The Toronto Theatre Review: Lyle Kessler’s “Orphans” turns a Philadelphia row house into a battleground for family, identity, and control
By Ross
As I walked down the stairs into the Village Playhouse, I found myself increasingly curious about Lyle Kessler’s Orphans, presented by Miriam Laurence Studio Ensemble Works. The play first premiered in 1983 at The Matrix Theatre Company in Los Angeles, where it received critical and commercial success and won the Drama-Logue Award. The play went on to productions by Steppenwolf Theatre before making its Broadway debut in 2013 with a very starry cast. And yet, somehow, I never heard of it again. It’s a dark and unsettling story about two brothers and a drunken stranger who arrives unexpectedly and under even darker circumstances. But is that an entirely accurate portrayal of the set-up? That’s the fascinating tightrope this play walks. I kept thinking about how desperately all three men seem to be searching for the same thing: someone to tell them who they are and what they mean to one another. That complex and captivating search gives this revival its strange pull, even when the play itself seems unsure how far it wants to take the idea.
Kessler’s 1983 drama drops us into a battered Philadelphia row house occupied by two orphaned brothers who have built an entire existence around their isolation. Treat, played intensely by Daytoni Raye, has appointed himself protector, provider, disciplinarian, and substitute father to his younger brother Phillip, played magnificently by Kai Davanyan. Treat provides for the two through petty theft and violence while keeping Phillip inside the house, convinced that the outside world is too dangerous for him. Phillip has responded to that confinement by developing his own peculiar relationship with the world beyond the front door. He watches the world pass by from the window, studies reruns of ‘The Price Is Right‘ like it’s an encyclopedia, underlines words in newspapers and hidden old books, and retreats into his dead mother’s closet, surrounded by clothes she will never wear. It is an existence built from fragments of knowledge, memory, fear, and an enormous hunger to understand what lies beyond the walls.
Davanyan gives Phillip a beautifully layered vulnerability. His curiosity and energy never feel like a simple device for making the character innocent. There is an intelligence struggling to emerge underneath the gaps in his education, and Davanyan allows us to see how much Phillip wants to understand the world even as Treat has convinced him, perhaps out of genuine fear or perhaps out of a need for control, that he will die from something outside because of a near-deadly allergic reaction he had as a child. His physical presence contributes enormously to the play’s atmosphere. Phillip often seems to inhabit the house like someone who has been waiting for permission to become a person, and the moments when that possibility begins to open up carry genuine emotional weight.
Raye’s Treat is a much more volatile creature. His violence is obvious, but what makes the character compelling is the contradiction inside his protectiveness. Treat has made himself indispensable to Phillip while simultaneously keeping him helpless. His petty criminal life outside the house gives him a sense of purpose, but it also allows him to maintain the fantasy that he alone knows what Phillip needs. The problem is that Kessler does not give us enough access to the thinking behind Treat’s choices. We understand the circumstances that shaped him, but the play leaves too much of his internal journey sitting just outside the frame. Raye brings considerable pent-up anger and desperation to the role, and a few fascinating twists to his logic, giving Treat an unpredictable energy that keeps the household permanently unsettled.
Then Philip Savas arrives as Harold, and the entire balance of the house changes. Treat initially believes he has found an easy victim when he kidnaps the drunken stranger and ties him up, but Harold quickly demonstrates that he may have been playing a much longer, more complicated, and calculated game. Savas makes the drunkenness feel suspicious from the beginning, giving Harold the quietly intimidating quality of someone who knows considerably more than he is allowing anyone else to see. Once the power dynamic is reconfigured, the supposed hostage becomes the person with the greatest control over the room, and the play’s peculiar interpersonal struggle begins.
This is where Orphans becomes most fascinating and most frustrating. Harold is himself an orphan, and his memories of growing up among other “dead end kids” provide the connection between the three men. He recognizes something in Phillip and Treat, then begins reshaping the household according to his own ideas about what each brother needs. Phillip is encouraged toward the world outside the front door. Treat is pushed toward Harold’s vision of criminal masculinity. Harold becomes teacher, healer, surrogate parent, and oppressor almost simultaneously. Savas plays those shifting identities with a controlled menace and fatherly care that gives the production much of its tension.
Miriam Laurence’s direction understands that the house needs to feel increasingly claustrophobic as Harold’s influence grows. The production’s focus stays firmly inside that cramped front room, and the confinement becomes part of the drama itself. We are watching three men negotiate power inside a space where none of them seems entirely capable of living without the others. The atmosphere has an almost Pinter-like unease, particularly whenever Harold’s calm begins to suggest that violence is never far away. Laurence allows those moments to breathe, giving the actors room to establish the strange rhythms of this household before the power shifts again. That space pays off in the performances, with Davanyan, Raye, and Savas making the increasingly strange relationships inside the house feel emotionally dangerous as well as theatrically compelling.
The play’s treatment of bigotry creates another uncomfortable question that never receives enough attention. The hostility expressed within the household could potentially speak to the brothers’ fear of a world they have experienced as threatening, to the social environment surrounding them, or to something more deeply embedded in the characters themselves. The production does not provide enough context to settle that question. Because the issue is introduced so fascinatingly and then left hanging, it becomes one more element contributing to the feeling that Orphans contains more ideas than it knows how to resolve.
The recurring red shoe creates another particularly complicated mystery. Phillip treats the single shoe as though it carries enormous personal significance, and because it keeps returning, I kept waiting for the play to give me some clue as to why. Is it connected to his mother? A memory from the life that existed before the brothers became completely isolated? A symbol of the world beyond their front door? The mystery becomes even stranger when we are told that their mother would never have worn that type of shoe. Or is that a protective lie? That detail seems to send us looking elsewhere, yet the play never gives us enough information to understand where we should look. I don’t need every symbol in a play explained, but when an object is repeatedly placed in Phillip’s hands and given this much emotional weight, I want at least an inkling of what it means to him.
I found myself thinking about Phillip’s mother’s closet again after the final moments. All those unworn clothes connect somehow to a childhood that stopped before Phillip was ready, while the battered house around him has become both shelter and prison. Treat has tried to protect him from the world by keeping him inside it. Harold arrives believing he can teach both brothers how to survive, only to impose another version of control. What makes this revival so affecting is the glimpse it gives us of three men reaching toward family while carrying very different ideas about what family is supposed to mean. Beneath all the violence, manipulation, absurdity, and uneasy humour is a simple human hunger: to have someone there when the world outside becomes frightening, and to know that being loved does not have to mean being trapped.
