Leaving Home by Canadian playwright David French takes a hard look at a Toronto working-class family circa 1960. The patriarch of the Mercer family is Jacob (lusty performance by Chris Mulkey), a big, drunken, overbearing man who attempts to bully everyone else in the household–namely his two sons, Ben (Kayde McMullen) and Bill (James Lastovic), and his wife Mary (the valiant Karen Landry). The latter, though, has learned over the years how to cope with his angry outbursts and keep the peace. Not so with Ben and Bill, who have come to hate their father and can’t wait to flee the coop.
Bill’s chance comes when, at the age of seventeen, he knocks up his girlfriend Kathy (Sierra Barter). As she is a Catholic and won’t have an abortion, Bill agrees to marry her, knowing it will give him an excuse to leave the house. Nineteen-year-old Ben decides to follow in their footsteps and move in with them.
All these plans are knocked for a loop by life. Kathy, a bewildered waif of a girl, has a miscarriage–-on the day before she is to be married. With no baby in the offing, why should she and Ben get hitched (they’re too young and immature to know if they really love each other)? But then Kathy’s hard-drinking, foul-mouthed mother Minnie (Mary Carrig) arrives to remind everyone that the wedding party and the priest are standing by–imagine the scandal if the ceremony doesn’t take place.
There are further complications. It turns out that Minnie and Jacob once had a fling, despite their religious differences: he’s Anglican and vehemently anti-Catholic. She’s also a gambler and a boozer. And she loves to needle him by talking about the rich lawyer his wife could–and should–have married. So it’s no surprise when Jacob blows his top yet again and tries to smash all the furniture in the house.
Leaving Home was chosen as one of the “1,000 Essential Plays in the English Language” in the Oxford Dictionary of Theatre. It’s hard to know why. Although the play does have powerful and touching moments–and uses snatches of Irish folk music and dance to good effect–it never comes together for me. Jacob is such an unrelentingly awful, self-pitying jerk that it’s painful to spend two hours in his company. Poor, long-suffering Mary really should have married that wealthy barrister.
