1 Hour Photo at The Cultch

Tetsuro Shigematsu's 1 Hour Photo, which opened last night at The Cultch's Historic Theatre, is his follow-up to the wildly successful Empire of the Son. Like Empire, 1 Hour Photo is once again being produced by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre (VACT), and Richard Wolfe returns as director. The two shows also follow a similar format, with Shigematsu, as writer-performer, recounting his story directly to the audience and using miniature digital cameras and live video feeds to animate various on-stage objects to startling effect, including in this newest work a miniature dioramic model of the North Vancouver house where Shigematsu lives with his family.

The replica house is a significant symbol, and in many ways represents the bridge between these two works. Thus, near the top of 1 Hour Photo, we learn that Shigematsu moved into it with his wife, children and parents at the insistence of its owner, VACT's Artistic Producer, Donna Yamamoto. It was here that Shigematsu cared for his dying father (who was the subject of Empire), and also where he discovered, in the form of an old Japan Camera coffee mug, the first clue to the life story of Yamamoto's father, who is the focus of this piece.

Mas Yamamoto, 91 years old and still going strong, owned a string of Japan Camera outlets, which were among the first photo development franchises that began offering one-hour return service in the early 1980s--hence the title of the show. But before he became a successful businessman, Mas lived several other lives, which coincided with some of the signal events in twentieth-century British Columbian and Canadian history. Distilling 36 hours of interviews with Mas into an 18-minute first-person narrative that he then pressed into a vinyl recording, Shigematsu, aided by composer and onstage musical sidekick, Steve Charles, proceeds to spin his tale, giving us an excerpt of Mas's voice, and then elaborating on the larger social and political context. We learn, for example, that Mas was interned with his family during World War II at Lemon Creek, and that it was there that he met his first love, Midge. With only a Grade 9 education at the end of the war, Mas went to work to support his family, losing touch with Midge, and eventually working on the Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic during the height of the Cold War. It was during this period that he met Joan, whom he would marry. Their growing family, and the need to supplement his meagre blue collar wages, prompted Mas to return to school, completing his high school equivalency, and a BSc, MSc and PhD in Pharmacology at UBC in less than a decade. And then, chucking his comfortable job as a government scientist, at the age of 50 Mas decided to become a photo shop entrepreneur. The story comes full circle when, later in life, Mas reencounters Midge, who will join Mas and his family in the gallery at the BC Legislature to witness Mas's daughter and Liberal Minister of Advanced Education, Naomi Yamomoto, deliver a speech endorsing a motion of apology to Japanese Canadians on the 70th anniversary of their interment.

All of this is supplemented by amazing archival photographs and film footage (the video design is by Jamie Nesbitt), and Shigematsu creates some wonderful effects with his live camera feed, as when a single miniature bunkbed placed within a mirrored box becomes multiplied into row upon row when projected on the backstage screen. Paradoxically, however, the visual design of the show points to the underdevelopment of the photographic metaphor in Shigematsu's script. Apart from one arresting description of multiple exposure as a way to think of the collapsing of time into a single stilled moment, I was struck by how Shigematsu's narrative portrait mostly eschewed such analogies. Indeed, it is the recording of Mas's voice that instead tends to dominate, and that via the repeated ritual of Shigematsu or Charles dropping the turntable needle into a given groove on the spinning record accords that voice a necessarily auratic quality (Shigematsu's likening of this audio document to the recordings that were sent into space on the Voyager satellites only deepens this feeling). As a result, Shigematsu's own voice at times registered to me as more adjunct than central to the story, mostly serving to amplify or illustrate the gist of what Mas had to say. Most telling, in this regard, is that the references to Shigematsu's own father felt extraneous to this piece, almost as if they had been imported to tie Empire of the Son and I Hour Photo more tightly together.

I don't think such dramaturgical stitching is needed. The two works already complement each other in myriad other ways.

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5@50 at PAL Studio Theatre

Brad Fraser's 5@50, on at the PAL Studio Theatre through next Saturday in a co-production between Ruby Slippers Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre, does something quite radical in the theatre world: it puts five women of a certain age front and centre on stage and lets them be as complex, flawed, vulgar and outsized in personality as any male character from a David Mamet play (back when Mamet was actually writing good plays). Exposing the other side--and the ugly underbelly--of Paul Feig's Bridesmaids, 5@50 throws out the representational rule book for professional women on stage. Some spectators may not recognize what they see, but that doesn't mean that women like these don't exist.

The premise of the play is simple. Five women who have known each other since high school gather over the course of a year to celebrate each of their milestone birthdays. First up is office manager Olivia, played with characteristic force by Deborah Williams. Olivia lives with her pediatrician girlfriend Norma (Beatrice Zeilinger), who has invited freelance journalist Tricia (an excellent Veena Sood), real estate agent Lorene (Diane Brown), and homemaker Fern (Donna Yamamoto) to surprise Olivia with a party. Even before Olivia arrives a significant amount of alcoholic beverages are consumed and profanities uttered, often in combination (typical line, from Tricia: "Who do I have to blow for a bourbon?"). However, when Olivia bursts through the door, already plastered, things ramp up considerably, culminating in Olivia puking all over Tricia. And that's just in the first ten minutes of the play! Deliriously but also assuredly paced by director Cameron Mackenzie, the play careens from there from one booze-soaked and emotionally overwrought scene to the next as Olivia's drinking spirals out of control and her friends debate what to do about it.

For, thematically, Fraser's play deals with a topic that we also don't see discussed very often in relation to women: addiction. Most obviously there is Olivia's alcoholism, for which her friends eventually stage an intervention, sending her to a treatment centre. But there is also Tricia's drug use, which includes pot, cocaine and prescription pain killers; the latter are for a serious back injury that she is hiding from her friends, but the fact that she has a dealer for the other stuff should also tell us something. Lorene is a serial bride, currently on husband number four and apparently happy to overlook the fact that he's gay if that means she doesn't have to think of the children from her previous marriages that she has abandoned, or the emotionally abusive mother who is stuck in a care facility. Fern is a compulsive exerciser, addicted to yoga, which is partly her way of dealing with the fact that for almost half as long as she's been married to her husband she's been carrying on an affair with a neighbour. And then there's Norma, whose habit happens to be Olivia; worried that her partner, once sober, might stop loving her, Norma enables Olivia's drinking and is actively opposed to the other friends' intervention.

It is with Norma's character (underplayed to the point of virtual indistinction by Zeilinger) that I have the most trouble in this work. Not only are we meant to believe that a middle-aged doctor is fine with a diet whose fat, cholesterol, and sugar levels would likely kill any fit and healthy twenty-year old, but we are also asked to accept that Norma would actively encourage Olivia to fall off the wagon in order to keep her. This leads to a denouement that splinters the quintet apart, though in the final scene--which includes a satisfying scenographic surprise involving the drapery that is the primary feature of Marina Szijarto's set design--there is hint that some of those fractures might eventually heal. And, upon reflection, the counter-intuitive logic of Norma that leads to this point might in fact hint at any added layer of depth to Fraser's play: that affection can itself be an addiction, with friendship in this case providing a safety net from other of life's travails, but in whose familiar routines might lurk other dangers.

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