Sergio Di Zio, left, and Megan Follows in Studio 180 Theatre's production of Four Minutes Twelve Seconds.Handout
- Title: Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds
- Written by: James Fritz
- Director: Mark McGrinder
- Actors: Megan Follows
- Company: Studio 180
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to May 12, 2024
Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds, a 2014 drama by James Fritz with streaks of dark comedy about a mother whose son is accused of sexual assault, opened on Thursday evening at Tarragon Theatre. This was the same day that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape conviction was overturned – a “hard day for survivors” as the actor Ashley Judd said.
While it had seemed odd earlier in the week that prominent Toronto indie theatre company Studio 180 was producing the North American premiere of a decade-old British issue play on this subject, after a flood of stage scripts (and movies and television shows) that engaged directly with #MeToo and its aftermath, it suddenly made more sense.
Why not take a step back and look at how sexual-assault accusations were portrayed before the trials in the media and courtrooms of Weinstein (whose 2022 conviction in California still stands) became a universal touchstone in an international movement (that has had many two steps forward, one step back moments)?
In the opening scene of Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds, Diane – Megan Follows, the veteran of stage and screen still beloved from her early work as Anne of Green Gables – receives a series of cascading revelations about her 17-year-old son, Jack, from her husband David (Sergio Di Zio, in a strong, stylized dad-skewering performance).
The first is that Jack has been assaulted.
The second is that the person who punched him in the nose is his ex-girlfriend Kara’s brother.
The third is that there’s an explicit video of Jack and Kara circulating online.
The fourth is that Kara is now also saying that Jack – though the details are initially very vague – has sexually assaulted her, which he says is a false allegation, revenge for the video, which he says he never uploaded.
In a few short minutes, Diane has to go from worrying about her son being the victim of a physical assault to worrying that he is the perpetrator of a sexual assault – and Follows does a fine job riding that emotional roller coaster through exchanges with Di Zio that are, surprisingly, quite funny.
What is a mother to do presented with a situation like this – and how should she take action?
We are definitely in a time before the hashtag #BelieveWomen. Initially, Diane simply believes her son – and heads off, as a kind of private investigator, to find ways to prove his innocence regarding both non-consensual intimate image distribution and sexual assault.
She interrogates Jack’s friend Nick (a sweet Tavaree Daniel-Simms) – who she suspects uploaded the video – and then Kara (a nervy Jadyn Nasato) who tries to appear tougher than she is.
Unfortunately, after the tightly written first scene, the play’s plot – which has been transposed to Toronto – goes to more and more contrived places and the tone becomes increasingly melodramatic until you might start to feel like the play is transforming into something akin to the 1938 thriller Gaslight.
The word coined by that old chestnut – “gaslighting” – is more popular than ever in our times for a reason. But Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds neither tackles that form of psychological abuse, nor its pileup of other topical subject matter, in a manner theatrical or realistic enough to feel like it contributes enough to any conversation to merit being seen on a Canadian stage in 2024.
Megan Follows, left, and Tavaree Daniel-Simms in Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds.Handout
Even in the realm of the Broadway jukebox musical, a mother wrestling with an accusation against her high-achieving high-school son was much more compellingly drawn on both the personal and political levels in Diablo Cody’s book for Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill.
As for dramas that explore the perception of ambiguity in so-called he-said, she-said situations, there are at least a dozen more notable ones that have done so with more rigour.
Fritz avoids either moral clarity or messiness (thus ending up in melodrama) by imagining an assault where there is a clear paper trail of guilt to follow – and then coming up with plot twists that, ironically, make the whole story seem unbelievable nonetheless.
In short, it’s clear why no other theatre company in North America has put on this play yet. There are sparks in Fritz’s writing – he won a most promising playwright award for this, and that seems about right.
Hopefully Four Minutes, Twelve Seconds is just a one-off programming misfire by an independent company that is going through a leadership transition. Founding artistic director (and longtime in-house director) Joel Greenberg retired in June and has been replaced with Mark McGrinder, an actor who co-founded the company.
More concerning is the company’s decision to have McGrinder take the reins as director on the show. From the evidence here, his staging skills are decidedly amateur – with the production embarrassingly awkward on the basic level of blocking, on a set so underutilized that looks like it’s being stored on stage.
There’s no excuse for artistic directors to be learning how to direct on the job at established professional theatre companies.
J. Kelly Nestruck