Sabryn Rock, left, Meegwun Fairbrother, centre, and Jakob Ehman star in Jordi Mand’s Caught at Theatre Passe Muraille.Michael Cooper
Jordi Mand loves an intense confrontation. In her transfixing debut drama Between the Sheets, first produced by Toronto's Nightwood Theatre in 2012, a parent-teacher interview turns into a cage match between an angry wife and her husband's young mistress. In Caught, her new play premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille (where Mand is resident playwright), a shoplifting arrest deteriorates into a heated three-way struggle between a stressed cop, an obsessed security guard and an exasperatingly enigmatic teenager.
In the process, Mand brings in themes of privilege, power and physical abuse, a potent mix especially when coming in the wake of the Jian Ghomeshi trial. It's a great conversation-starter of a play – but that's all it is. At a too-lean 60 minutes, Caught raises issues but never really gets down to exploring them. As she did with Between the Sheets, Mand makes artful use of multiple plot twists to keep us on the edge of our seats. But at the end, we're still on the edge, expecting something more.
The scene is the grimy little backroom of a major department store in a Toronto shopping mall. Security guard Trisha (Sabryn Rock) has hauled in James (Jakob Ehman), a teen she has caught with a backpack full of stolen goods. James, a weedy-looking white kid in a hoodie and ball cap, insists he only swiped the stuff so he could meet Trisha. He's also reluctant to reveal any personal information and won't let her look in his wallet.
Trisha, already irritable, grows increasingly frustrated by James's slippery attitude as she waits impatiently for the police to arrive. The tension between them finally explodes into violence, just as an officer, Dan (Meegwun Fairbrother), finally shows up. As he assesses the situation, it becomes clear that he knows Trisha – and he also seems to recognize James.
Now the tone, amusing at the outset, grows darker and the story gets knottier. Where James has said he was following Trisha, it could be that Trisha herself is a stalker. Indeed, James claims to have evidence of it and now it appears she's the one who has been caught. Dan, meanwhile, is up for promotion and under a lot of pressure; he, too, is caught – between believing Trisha or James. If he sides with one of them, he risks destroying his career.
Sorry to be so vague, but this is one of those plays you can't fully unpack without venturing into "spoiler alert" territory. What we can say is that Mand touches on issues of class and sex and their perceived influence on supposedly blind justice. One of her characters turns out to have taken a vigilante approach to cases of violence against women, which reminds us of the ongoing controversy over how the law deals with complaints of domestic and sexual abuse.
Then there's the question of class and of race. Mand makes no direct reference to the latter, but director Sarah Garton Stanley puts it front and centre with her casting. While Ehman is white, Rock is a black actress and Fairbrother is part Ojibwa, which in the context of their characters compels us to think of white privilege. Ehman's James may be the accused criminal and the other two the figures of authority, but as soon as we learn that the kid goes to Upper Canada College, we have a pretty good idea who's going to gain the upper hand.
There's plenty that's relevant here and Mand's clever writing keeps us intrigued, but the play is all technique, at the expense of any deeper insights into the characters. It was, in fact, Mand's sympathetic understanding of the two rival women in Between the Sheets that made her first play such an impressive debut. Here, she only just begins to show us hidden aspects of her three characters. Caught is meant to be short and sharp, like its predecessor. Instead, its cliffhanger ending feels more like the first-act conclusion of a full-length play.
We're certainly invested enough in the actors' performances to see them take their roles further. Ehman makes the mysterious James teasingly elusive; at times he's charmingly goofy, at other times a weasel or a crybaby. As Trisha, Rock has the edginess of someone who is keeping secrets herself. She paces the room as if she were the one being detained. Fairbrother, as the tough but harassed Dan, is one of the most convincing cops I've ever seen onstage.
John Thompson's production design embeds a small, dingy white room within the stage of the Passe Muraille Backspace, keeping the action tightly confined. His lighting bathes its dirt-speckled walls in florid colours when the mood gets heavy. Similarly, sound designer Debashis Sinha signals upcoming tension with a clanging musical score.
It's an entertaining show but you feel it should have more to say. I'm all for plays that leave you with something to talk about in the bar afterward. With Caught, however, you want to take the playwright out for a coffee and discuss a possible second act.
Caught runs to April 24 (passemuraille.ca).