THEATRE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2025 | Volume 257

 

A play by the writer of TV’s Succession is bound to be intense and twisty, marked by shifting allegiances and betrayals. The Effect, a Rumble-ITSAZOO co-production directed by Rumble artistic director Jiv Parasram, has all those hallmarks along with a profound self-consciousness on the part of two of its characters, a quality missing from the TV show.

The scenario: two young people, Connie (Paige Louter) and Tristan (Andy Kalirai), have signed up to be the guinea pigs in a clinical trial of a new anti-depressant drug that increases the dopamine hit to the brain. As the doctors testing them keep upping the dosage, Connie and Tristan, strangers, become powerfully attracted to each other. The play tracks their journey and its consequences.

Their doctors, psychiatrists Lorna (Meghan Gardiner) and Toby (Anthony Santiago), turn out to have been lovers in the past, and the drug trial tests their relationship, too. Lorna has a personal history of depression and an aversion to the very drugs she’s feeding these kids. Machiavellian Toby is more the objective scientist, remaining above the fray, emerging apparently unscathed while Lorna falls into a crisis as profound as Connie’s and Tristan’s in the end.

All this takes place in a stark, largely empty room furnished only with five mirrors and a couple of isolation booths (set, props and projections by Monica Emme), gloomily, moodily lit by Phil Miguel. I was reminded of Sartre’s No Exit: the dead trapped in a room they can’t escape, where “hell is other people.” Only these characters aren’t dead, just (with the exception of Dr. Toby) trapped in the hell of their own psyches, their torment exacerbated by drugs or their own hormones surging through their brains or the other people in their space.

I didn’t find the story especially revelatory, and the plot device that generates the final scenes is questionable at best. But I enjoyed the intensity with which Parasram drove the actors. And I loved all the acting.

Louter and Kalirai play their characters as almost exact opposites. Connie is cerebral and settled, with a boyfriend on the outside, while Tristan is physical and aggressive, a Stanley to her Blanche. But once the drugs kick in, they both feel like their heads are exploding, and they go at each other with an animal intensity that’s electric in the live theatre. Gardiner and Santiago maintain their odd-couple opposition to the end, and Gardiner’s final tableau is shattering.Connie will prove as near to heroic as anyone gets in the play, perhaps its only positive outcome.

It’s great to see these non-subscription companies cooperating in this time of cultural belt-tightening, producing a serious, offbeat script that we’re unlikely to see anywhere else in the city. And I’m reminded again how deep our community’s acting poolhas become.

 

 

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