The Toronto Theatre Review: Coal Mine Theatre’s Fullfillment Centre

By Ross

Something deeply uncomfortable is happening inside the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto, an unease that truly is the highest of compliments to Abe Koogler’s Fulfillment Centre. This compelling play unfolds as a series of two-character encounters that should, in theory, create intimacy, but nothing about these people, or the stark emotional terrain they inhabit, allows for anything resembling closeness Even in moments that skirt romance or fragile connection, the characters stand painfully apart. And when they do find themselves side by side, or face to face, they can’t quite cross the tense, widening gulf that exists between them.

Directed with cool, unsentimental precision by Ted Dykstra (Coal Mine’s Appropriate), the production becomes a study in human drift. It is tragic, funny, and unexpectedly engrossing to watch four fine actors strive toward one another but rarely meet, as if the desert air that surrounds this New Mexico town has dried out their ability to attach. They flounder through their own history of questionable choices and long-worn disappointments; they reach, withdraw, soothe, poke, provoke, and retreat again. Yet, they always seem to circle back to that unquenchable need for connection, but never quite find the way to fulfill it.

Alex, played compellingly by Emilio Vieira (Stratford’s London Assurance), is the young transplant who has relocated for a management job at the titular Fulfillment Centre, a place mapped out like an Amazon warehouse where workers race through aisles gathering items meant to satisfy someone else’s dream. His college sweetheart, Madeleine (a dynamic but somewhat emotionally limited Gita Miller), has followed him from New York, though her presence feels as much like sabotage as support. She is restless, hungry, emotionally unmoored, No amount of affection could possibly quench the dull ache of her displacement. And together they stand, surrounded by unpacked boxes, looking for the other to make this place feel like home.

In contrast, the other, older pairing arrives somewhat weathered and worn, and definitely in separate spaces and attitudes. Suzan, brought to heartbreaking life by the spectacular Kristen Thomson (Soulpepper’s Pipeline), is on the run from a failed relationship and now stranded in New Mexico with a broken-down car, a tent in a trailer park, and a lifetime of bad decisions she narrates with both candour and desperation. John (an outstandingly detailed Evan Buliung) has been kicked out of his girlfriend’s home and settled into life in his car. There is something quietly menacing in his awkward detachment, an inscrutable threat just at the edge of the frame, buried under a slow-moving passivity, but Koogler (Deep Blue Sound; Staff Meal) wisely offers no explanation. We are simply left to watch him, curious and unsettled.

The collision of these four characters, in alternating pairings, is wrought from deeply emotional terrain. Their scenes are unique, funny, disturbing, melancholy, and often uncomfortably truthful. Each is played out with determination against a backdrop of cardboard boxes crafted into something more by set and lighting designer Nick Blais (Coal Mine’s The Effect). The bleakness generally works, although the usage of box frames for almost every piece of furniture begins to feel clumsy and distracting. But the costumes by Des’ree Gray (Crow’s The Christmas Market) and the solid sound design by Thomas Ryder Payne (Soulpepper’s The Welkin) work their isolating magic. Much remains unsaid and unpacked, but the longing and their instinctual need to push one another away are immediately legible.

The first scene sets the tone for everything that follows. It makes clear that the Fulfillment Center is, ironically, the very place where fulfillment cannot be found. Alex reads the employee manual as if choking on its cheerful corporate lies, fully aware that he is unprepared for the demands of his new role. In a glaringly obvious “no-running” sign that he is ill-equipped for this job, he hires the desperate but totally unfit Suzan as one of the packers. His brain nearly short-circuits as he instructs her on her new position at the company and what the Fulfillment Center’s goals are.  She, in her caring hippy manner, tries to soothe him with touch. Helping him, against his will, to release the stress that is building within.  If there is one moment of connection in this whole sad tale, it is this.  A pause button has been pushed, but it is fleeting and followed quickly by discomfort. No matter how hard these people try, they will not be able to fulfill the employee manual goals in their own private lives.

Different audience members will likely attach to different characters. Personally, I
ached for Suzan, who describes herself, with a sad desperation, as someone who ‘once was beautiful’.  She has made bad decisions time and time again, and now finds herself scared and desperate in the New Mexico desert. Thomson does an amazing job giving us all the layers of the complicated Suzan. She is the afraid and needy child living inside an aging hippy-girl frame, with a bad back and a sore knee. Wishing that love and affection would save her from all the predicaments, she slides herself into another, but we know how this will turn out, in general, but not specifically. That is where the tension truly lies, in the unpredictable outcome, and it is here where her performance organically becomes the emotional core of the production.

The ending of Koogler’s play offers no easy salvation. It is a bleak surrender to what life has become, and what any of us can reasonably expect or hold onto. There is a raging hunger for connection in Fulfillment Centre: hunger for belonging, affection, and a sense of purpose. But fulfillment remains elusive, even illusory. And within that paradox, the production finds its haunting power. It leaves you with the sense that connection is possible, but only in brief flashes, quickly swallowed up by the vast, indifferent desert that surrounds these desperate characters. It is a haunting echo of connection denied, an uncomfortable truth that the Coal Mine production renders with unflinching clarity.