A new theatre company marks its debut with this emphatic play. But will you believe its premise?

George F. Walker must be the busiest man in Toronto theatre right now. A pair of new companies in the city are concurrently presenting two of his plays. And both productions, opening days apart, happen to be directed by the playwright himself. 
It makes sense that these new indie theatres would select works by Walker to mark their entrance onto the scene; the Canadian author knows how to write dramas that make a statement: an emphatic, grab-you-by-the-collar kind of statement that would put any emerging company on the map. 
First was the King Black Box Theatre, which launched its inaugural season with a smoulderingly brilliant Toronto premiere of “Girls Unwanted.” Now, the Moss Theatre Collective has announced its arrival with a new production of Walker’s “Fierce,” co-presented by the Alumnae Theatre Company.
At first glance, the play feels like a strong fit for the new non-union theatre, whose mandate is to promote works by Canadian dramatists. The 2016 play is a modest, intermissionless two-hander, requiring little by way of a set (designed by Douglas Tiller) and fitting more than comfortably into Alumnae’s third-floor Studio Theatre. 
But “Fierce” is more unwieldy than it initially appears. The play’s finicky narrative borders on the absurd and only works if audiences buy into its loopy premise. While Walker’s production features some fine performances, it never quite convinces us to follow it down its twisty path. 
The story begins benignly: After Jayne (Elizabeth Friesen), a former school guidance counsellor, is found wandering through traffic while high on potent drugs, she’s handed a court order to seek professional help from Maggie (Liz Best), her psychiatrist. 
The two women could not appear more different. Jayne, dishevelled and with her arm in a sling, is adrift, bingeing drug cocktails to mask a long-repressed trauma. Maggie, meanwhile, seems almost too put together, with a stone-cold demeanour and a piercing glance. But as Walker drip-feeds details about the characters, we learn that the pair share much in common, both haunted by their pasts. (In Maggie’s case, it’s her turbulent youth as an orphan.) 
The first half of the 80-minute play concerns Jayne turning the table against her psychiatrist. She knows about Maggie’s secrets after plunging into a deep rabbit hole on the web and tries, incessantly, to pry them out of her. There’s nothing manipulative, though, about how Jayne goes about this, especially as rendered by Friesen. In fact, Jayne seems to be provoked by survival instinct: she needs someone with whom she can connect and she needs Maggie to be as vulnerable with her as she has been during their sessions. 
The moment when Maggie inevitably breaks down, caving into Jayne’s unrelenting pressure, is key to the play. And it’s where this production stumbles.
Maggie undergoes the greater transformation of the two characters and Best captures the role’s complexity. Beneath the psychiatrist’s forward-facing persona, there’s always something lingering, restlessly.
But Best overplays a crucial scene in which Maggie is initially triggered by Jayne. Walker’s staging during that sequence is also excessive, so much so that it feels contrived, eclipsing the threshold of believability. What should feel like a small spark is instead rendered like an explosion. It then becomes all the more difficult to follow — let alone accept — everything that comes next. 
Like many of Walker’s other plays, “Fierce” explores some pertinent contemporary issues: mental health, substance abuse, repressed trauma, friendship. The script itself is punchy and barbed, with dialogue that bounces between characters like a ball in a ping-pong match. Walker also layers in his distinctively wry humour when you least expect it. 
But here, his wit comes at the expense of the rest of the play. As the plot tumbles toward some far-fetched places, it all sometimes feels like a parody of psychiatrist-patient relations rather than a proper exploration of it. Are we supposed to believe that everything that unfolds takes place over a single counselling session? 
Theatre, of course, is an exercise in the suspension of disbelief. But Walker’s play and this production ask us to take that concept just a few steps too far.