Rong Fu, Meghan Swaby and Sara Farb in Interior Design now playing at the Tarragon Theatre.Jae Yang/Tarragon Theatre
- Title: Interior Design
- Written by: Rosa Laborde
- Director: Kat Sandler
- Actors: Sara Farb, Rong Fu, Anita Majumdar, Meghan Swaby
- Company: Tarragon Theatre
- Venue: Tarragon Extraspace
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Sunday, Nov. 10, 2024
Critic’s Pick
Nihilistic documentarist turned temporary interior designer Olivia (Rong Fu) stares out at the audience with no small amount of wistfulness, explaining the appeal of marathoning home improvement shows instead of dealing with the current turbulent state of the world. It’s the happy ending found at the heart of these relatively low-stakes, formulaic episodes about transformation, she tells us, that’s so invigorating. Even small changes can make things better; adjust the size of a fireplace or the angle of a cabinet, and suddenly, a stifling space can feel like home.
Rosa Laborde’s Interior Design, the sharply comic and deceptively deep show now playing at Tarragon Theatre, uses the metaphor of home decor to capture the shifting internal landscapes and external dynamics of four female friends on the cusp of turning 40 who are re-evaluating their place in the world and each other’s lives. Now that those lives have coalesced around routine rather than endless possibility, they’re wondering if the threads of history that bind them together are strong enough to survive the renovation. As the HGTV show asks, will they love it, or list it?
Sara Farb and Meghan Swaby in Interior Design. Laborde treats each of her outsized but fully recognizable characters with seriousness and grace.Jae Yang/Tarragon Theatre
When Olivia is invited to newly divorced Sophie’s minimalist apartment for a skin-care sales party, she turns up with extreme reluctance, fed up with girls’ nights reduced to small talk and capitalism. Hobby-hopping Cecilia (Anita Majumdar) isn’t above hashtagging their group photos to promote her latest multilevel marketing pyramid scheme, and Olivia’s relieved when life coach Sophie (Sara Farb) seems to imply that the party is an intervention for their wayward friend that will stop the ocean of lotion. Sophie gets little backup from marketer Maya (Meghan Swaby), an expert at skirting conflict by telling both sides what they want to hear.
As Olivia gears up to burst sunny Cecilia’s bubble, though, she discovers the intervention’s actually aimed in her own burned-out, depressive direction. What follows uproots each woman from stasis, for good or ill.
Laborde’s keen ear for rapid-fire, entertaining dialogue is matched by Kat Sandler’s fast-paced direction, as the women trade barbs laced with the 30 years of history that can age a fine wine or a bitter poison. The joy of the show, however, is that it’s not simply a one-evening descent into a disintegrating friendship; the intervention is where the exploration starts, rather than ends. In showing the lengthy aftermath, Laborde treats each of her outsized but fully recognizable characters with seriousness and grace, giving each a fourth wall-breaking monologue with a subtle but stirring soundtrack by Maddie Bautista.
Despite the playwright’s swings from scathing humour to realizations and breakdowns and back again, there’s no tonal abruptness, as the skilled quartet of actors makes the ebb and flow between tears and laughter seem as natural as a subtle pattern on a kitchen backsplash.
Anita Majumdar, left, Meghan Swaby, Sara Farb and Rong Fu in Interior Design. The skilled quartet of actors makes the ebb and flow between tears and laughter seem as natural as a subtle pattern on a kitchen backsplash.Tarragon Theatre
Farb’s tightly controlled, therapy-speaking Sophie is utterly delightful as she reins in any remark that might hit a nerve, playing friendship like it’s a game she can win. Farb’s bland smiles give way to dangerous flashes of hurt when the game pieces don’t move as expected, and she creates an entire personality simply by the smug way she overpronounces French expressions.
Fu’s Olivia is dourly sarcastic but also playfully mischievous; set designer Shannon Lea Doyle is clearly having a great time as Olivia deliberately chooses the most egregiously loud apartment decor possible for Sophie, a woman who agonizes over whether to paint her wall one of two nearly identical muted shades.
Maya the people pleaser is the least defined character, perhaps by design, but Swaby gives her enough oomph to sparkle, providing us with the tantalizing crumbs of how the diverse foursome met over an elementary school lunch table. While this makes one wish there were more moments where we learned about the friendship’s history, her reinvented self’s attempts at knitting are some of the show’s best visual gags, representing her effort to stitch together a friendship with some significant holes.
And, speaking of gnawing absence, Majumdar’s Cecilia drops the filter on the social-media curation of her spontaneous party of a life that’s left her feeling unsettled before a milestone birthday, plaintively asking, “why does everything have to be so hard?” before flying the coop entirely. In its final segment, processing the grief of a friendship that ends without closure, the play lands some of its hardest and most bittersweet blows.
Interior Design will likely resonate especially strongly with millennials in its discussions about choices regarding careers, parenthood or lack thereof, and relationships, as well as its message about the psychological damage caused by social media, particularly to subsequent generations that don’t remember a world before it existed as a primary source of connection.
Rong Fu as Olivia and Anita Majumdar as Cecilia in Interior Design.Tarragon Theatre
Its wide-ranging messaging is sometimes too ambitious; a commentary on women’s stories in entertainment that brushes past a clever, subtle moment to verbally hammer the point home seems to come from a different play, when we could get more details about these specific women instead.
But what we do get is funny and fresh and real and raw, a look at what happens when the walls of a long-term relationship are torn down and all that’s left is the foundation.
In the “love it or list it” debate, this one’s squarely under “love it.”
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)