REVIEW: Paint Me This House of Love at Tarragon
iPhoto caption: Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann
What a wonder is Chelsea Woolley.
Her likely divisive new play, Paint Me This House of Love, is a balancing act between truth and lies, past and present, trauma and memory. When we meet Cecilia, fresh off a breakup and incapable of finishing a sentence, it’s within the crumbling walls of her home. The place needs a good spruce, a fresh coat of paint. It needs love.
Enter Dad — Jules — who hasn’t seen Cecilia in nearly 25 years. He’s handy, he says, a high-end realtor with a knack for projects, so why doesn’t he help his daughter fix the place up?
It’s a compelling lede for a frustrating story, a tale of reconnection and abandonment with no real conclusion to speak of. As Jules and Cece paint, they excavate the remnants of their relationship: the letters the two wrote to each other when Cece was a child, and the context which kept Jules from forming a relationship with her. His excuses for his absence flounder, pulsing from believable to not in a matter of moments. When Cece finally pushes back against her father’s trail of lies, it’s explosive and raw, and sends a poor Scrabble set flying against Ken MacDonald’s subtly genius set, primed for paint job after paint job as the show’s run progresses.
Cece’s no saint either, though her father’s flightiness provides some possible background on her inability to relate to others. The particulars of her recently ended romantic relationship are muddy, as if she herself doesn’t quite understand them. He was German, and he liked Scrabble, and he loved her, and he’s gone, she tells us and un-tells us over the course of Paint Me This House of Love’s roughly two hours.
Jessica B. Hill and Jeremiah Sparks are a sublime daughter-father pairing. They’ve mastered Woolley’s tricky text and rhythm (you can almost hear the punctuation and pagination of the play in the actors’ mouths) — with a less capable acting team, the play would wear out its welcome quickly. Attending a play to watch actors not finish a sentence might sound daunting, maddening, even grating, but under Mike Payette’s as-usual skillful directorial hand, the duo soars, filling the crumbling house’s every corner with simultaneous warmth and fury.
Plus, the audience does get a break from all that fragmentation. As I said: Woolley knows what she’s doing.
That break comes in the form of Rhondi, Cece’s mother, played by a Tanja Jacobs in a fabulous, Dora-worthy performance. Rhondi is irreverent and crass, and on her fourth husband (whose bowel troubles are the butt of many of her punchlines).
But the wily Rhondi is aging, too, trapped in a body that can no longer shave its own legs. Her relationship with Cecilia is solid, if just a hair overbearing, and in one simple act of caregiving we see just how much Cece feels for her mother. Rhondi’s sharp tongue can be harmful as well as humorous — more than once does she knock Cece down with a quick insult — but she means well. Cece has to believe that, and we the audience do too. Jacobs captures Rhondi’s many complicated layers, milking the laughs and reveling in the drama: it’s a fine performance.
To watch Paint Me This House of Love feels to me like what it must have been like to see an early Hannah Moscovitch play. There are quirks to even out in Woolley’s style — her penchant for overlapping sentences might be just a smidge too strong in places — but the artistic voice there is powerful, and specific, and frighteningly skilled. The story of an adult daughter reconnecting with her father through a home reno might lend itself to cliché under a less confident hand, but the symbols of Cece’s world (Scrabble, and orange taffy, and stamps) are fiercely original and show great promise for Woolley as a playwright.
Paint Me This House of Love is a decisive ending to an overall kickass Tarragon season, one Payette and his team can be proud of. An electrifying Tarragon debut for Woolley.
Paint Me This House of Love runs at Tarragon until May 7. Tickets are available here.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling is Intermission's former senior editor and the theatre reporter for the Globe and Mail. She likes British playwright Sarah Kane, most songs by Taylor Swift, and her cats, Fig and June. She was a 2024 fellow at the National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT.
LEARN MORE
iPhoto caption: Photo by Aisling Murphy.
In the darkest months of Yukon winter, it’s all about the Sun Room
I’m here for a week in January as a guest of Nakai Theatre, a hub for theatrical experimentation and outside-the-box programming in Canada’s westernmost territory.
Armchairs, tattoos, and an online theatre magazine
When I started at Intermission, my world was limited to the confines of an armchair. Arts journalism was a high it felt dangerously fruitless to chase. The life stretched ahead of me was amorphous and frightening, a chasm filled with hand sanitizer and immigration concerns. It was worth crying over a spilled kombucha and scrubbing at the stain.
iPhoto caption: Liz Appel headshot courtesy of Liz Appel.
Five questions with Wights playwright Liz Appel
Intermission spoke with Appel over email for a brief Q&A about Wights, now playing at Crow’s Theatre until February 9.
Call for applications: Publishing and editorial assistant
Intermission Magazine is seeking a dynamic and collaborative individual to join our team.
iPhoto caption: What Writing Can Do: The 2025 Musical Theatre Critics Lab
Announcing What Writing Can Do: The 2025 Musical Theatre Critics Lab
What Writing Can Do is timed to coincide with the Grand and Theatre Aquarius’ co-production of Waitress, which will serve as a jumping-off point for discussions throughout the Lab.
iPhoto caption: A Christmas Story production still by Dahlia Katz.
REVIEW: A Christmas Story feels fresh at Theatre Aquarius
If you want to catch A Christmas Story before it closes, good luck — the show is close to sold out, and with the talent on that stage, it’s not hard to see why.
Comments