What is love? This is the question explored in Palpitations, a play written and directed by U of T student Nic Makos. Originally devised as a one-act play for a drama festival, Makos extensively rewrote the script to bring it to its current form. The result is a simultaneously thoughtful and vibrant production that, for the most part, succeeds in its ambition to provide a careful analysis of love.
In a series of risky, stylish vignettes interspersed with music and movement, eight characters highlight the nuances, joys, and disappointments of romance. Inspired by music while writing the play, Makos decided to integrate it into the production, along with some simple but effective choreography.
The play opens with the nine actors standing motionless onstage against an original remix of Haddaway’s “What is Love” by sound designer Chris Pugh in collaboration with Christie Bates. The unaffected choreography is enhanced by the breathtaking lighting design. “What is love?” asks Sarah Goodman (Emma Malm), and thus we begin.
The first scene is set in a classroom, where teacher Anna Palmer (first-year student Olivia Gagnon) is unable to answer her students’ questions about sex and love. Only able to say that she and her husband have been together for over a decade, she is nonplussed and flustered by their enquiries. Palmer finds herself out of love with her husband and starts an affair with the father of one of her students in an attempt to find love again. Her role is the most demanding, and Gagnon rises to the occasion, giving an emotional and courageous performance.
Sam (Alyssa Hauer), one of Anna Palmer’s students, is alternately self-pitying, cynical, and vulnerable, and convincingly portrays a teenager wounded by the separation of her parents. Her character raises interesting questions about the transformative power of love in those that witness it, wondering whether she would be a better person if her parents were still enamoured of one another.
Her father, Frank (Gavin Douglas) thinks that he has rediscovered love with Anna. Douglas and Gagnon show great chemistry in their scenes together, though his expressions of fatherly concern towards Hauer falter a little. However, it is during one father-daughter scene that the choreography is used to great effect, as the rest of the cast enacts a wall (with an initial foot stamp to simulate the sound of a door slamming) between father and daughter, while she questions him about the reason her mother left. As Frank responds and Sam accepts his answers, the cast moves further and further apart, until there is no wall left between the two.
The love triangle between John (Tom Da Silva), Eve (Anna Ross), and Joey (Lucas Durand) offers some of the most heartfelt moments in the play. Joey and Eve fall in love, but Eve’s faith leaves her struggling with her newfound emotions for Joey. In a strong performance from Ross, she reminds us of the joys and uncertainties of a budding relationship—the ache to touch and be touched, the fluttering stomach, and the hesitation in admitting one’s feelings, even if they are returned. Durand plays the part of the urgent boyfriend desperate to declare his love to his girlfriend whether or not she is able to say the words back. In an outstanding performance, Da Silva plays John, who is in love with his heterosexual best friend, Joey, and delivers one of the many memorable lines of the night when he declares that “My skin crawls when he touches her.” He perfectly captures the piercing heartache and hostility of unrequited love.
Lexi (Pash Ahmeree) and Rachel (Robin Buller) highlight the lengths women will go for love and how rose-coloured glasses sometimes act as blinders. Lexi has a fight with her boyfriend and although she feels that “a life without love isn’t a life at all,” she is weary of always being the one to compromise. Rachel deals with a physically abusive boyfriend, leaving John (who has discovered her in the men’s bathroom trying to cover up her bruise) to proclaim in anger “This isn’t love!” while she remains insistent that what she has is better than nothing at all.
The musical choices between scenes were excellent and thoroughly appropriate, although the volume was inconsistent and sometimes jarring. Emily Hofstetter’s lighting design was truly inspired, using coloured lights, a translucent back screen, and footlights to great effect. The music, movement, lights, and dialogue worked well together, reinforcing the concepts and emotions expressed both verbally and physically. Although overwhelming at times, the play was an interesting, cohesive whole that avoided being pretentious or overly sentimental. Love is a universal theme, and Makos’s offbeat, multifaceted approach engaged the audience. Fifty entertaining minutes after posing the question, “What is love?” we got our answer: “Love is everything that makes us who we are.”
