Patience
Aleks Sierz , The Tribune

Watch out, here comes the hopeless male. You know the kind I mean: the workaholic who says he loves his wife and kids but never spends any time with them; the squash player who can’t lose gracefully; the kind of guy who doesn’t know what he really wants – or has the faintest notion of how to get it. Yes, there’s only one word for him: hopeless.

In Canadian playwright Jason Sherman’s Patience, the hopeless male is called Reuben and is a businessman whose latest idea is selling Buddha cell phones to Koreans. His life is stable, predictable and repressed. Ten years ago, he exchanged some emotionally honest letters with Sarah, the wife of his friend Paul – their little secret. But since then, nothing.

Then, on the way home from work one day, Reuben stops off at a Chinese restaurant and meets Paul, who he hasn’t seen in ages. Boy, is Paul discontented: he’s bored with his marriage, bored with work and bored with life. Now, he’s decided to take things in hand, and start over. As he says, “Every day is not one more day of your life, it’s one less.”

Typically, Reuben is unimpressed, but pretty soon this meeting sets off a series of events that turn his life upside down. His family home has been built on sand, and he suddenly finds himself alone, having to face questions about who he is and what he really values in life. But, being a hopeless male, he simply can’t hack it. Having a unique chance to start again, he ends up blowing it once more. Hopeless.

Sherman’s play is about how small changes can make a big difference. And about Reuben’s trying to answer the central question of today’s consumer-mad society: “You have everything you need, but do you need everything you have?” But, in political terms, Reuben can’t make even the smallest of changes – at least not for long. And that’s depressing to watch.

Sherman’s stagecraft is confident and imaginative, and he bravely wrestles with the intriguing idea that you can find a moment when your life started to go wrong …Patience is neatly directed by Adam Barnard, and has impressive performances by Geoffrey Towers as Reuben and Chris Andrew Mellon doubling as his work colleague and his brother, while Russell Bentley plays Paul plus no fewer than six other roles.

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