Toronto, Mississippi

Actors often win acclaim for playing developmentally disabled characters, but it’s a tricky business. For every nuanced portrayal, there’s a raft of patronizing and often cringeworthy rubbish (my vote for cringeworthiest goes to Meredith Baxter-Birney in the ’80s TV movie Winnie). Rydberg’s performance as Jhana, a moderately autistic young woman in Canadian playwright MacLeod’s 1987 domestic drama, falls somewhere in the middle. As written and as played by Rydberg, Jhana is no cuddly, childlike saint; she gets angry, lonely, obstinate and sweet by turns, just like the rest of us. But Rydberg undoes some of her good work by loading up on distracting tics and mannerisms, particularly with her voice, giving Jhana a strange and grating way of speaking—part Valley Girl, part drawl.

The rest of the performances in Garcia’s staging are serviceable but feel muffled. What plot there is in MacLeod’s uneven script involves the return of Jhana’s father, an Elvis impersonator, to the home in Toronto where Jhana lives with her overprotective mother and their boarder, a struggling poet. (Incidentally, William Anderson’s set is a dead ringer for the Conners’ living room on Roseanne.) MacLeod sets up a bad boy/nice guy showdown between the two men, but the story fizzles thanks to a lack of urgency or rising stakes. Those qualities are present only in the few gripping scenes between Rydberg and Behrendt’s versifying boarder, who have an unsettling relationship built on genuine, sibling-like affection and creepy sexual tension.

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