| TORONTO STAR |
| Mar. 23, 2003. 01:00 AM |
| At the play's heart is love Playwright inspired by episode of E.R. Play ponders three people sharing a heart
What if I loved you openly? Was honest with myself and others? Then who would we be? "I kind of want there to be this unconscious mantra running through the play that nails every person in the room," said Matthew Edison, whose play, The Domino Heart, explores such possibilities. When asked what the mantra would say, Edison's green-blue eyes search the air for some time. Then, like a version of E.M. Forster's "only connect," it comes to him: "Just love." Like his play, Edison is remarkably open when he talks about love — how it should be in endless supply, and how, like the characters in his play, people would rather hide than accept it. The idea comes from the title of an E.R. episode he saw about three years ago. Though not the kind that anchors this play, it's the name of an actual operation, in which someone with lung disease is given a new heart and lungs. This frees the healthy heart for someone else. Edison took some poetic licence and made his play about a heart shared among three people. When he first sat down to write, he started with the heart. Whose was it? He heard Cara Fortree's voice first. Played by Rosemary Dunsmore, Fortree is a professor whose husband, Peter, is killed in a car crash, seconds after a fight over an affair that happened years ago. Her betrayal stemmed from many things, one of which was how much Peter loved her. "It's not easy to be with someone who's so open," Edison said. Then the next character to get Peter's heart began to speak. It was Rev. Mortimer Wright, who is pushing 70 and likes nothing better than preaching to a congregation whose hearts are shut; a man who sees nothing hypocritical in the fact that, despite his position, he doubts whether paradise exists; a man whose words are borne of such fierce idealism, actor David Fox wasn't initially sure how to speak them. "They can be seen — if they're not dealt with properly — as platitudes. But they're truths. And often because they're truths, people take them as self evident, or they look at them as trite. But he says them out loud and he believes it." Edison has been busy acting in major theatres, most recently in The Winter's Tale at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. But he plans to keep writing. He has begun a playwright's residency at CanStage, where he'll also play Mozart to David Storch's Salieri in Amadeus this fall. Last season, the 27-year-old Edison was a member of Tarragon's playwright unit, once led by the theatre's late artistic director, Urjo Kareda, who had read the first draft of The Domino Heart a year earlier. "He just smiled and said, `I like your play,'" Edison recalled. Kareda had taught Edison that a playwright must know the meaning behind each moment. Kareda was too sick to attend its staged reading, but Tarragon's associate artistic director, Andy McKim, did. About a month after his death, someone from the theatre phoned to say that Kareda had left a season behind before he died. The Domino Heart was on it. |