confront its deepest shames and the self-reproaches that might be easier to avoid in our day-to-day life. It’s here, in a shared purgatorial cortex known as the ‘ether’, that seasoned actor and theatre artist Brendee Green sets her first play written for the stage. Ether functions as a goldmine of substance-rich roles for women, from a high school teacher who dares to have a life outside her troubled students to a sweet Southern caretaker that defined herself in both life and afterlife by her impact in the existence of others. But it also poses challenging questions to the audience that it immerses: what tethers you to life? And would it to be enough if you had the option to move beyond to what comes after?

Esther Vlessing, Felicia Valenti, Jonathan Widdifield, Breanna Maloney, Cassandra Davidson. Photo by Yuko Yamamori.

Esther Vlessing, Felicia Valenti, Jonathan Widdifield, Breanna Maloney, Cassandra Davidson. Photo by Yuko Yamamori.

Shannon Mills and Brandon White of White Mills Theatre Company were an ideal team to produce this new script, having tackled the boundaries between life and death in their sold-out 2018 production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. With a successful repertoire of musical and operatic works securely in place, their first foray into using a script rather than a libretto marks an exciting expansion of their wheelhouse. Having effectively staged ghost characters, they now approach the tricker challenge of portraying souls suspended in a purgatory state separate from our world.

The piece opens ambitiously without explaining where we are, and our confusion is shared by the character Indigo Childs (get it?) played with tremulous vulnerability by Esther Vlessing. She questions the infuriatingly serene voice that welcomes her to this two-dimensional limbo, establishing us in a space where our deepest regrets and failings have nowhere to hide. Green avoids the comforting myth that love can heal all wounds, instead exploring the circumstances in which a soul might forgive themselves for ambiguous transgressions, or might choose not to return to their body at all.

To this end, Breanna Maloney gives an exceptional performance as Charlotte, a woman whose identity has been fragmented by the allure of the world’s oldest profession… and one particularly possessive client played to grotesque, menacing perfection by Jonathan Widdifield. Building as slowly as a one-act script allows, we witness ‘Charlie’ with her partner Paisley, played with arresting gravity by Cassandra Davidson, and the consequences of becoming ‘Lottie’ for her clients. Navigating the complexities of sex work with compassion and frank detail, Green offers the audience insight into the therapeutic elements that can obscure a deeper alienation occurring over time as a person loses connection to who they are outside the desire of their clients. Maloney beautifully portrays a soul whose connection to her fleshly garment was fragile long before the accident that landed her in the Ether, unravelling her tangled tether to life by increments from the moment she begins her performance with a bleary “What the fuck?”

Jonathan Widdifield, Breanna Maloney, Cassandra Davidson. Photo by Yuko Yamamori

Jonathan Widdifield, Breanna Maloney, Cassandra Davidson. Photo by Yuko Yamamori

Ether involves the audience in the final third of the piece as we’re joined by the buoyantly tragic Myssie, played by Felicia Valenti with all the southern charm of the current Bachelorette. She serves as an anchor in the piece, acknowledging the audience as fellow inmates of the shared psychological landscape the characters must find their way out of with only deep honesty as a compass. It’s never asked outright, but this allows each audience member to interrogate their own connections to life—in the same situation, are you bound to your existence by more than your three-dimensional body? Is the love you share with others enough to heal deeper fissures that have divided you from your sense of self? Even if it’s the best thing in your life, is it enough to live for? As Myssie states, it must be an individual decision even if your partner is integrated into the process. This is just one of many parallels to real-world therapeutic models that anyone privileged enough to have access will recognize.

Esther Vlessing. Photo by Yuko Yamamori.

Esther Vlessing. Photo by Yuko Yamamori.

Not without passages of engaging humour and interludes of grounded connection between characters, perhaps the most charming idiosyncrasy of the production was the decision to costume the character of Paisley in plaid. It’s a credit to Green and both directors that we’re given moments to inhale and laugh between breathless descents into perilous recesses of human shame. Navigating the ether of one’s own mind requires a resilient sense of humour as well as the courage to swim down into your darkest regrets and failings, a balance Ether strikes effectively in this compelling premiere for a script that will hopefully be workshopped and remounted over the years.

Presented by the Toronto Fringe Festival, Ether runs July 3rd -14th at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse.

Tickets can be purchased HERE.

Design by Ella Mazur

Design by Ella Mazur