Pacific Theatre and Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Theatre
Re:Union
by Sean Devine

Dates and Venue 21 October - 12 November 2011, Wed-Sat at 8pm | (Sat matinees at 2pm) | Pacific Theatre

Director John Langs Set and Lighting Design John Webber Sound Design Noah Drew Video Projection Design Jason H Thompson Costume Design Flo Barrett Dramaturg Heidi Taylor Stage Manager Lois Dawson

Reviewer John Jane


Almost exactly forty-five years ago (2 November, 1965) Norman Morrison, a teacher and an executive secretary of a Quaker community in Baltimore got into his car with his infant daughter Emily and drove the forty miles to Washington DC, drove onto the parking lot at the Pentagon, walked over to building directly below Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara’s window, doused himself with kerosene and lit a match!

Some have since called him a madman, a religious zealot, even a heartless parent. Morrison was likely none of these, but from any perspective, four and a half decades later on it would seem that his selfless action failed to have much impact on political decisions at the time – or even since.

In Sean Devine’s highly speculative two act play Re:Union, he offers a non-linear narrative of what led up to Morrison’s gruesome act and it’s hypothetical impact on his daughter Emily and former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara thirty-six years later. Mr. Devine obviously prefers an allegorical form of storytelling. This works well up to a point, although, too much is made of Morrison’s lecture notes about Soren Kierkegaard’s three problemata, the third dealing with the ethical issues of Abraham and his son Isaac from the Old Testament and only succeeds in slowing the pace of the play.

Conjecture about the personality of real people is always tricky. Of the three characters dealt with in this coup de théâtre, only one is still alive (McNamara died aged 93 in 2006). The theatre programme publishes a disclaimer admitting that the Morrison family did not give their consent to the production. Hardly surprising - Alexa Devine’s portrayal of Emily Morrison makes for a complex heroine. She is a peace activist who holds the belief that to achieve peace we accept that some nihilism is justified. This posture is manifest in the hostile conversations between herself and former Secretary McNamara that drive the play forward.

Mrs. Devine (the playwright’s wife) plays Emily with both strength and passion and Evan Frayne and Andrew Wheeler each turn in strong performances as the sentient Norman Morrison and the intractable politician respectively.

John Webber’s stark set consists primarily of a light box in the centre of the stage and floor-to-ceiling panels fastened across the east wall that both evoke a monolithic government structure and serve as a surface for Jason H. Thompson’s stunning multimedia.

Sean Devine, in his first new play offers a well-imagined and thought-provoking work, though I did sense that it’s really a work in progress that could stand being developed beyond its current state. Symbolic references like the previously mentioned lecture notes and the muffin that McNamara brought for Emily provided as much confusion as illumination. Although, the conveniently acronym-ed US Patriot Act that removes constraints on law enforcement agencies might have been given more elucidation.

© 2011 John Jane