Visitation needs limits
Local company offers great production, meandering story
Barb Stewart

This premiere run of Winnipeg actor/playwright Carolyn Gray’s The Elmwood Visitation showcases a wondrously ambitious work which both fascinates and frustrates.

Much like the spiritualist goings-on it explores, the play is full of delightful spectacle and wacky shenanigans, but its scope is a bit too broad and sometimes spoils the illusions it valiantly tries to conjure.

Ostensibly about the visit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Harry Nelken) to the Elmwood home of Winnipeg doctor T. G. Hamilton (Gordon Tanner) and his wife Lillian (Miriam Smith) — both of whom are devout researchers into the psychic realm — the work veers off in many directions from this encounter.

In the play, Doyle’s visit to Winnipeg involves a séance with the Hamiltons, Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon (Graham Ashmore) and his wife, the infamous medium Margery Crandon (Monique Marcker). Crandon, a rather pathetic swindler played with great comic elan by Ashmore, has violently latched himself to the meal ticket that is Margery, a steel-willed woman whose own ambitions cloud her vision of truth.

In many ways, Margery, artfully portrayed with honest sympathy and evocative physicality by Marcker, is the focus of The Elmwood Visitation, as her actions at the séance bring about a series of events which irrevocably affect the lives of all the characters.

While Marcker is up to the task of bearing this weight, the strong focus on her (along with the rather unnecessary tale of the Gorilla Man murderer, who was captured in Killarney in the mid-’20s), is a bit of a puzzle.

Gray has a wonderful way with language and all the of the actors take obvious delight in her words, but the play is ultimately too long and broadly focused to completely engage with the plight of its characters.

The cast is unequivocally strong and the production itself has been lovingly researched and superbly staged, with an ethereal all-white set by Lisa Hancharek, otherworldly lighting by Hugh Conacher and real live illusions courtesy of magic consultant Dean Gunnarson. Director George Toles knows how to get a laugh from an audience and there is some truly engaging verbal and physical comedy in this production.

But when too many storylines collide and the lives of the characters become dark with the happenings of the real world rather than lit by the glow of the other side, The Elmwood Visitation loses steam and leaves the audience restless for a bit more cohesion.