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| Jan Rudd |
In the affecting first scene of Jan Rudd's new one-woman play, Safety in Numbers, the main character, Naida, moves us through emotions ranging from tension and agitation, through the bathos of drunkenness, to rage, abjection, and despair-only to arrive at humour. All this, with only two words of monologue and one prop-a phone that doesn't ring.
A one-person show runs the risk of being all talk, but the physicality Jan Rudd brings to her acting is the most remarkable and engaging part of Safety in Numbers. Rudd inhabits the six characters in the play, and each of them has her own face, her own voice, her own body.
The six women in the play are participating in a series of free therapy sessions at the community centre, led by the relentlessly positive (and slightly cracked) Meg, an off-license therapist-"not presently certified"-who keeps one page of Freud ahead of her charges, who are C.T. (a chain-smoking ex-con in therapy as part of rehab); Earla (whose father wanted a boy and whose deepest fantasies are about Gilligan's island); Doris (a prudish housewife who uses moral judgments as an excuse not to deal with her own unhappiness); and Cindy (a perky ditz on a self-improvement kick, with the self-awareness of a broomstick). Naida arrives as a newcomer to the group, in the aftermath of the telephone incident in the first scene.
Thanks to Rudd's sensitive writing and acting, watching these stock characters become real people to themselves and to the audience is both funny and sad. But laughter and anguish are still uneasy bedfellows-no matter how often they manage to wind up in the sack together. As audience members, we can't laugh wholeheartedly because to do so would be unjust to the characters' genuine pain.
Rudd plays to this uncertainty and even probes it through the structure of the play. Naida, the play's central character, is almost silent-she's clearly a good listener, but hardly a speaker. In fact, when Naida starts to tell her story to the group, C.T. shoots her down, angrily reminding her that they've all had their traumas. This leaves the audience to assume Naida's place in the therapy group: listening, learning, and understanding oneself as a result of others, stories.
I think the audience wanted not so much to be Naida as to see her. We needed to hear her story, and not only out of lascivious or voyeuristic interest, but because we, like the others in the therapy group, learn by listening, learning, and understanding. And in a show built on character rather than plot, it is still individual and collective stories that move us. (For this reason, it's Doris, whose story is most developed, that we remember most vividly at the end of the play.)
Safety in Numbers features an extraordinary performance by Rudd and is well worth seeing for its humour, compassion, and integrity. Exploring the psyches of six women, Rudd as a playwright found safety in numbers, and as such she put the emphasis on the collective rather than any individual. Though I missed seeing a central character grow and change, Rudd's play offers a moving vision of the transformative and integrative power of friendships among women, with a heavy emphasis on the healing power of laughter.
Jane Ledwell is a regular contributing writer to The Buzz who has recently been appointed Executive Director of the Institute of Island Studies.
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