Jitters at The Stanley

David French, perhaps English-Canada's most produced playwright of the 1970s and 80s, is getting two revivals in the Greater Vancouver Area right now. Salt-Water Moon, part of French's Mercer Family cycle, opened at the Gateway this past Friday; directed by Ravi Jain, this touring co-pro from Toronto's Factory Theatre and Jain's own Why Not Theatre is a heavily stylized take on French's period-set Newfoundland love story. The production got raves when it opened in Toronto in 2016, but according to our friends Richard Wolfe and Connie Kostiuk--with whom we had dinner last night, and who attended the Gateway opening--Jain's choices produce decidedly mixed results, and there were more than a few walkouts.

By contrast, the Arts Club staging of French's backstage comedy Jitters, on at the Stanley through February 25, adopts a reliably naturalistic take to its story, and the audience ate it up. Director David Mackay has chosen to set the play in the year it was first produced, 1979, in part as an homage to outgoing Arts Club AD Bill Millerd, who opened the company's second Granville Island venue that year. More practically--and very rewardingly--in terms of production design, this choice has given costume designer Mara Gottler free rein to reproduce the shaggy hairstyles and flared pants and garish colour palettes and clothing patterns of the period. An eye for authentic temporal specificity also extends to both sides of Ted Roberts' revolving set, including: the psychedelic hues of the wallpaper, throw pillows, and afghan in the living room of the play-within-the-play of acts one and three; and the grimy, overstuffed dressing rooms of act two. Even the pre-show and intermission music was chosen with care.

Likewise the entire cast feels at home--both emotionally and physically--in their parts. Megan Leitch, as the diva Jessica Logan, and Robert Moloney, as her cynical and hard-drinking co-star, Patrick Flanagan, are expert foils, their constant verbal sparring nevertheless allowing us to see the vulnerability that each is attempting to mask: for Jessica, the Canadian who has made it in New York, a fear that she is past her prime; for Patrick, the home-grown talent who has decided to remain a big fish in a small pond, the gnawing anxiety of failing on a bigger stage. James Fagan Tait, whom I mostly know as a director, reveals himself to be a hilarious master of comic timing in playing Phil Mastorakis, the jobbing character actor who has a habit of drying on stage and who still lives with his mother. Kamyar Pazandeh, as the company's male ingenue Tom Kent, conveys just the right amount of wanting-to-please-everybody desperation, and also gets a breakout moment of Y-fronts-wearing physical comedy in the second act. As, respectively, the put-upon director George Ellsworth and the alternately protective and self-doubting playwright Robert Ross, Martin Happer and Ryan Beil do their best to referee all of these egos, while also finding time to needle each other on various artistic choices. Raugi Yu, looking like an Asian member of the Bay City Rollers, gets in a few good digs against everyone as the martinet of a stage manager Nick. Kaitlin Williams, as the front of house manager Susi, and Lauren Bowler, as props person Peggy, make the most of what little their parts give them to do.

And in terms of action, French's play is not an all-out farce in the manner of Michael Frayn's Noises Off. Which perhaps explains why, as a spectator, I kept leaning in and out of yesterday's performance. All three acts have significantly different tonal qualities, which mostly pertain to the additional statement about Canadian artistic nationalism and our longstanding cultural cringe towards the United States that French wishes to make. Thus, in act one, the set-up of the animosity between Jessica and Patrick at a rehearsal four days before opening is skewed in its beats mainly towards punctuating the binary choices facing theatre artists in Canada in the 1970s: flee to the US to make it on Broadway; or plod along anonymously in rep in Canada. To be sure, the start-and-stop rhythms of the rehearsal--with everyone offering an opinion on the script or wanting something from director George, and with Nick in voiceover reminding everyone about the ticking clock--are a warmly affectionate poke at the world of the theatre more generally. But it's only towards the end of act one, with an aborted entrance by Phil, that we actually start edging into the comedic hijinks we've been waiting for. And it's only in act two--set on opening night, with both Phil and Tom seemingly AWOL, and with the Broadway producer who's come to see the show stuck at the airport--that we move into full-blown farce. Director Mackay and the entire ensemble nail all of the physical action here, and both the laughs and the pacing are satisfyingly relentless, with the audience exiting into intermission on a nice collective high. But in act three French makes another tonal shift, returning to meta-commentary via an extended dissection of a post-opening review in the Toronto Star. Again, there are some nice moments of insider recognition here, but the resolution of the supra-conflict around artistic integrity as distilled through the opposition between Jessica and Patrick feels somewhat forced.

And also dated. This is by no means a fault of the production. I'm merely noting my own feeling that the extra layer of quasi-political critique about Canadian cultural production that French attempts to fuse to the genre of farce (and for a Quebec-focused 70s-era take on this see Robert Lepage's film No) hasn't aged so well.

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Smart People at Studio 16

Currently I'm reading Ta-Nahisi Coates' newest book, We Were Eight Years in Power. A collection of several of the essays he wrote for The Atlantic during Barack Obama's two terms in the White House, it is a sobering account of the brief window of racial possibility that was opened in the US with the election of the country's first African-American president, but even more so of the accompanying retrenchment of the forces of white supremacy that then paved the way for Obama's replacement in the Oval Office by Donald Trump. Drawing on the sweep of American history, as well as pop culture and his own personal experience, Coates lays bare in at once measured and urgently impactful tones that the US will always be a racially divided country until it comes to grips with the fact that its very foundations (politically, ideologically, economically) are based on slavery and the violent suppression of one race by another, and that this fact continues to inform every aspect of American society.

Coates' book is useful supplementary reading to Mitch and Murray's production of Lydia R. Diamond's play Smart People, directed by David Mackay and running at Studio 16 through this Saturday. The play, while written in 2016, is set in 2007-January 2009, spanning the period from Obama's announcement of his presidential candidacy to his inauguration. Diamond gives us a cross-sectional snapshot of race relations in Cambridge, Massachusetts during this period by focusing on four highly accomplished professionals. Two of them work at Harvard. Brian (Aaron Craven) is a white liberal neurobiologist who claims to have hard scientific data proving that white peoples' brains are genetically hardwired to hate black people. At a faculty meeting on diversity Brian meets Ginny (Tricia Collins), an Asian-American psychologist who studies the internalization of stereotypes by young Asian-American women, some of whom she also privately counsels. The two other characters are both graduates of Harvard and are also both black. Jackson (Kwesi Ameyaw) is a surgical resident chafing under the paternalistic mentorship of his white hospital superiors, while also running his own clinic in a predominantly Asian-American/mixed ethnic neighbourhood. He meets Valerie (Katrina Reynolds), an MFA graduate in acting whose classical training comes up against the limits of colour blind casting, when she visits the clinic to receive stitches after an accident during rehearsal. The play is loosely structured around the progress, or lack thereof, of the two couples' relationships. Along the way, we see Ginny visit Jackson's clinic to make a case for recruiting participants for her research; we witness Valerie take a job as a research assistant for Brian in order to earn additional rent money; and we learn that Brian and Jackson are old friends who like to shoot hoops together. However, all four characters don't come together and sort out their intersecting ties to each other until the penultimate scene, a dinner party at Brian and Ginny's. Crucially, this is also where we learn that even among this rainbow collection of educated, progressive people, those ties do not and cannot supersede race. Brian by this point has lost his bid for tenure, Harvard only having so much tolerance for his proof of its institutional racism. When the other three people of colour at the table try to make him understand that his research represents not so much a solution to the scourge of white supremacy as a threat to the ways in which it continues to flourish by invisibilzing its claims to majority power, Brian proves this very point with his own racist outburst.

Diamond is herself a very smart playwright. Her script trades in some complex, hot-button issues, but it never feels like she is hectoring the audience, or scoring points off of her characters, all of whom she portrays as richly complex and sympathetic, even the hapless Brian. Mackay has elicited superb performances from the entire ensemble; you can tell the actors are really enjoying sinking their teeth into Diamond's fast-paced and meaty dialogue, especially the many comic barbs, and there is palpable chemistry emanating from the stage. That said, I did find the mostly episodic structure of the play a bit of a spectating challenge, with the succession of short, sharp scenes punctuated by blackouts a bit visually wearying. Mackay resolves this structural issue somewhat by staging this production in the round, with the four points of access allowing for swift actor-driven transitions, while also suggesting that a shared arena is both materially and metaphorically perhaps the most apt container for the bloodsport that is race in America. Still, I wondered if we needed all of the moving on and off of furniture between the scenes, or even the multiple blackouts; perhaps having some of the scenes overlap spatially and temporally would have aided in structural continuity. And depending on one's position in the audience, it can be challenging to see some important stage business. Richard and I, for instance, did not learn [SPOILER ALERT!] that Brian had hooked himself up to the heart rate monitor attached to his computer in the final scene--in which the other characters separately report on Obama's inauguration ceremony--until Richard Wolfe (who was seated in another section) told us what was happening in the cab ride home.

But that is a minor criticism. This is stellar production of an incredibly timely play, one that in using Obama's election as the social and political background to its dramaturgy ends up foregrounding the problems with Donald Trump being given free reign on the world stage.

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Not Completely As I Would Have Liked It

There is much to admire in David Mackay's production of As You Like It at Bard on the Beach, which I caught in preview performance last night along with several members of my Women and Comedy class (we are discussing the play next week). Lois Anderson is a spirited, intensely physical, and very sexual Rosalind, and she is matched in comic timing, vivacity, and stage presence by Luisa Jojic as Celia. These two bosom buddies do not moon coquettishly over the de Boys brothers (Todd Thomson as Orlando and Sebastian Kroon as Oliver), but rather openly display their desire and revel in the frank ribaldry of Shakespeare's language. As such, we are given much lustier portraits of both women than we normally see in productions, their respective sexual ids having been unleashed by the wilds of Arden--a point reinforced especially by the staging of one of the songs requested by Jaques (John Murphy) of Duke Senior's men in Act IV as a fever dream of Celia's.

At the same time, I did chafe a little at what struck me as the resolutely heteronormative channeling of the women's open sexuality. After all, the play is pretty clear in suggesting that Celia and Rosalind, who share a bed in addition to an intensely symbiotic friendship, are same-sex cousins who kiss, and very likely a lot more else besides. When Rosalind falls for Orlando, Celia is openly jealous, and as critics like Julie Crawford have suggested, one way to interpret the speed with which Celia accedes to Oliver's marriage proposal so late in the play (and so soon after first laying eyes on him) is that she sees in a union with Orlando's newly reconciled brother a way to remain close to her own "most true" bosom buddy--Rosalind.

Of course, one of the delicious ironies of As You Like It is that the marital epithalamium is actually forestalled at the end of the play. To be sure, the god Hymen is magically conjured by Rosalind to unite each of the four couples (Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Oliver; Touchstone and Audrey; Silvius and the truculent Phoebe), but the bonds are actually never pronounced and Duke Senior's concluding couplet announcing their imminence is followed by Rosalind's epilogue, which takes us out of the fictional temporality of traditional comic closure and into the subjunctive temporality of the play's real-world staging ("If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me..."). Spoken by a boy actor who has just finished playing a woman playing a boy playing a woman, both the potential cross-gender and same-sex pathways encapsulated by this phrase are made manifest not just in the radically unstable referent behind the first-person pronoun, but also in the equally ambiguous second person addressee, whose multiple and multi-directional identifications cannot be pinned down.

So what happens if you excise the epilogue altogether, as this Bard production does? For one thing, you necessarily make marriage the de facto end point, both structurally in terms of the play and ideologically in terms of normalizing the free play of gender identifications and sexual desires that up until that point had reigned in Arden. The homoerotic associations that resurface in Rosalind's epilogue, and that link it to her cross-dressing elsewhere in the play, are here jettisoned in favour of an explicit staging of the revelries only hinted at in Duke Senior's final lines.

As disturbing, to me, is the fact that removing the epilogue also imperils if not destroys altogether the complicity established between performers and audience, that we are not only in on the joke (of gender and sexuality, generally, but also of theatrical masquerade more specifically), but that we are enjoying the joke. In a production that has up until this point traded in broad winks at the audience, not least in Ryan Beil's delightful capering, ad libbing, and general breaking of the fourth wall as Touchstone, this seems a curious final choice. And falling back on an excuse of changing theatrical conventions--i.e., that to a contemporary audience a female actor speaking the epilogue as written just wouldn't make sense--betrays an equally grievous failure of imagination in presuming audience members' identifications with both the character of Rosalind and the actor playing her are singular and straightforward.

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