Titus Bouffonius at The Cultch

In 2015 Rumble Theatre launched an ambitious project to commission new works from acclaimed Canadian playwrights based on classics from the Western dramatic canon, but adapted to a contemporary local/Pacific Northwest context. The first work in the series, Hiro Kanagawa's Indian Arm, based on Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, premiered in April of that year and has just been awarded the 2017 Governor General's Award for English drama (my review of the original production can be found here). Last night, the second play in the series, by the two-time GG award-winning playwright Colleen Murphy, opened at The Cultch. The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius (which from here on we'll simply abbreviate to Titus B) is Murphy's inspired take on Shakespeare's bloodiest and most violent play, Titus Andronicus being a revenge tragedy more in the mold of contemporary works by Thomas Kyd and Thomas Middleton than what we later came to expect from the author of Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth.

Murphy is no stranger to dark material. Her play Pig Girl, inspired by the Robert Pickton case, depicts in one of its parallel plots the murder of an Indigenous woman in real time. But whereas Julie Taymor's 1999 film adaptation of Titus played to the gory appetites of screen audiences, bathing scenes in spectacular hues of red while also taking itself far too seriously, in Titus B Murphy chooses to mine the black humour of Shakespeare's original text, adopting a caustically farcical tone precisely in order to mock our fascination with generational violence. And she does so by drawing on the tradition of bouffon, her time writing the play having coincided with a playwright-in-residence gig at the University of Alberta, where Michael Kennard (one half of Mump and Smoot and a consultant on this show) teaches the art of clown. Thus, unlike with Kanagawa's take on Ibsen, Murphy's adaptation of Shakespeare is more one of style than of content. The characters and plot (albeit radically telescoped) remain the same, and large chunks of Shakespeare's dialogue are recited by the actors; however, at the top of the show a frame narrative introduces us to the members of the The Society of the Destitute, a taxpayer-funded community theatre troupe comprised of the very bottom layer of the 99% that will be putting on a show for us well-heeled types in the audience. Sob (Peter Anderson) plays the Roman general Titus; Spark (Naomi Wright) is Tamora, Queen of the Goths; Leap (Pippa Mackie) is a sexually aware Lavinia, daughter to Titus; Fink (a completely unrecognizable Craig Erickson) assails the dual roles of brothers Saturninus and Bassianus; and Boots (Sarah Afful) takes on the role of Aaron, though he would really prefer to be playing Macbeth.

Indeed, a whole bunch of other Shakespearean references get thrown our way throughout the ensuring 90 minutes, and if it quickly becomes clear that, notwithstanding their occasional lapses in delivering their lines, this rag-tag bunch of fringe performers knows the Bard's canon like the back of their characters' soon to be lopped off hands, we are also repeatedly reminded of why they eventually chose to stage this one: because it contains fourteen murders (a chalkboard keeps track of the victims). All of the deaths are depicted in a grotesquely cartoonish manner on stage, complete with plastic knives and ketchup bottles of fake splattering blood in the climactic scene where Titus serves up his revenge to Tamora and Saturninus in the form of a meat pie (its telegraphed appearance serving as a running gag throughout the play). And on the subject of meat pies, it should be noted that Murphy, like Stephen Sondheim in Sweeney Todd, also seems to be drawing on the traditions of Victorian melodrama, not least in her incorporation of music and song (the composer is Mishelle Cuttler). As with the story of Todd, who has been wronged by the legal justice system that has also robbed him of his wife and child, in Murphy's version of Titus's revenge plot there is a strong critique of the state, and especially a child and family welfare system that seems to prey on the most vulnerable in our society. To this end, the murders of Titus's and Tamora's sons are represented in this version via the dismembering, beheading and crucifixion of a succession of plastic baby dolls. And the real horror in watching comes not from registering the immense glee with which the performers attack this task, but in noting how hard we are laughing.

Stephen Drover's maximalist direction is perfectly suited to this material. I imagine that the operative word in rehearsal was "more": as in more mugging; more writhing; more fake blood. Production designer Drew Facey has constructed a set that nicely captures the play's gallows humour, including a final reveal that really hammers home Murphy's Swiftian point about the state eating its young. Finally, all of the actors are superb, inhabiting their bouffon humps and displaying their blackened teeth with slouchy, wide-mouthed delight. They are also able to move on a dime between line-perfect readings of Shakespeare's poetry and the contemporary comic asides interpolated by Murphy, and are clearly revelling in the physical comedy and direct cajoling of the audience. Sometimes that cajoling is scripted and sometimes it arises in the moment, as when last night, during Lavinia's "big feminist speech" about how only she has a right to decide who does what to her body, a cell phone went off. Without missing a beat, and following Mackie's lead by staying in full clown mode, the entire cast did a blistering take down of the offender and then adroitly picked things up from where they left off. Then again, maybe the interruption and ensuing admonishment was planned. Either way, it worked within the overall ethos and tone of the piece.

This is a production that takes its mandate to offend extremely seriously, and no matter our level of discomfort upon exiting the theatre we should be extremely thankful for this. We should also be thankful that we have in this country a playwright as fearless as Murphy. Formally there doesn't seem to be anything she can't do (witness the epic imagination of The Breathing Hole, which premiered earlier this year at Stratford); and in terms of subject matter, she is unafraid to stare into the abyss, and then to stare us down with what she has found there.

P

Angels in America at the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre

Among the many ideas being explored in Tony Kushner's epic play Angels in America is a dialectics of scale. On the one hand there are, as Louis says to Belize late in the first part of the play, Millennium Approaches, monolithic concepts like freedom and democracy, even the "idea of America" itself, that seem so huge and abstract as to be unimaginable--except when they are organized into specific structures, like government and religion, that bear down upon and circumscribe our daily lives. And then there's the "small problem" of living those lives in the face of such monoliths: the intimate acts of care or betrayal, obligation or disconnection, that one performs with or on those closest to you.

I was put in mind of this framework by the Arts Club's current production of Millennium, which I saw in preview last night at the Stanley Theatre on Granville Street. Directed by the Electric Company's Kim Collier, the production is dominated by Ken MacKenzie's monolithic set design, a giant faux-marble pedimented structure with steps ascending upstage that puts one in mind of the facade of a courthouse (where Louis and Joe both work), or the Lincoln Memorial, or any of those other giant mausoleum-like structures that Harper suggests dominates the architecture of Washington, DC. The set is so overwhelming that no matter how inventively Collier distributes her actors about it, or through what myriad portals within it they (and their furniture) appear and disappear, the performers inevitably look puny on stage (even from where I was sitting in the sixth row of the centre orchestra section). Perhaps this is the point, with the neo-classicism of American colonial architecture here standing in (quite literally) for the symbolic nation-state that does not so much absorb one within its warm embrace (the US being "a melting pit where nothing has melted," as Rabbi Chemelwitz tells us at the top of the show) as threaten to obliterate one with its surveilling shadow.

I would have no problem with this if Collier remembered, dialectically, what the theatre--and this play especially (Kushner being a good Brechtian)--proposes as an antidote to such spectacularized separations: the proximate and material connection between bodies on stage. Instead, she embraces the scaling up of spectacle, in part by inserting a rotating chorus of figures in scenes normally featuring just one or two characters. I didn't mind this in the opening prologue by the Rabbi (Gabrielle Rose), when other members of the ensemble join Louis (Ryan Beil) and Prior (Damien Atkins) as members of Louis's extended family mourning the death of his grandmother. However, I thought the effect an unnecessary and distracting caprice in two other places: in the already split scene when Prior is being examined by the nurse Emily (Lois Anderson) and Louis is talking with Belize (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff), the rest of the company parades on stage in hospital gowns and trailing IV drips, the presumed nod to the scale and complexity of the AIDS pandemic here only managing to pull focus from Prior; and in the scene when Hannah (Rose again) is asking her friend Ella (also played by Anderson) to sell her house in Salt Lake City following her phone call with Joe (Craig Erickson), Collier mysteriously sends out a chorus of Mormon parishioners to moon for a few seconds before retreating.

Even more questionable for me was the use of live camera feeds and video projection. The conceit first appears with Mr. Lies's entrance, the physically nimble and charismatic Jackman-Torkoff entering the stage trailing a camera, which he then proceeds to train on Harper (Celine Stubel) as she chases him around the stage and declares her desire to visit Antartica to see the hole in the ozone layer. Thereafter cameras recur in all of the subsequent dream or fantasy scenes: when Prior and Harper share the "threshold of revelation"; when Prior is visited by the ghosts of his two similarly named ancestors (played by Craig Erickson and Brian Markinson); and when Ethel Rosenberg (Rose) haunts the brownstone of Roy Cohn (Markinson). I get that Collier is using technology to suggest that these scenes are taking place in another realm or medium; however, especially with the scene between Prior and Harper, each on separate beds with a mini-digital camera pointed at them, and with their respective images projected side by side on cloth panels that have descended between the pillars of the set, it felt like I was watching a Skype conversation. The whole point of these two shattered characters sharing the threshold of revelation is that we see and accept that in the theatre different temporal and spatial realms can touch and that bodies can cross over into those realms to speak certain truths to each other--and to us. I don't see the point of added technological embellishment, especially when the performances--as, in this case, by Atkins and Stubel--are already so strong. In its final use, in the scene between Roy and Ethel, I actually think the camera gets in the way of the acting, with Markinson--whose performance I was only really starting to warm to--and Rose--who doesn't really get a chance to establish a definitive take on her character--often struggling to make sure they stay in the frame. (Interestingly, Beil, who doesn't have to operate or appear before a camera, ends up giving the finest performance, and Erickson's Joe is also very compelling.)

Indeed, in terms of its embrace of scale and technological spectacle, this production bears an interesting contrast to the excellent and very low-tech staging of Millennium at Studio 58 last fall (which I reviewed here). I realize that the Stanley as venue in some senses calls for a scaled up and more spectacular production, complete with the full-on Spielbergian descent of the Angel at the end. That said, bigger isn't always better.

P.