Ah the wonders of live theatre, where it makes perfect sense to confide deep secrets to the audience despite its being a public space filled with strangers. Edward Carr, in Neil LaBute’s solo play Wrecks, also chats to us while telling us he is in the next room, hosting a large family gathering.

It seems part of him has stayed in the room with his wife’s coffin after the viewing (the day before her funeral). Or that while his physical self is coping with his children, in-laws, grand-children et al, his mental self is imagining what he’d like to say to people who just sit and listen (pay to, in fact).

“Families,” he says, “are the most unloving creatures the good Lord ever collected together in one place.” And yet love has been the driving force in Carr’s life. He has been as addicted to love with his Mary Jo as he is to cigarettes, which he knows are bad for him and have now given him the cancer that first took his beloved Jo Jo. And he smokes six of them during the play’s 80 minutes, by the way; no fake fags here that puff fine powder, these babies burn and smell like the real deal (see the Smoking on stage forum).

Mary Josephine Carr (born Delaney; formerly married to Edward’s boss Ulrich Andersen) had not had an easy time of it, growing into womanhood. And Edward, looking back over a successful career – they were partners in business too: Carr’s Cars – turns out to have had an even rougher upbringing, fostered as he was through 12 different homes.

So when he found her – when they found each other – and experienced mutual love for the first time ever … well who could deny them their happiness? Their relationship has been so productive, so right, there seems to have been an inevitability about it. And this is what the blissfully happy, if compulsively self-destructive, Ed wants to share.

Todd Rippon makes for a very engaging Edward, neither ingratiating nor remote, just telling it like it is and was. When people tell the truth with no ulterior motive or baggage attached, it’s hard not to like them; it’s easy to identify and empathise. And we do, not least because Rippon delivers his epic monologue with a deceptive ease that makes us believe in Ed without thinking twice about what it has taken to create him.

He and director Pinky Agnew have chosen to transpose this story, by an American playwright, into New Zealand settings, about which I am ambivalent. While it certainly brings the story closer to home, avoids the distraction of a put-on accent and leads to a more authentic performance, it can also con us into believing we are hearing our own stories told.

But Wrecks was commissioned and produced by the Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork, Ireland, as part of the city’s Capital of Culture programme in 2005. And LaBute – who has French Canadian, English and Irish ancestry, and was born in Detroit and raised in Washington – has drawn on a timeless and universal tale as old as theatre itself to create his particular Wrecks. So as long as we can credit a chain of 17 outlets that specialise in renting out classic American cars in NZ, it works very well.

I can’t say much more about the play. Well there is the memorable story about a night time accident on the highway which made me think twice about the title, not to mention ‘car scars’, but they came out of it unscathed. In fact it brought them even closer together.

No, there’s another reason it’s called Wrecks. And that’s a secret. Ed knows – he always has; well, most of his adult life. But you have to be there, right to the end, to find out what it is. Even so, he leaves us to guess what the final four words were that he said to his Jo Jo.   
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