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.

The Gay Heritage Project at The Cultch

When we use the word "heritage" we are likely often referring to an individual's or a group's ethnic or cultural lineage and traditions, or else to the shared history--including built--of a community or nation. So what might it mean to think of sexuality as having a heritage? How would one conceive of mapping a specifically "gay heritage" given that modern notions of sexual identity are belated historical constructs that simultaneously subsume and marginalize an entire spectrum of non-Western same-sex amatory and kinship relations, let alone some of the very real divisions that persist in the LGBTQ rainbow coalition in countries like Canada? And, even more pertinently, how would you turn these questions into a work of performance that sought to provoke critical thought and reflection even as it remained committed to entertaining its diverse audience? These are just some of the questions behind The Gay Heritage Project, a work of devised theatre created and performed by Damien Atkins, Paul Dunn and Andrew Kushnir. It premiered to acclaim last year at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto and has now arrived in Vancouver for a two-week run at The Cultch's Historic Theatre.

Thirty years ago, in the climactic scene of the off-Broadway premiere of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, the firebrand protagonist Ned Weeks delivered the following speech: "I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold." Several of these same figures turn up in The Gay Heritage Project, either named and voiced directly in some of the work's historical set pieces, or referred to in passing via a montage of images on screen or a medley of song (the work's multiple choral arrangements were overseen by Kushnir, who has a beautiful voice). However, GHP's creators, all able-bodied, white middle-class urban gay men in their thirties, are neither so presumptuous as to think that there is an unbroken line of connection between their contemporary "post-AIDS," post-same-sex marriage millennial queer identities and the forebears cited by Kramer, nor unaware of the other differences--not least with respect to gender--masked within such a totalizing genealogy.

On the former front, the performers do their best, over the course of the show, to become good Foucauldians, accepting that homosexuality as we have come to know it is a social construction invented in the nineteenth century even as they rail against the jargon of queer theory and its mute opacity in the face of one's contradictory response to the boy-love of a Socrates or a da Vinci or a Marlowe. This particular line of inquiry culminates in a brilliant scene in which Atkins at once spoofs and pays loving homage to that classic icon of gay heritage, The Wizard of Oz. Foucault himself is inserted into the role of the Wizard, and while on the one hand he tells all the friends of Dorothy that we can never find a fixed and stable home in homo, he also says the flip side of this is that we can choose with whom we wish to queerly affiliate ourselves (in these and similar scenes I detected the hand of my Dublin-based academic colleague, J. Paul Halferty, who served as dramaturge for the show).

Anxieties around the parameters and limits of queer affiliation are also front and centre in the many scenes in which the creators stage various debates about whom they are speaking for in the piece, as well as those voices they are necessarily leaving out. Dunn visits an imaginary queer archive to get a storytelling license for the show, only to be shown what a very narrow remit said license would cover. At the same time, Kushnir introduces us, via a Reading Rainbow sequence, to a succession of non-Western stories of same-sex relationships. And Atkins takes a bus ride in which he discovers just how fraught and tenuous are the lines of connection between different members of the queer community.

It struck me that after the third or fourth of such scenes the GHP boys were being a bit too defensive regarding anticipated critiques of the show's premise. Much more successful for me was the balance struck by each of the creator-performers' micro and macro focus on the meaning of "gay heritage." By that I mean that the effort at synthesizing transculturally and transhistorically an archive of queerness finds its narrative corollary not just in the more specific focus on Canadian issues and landmarks, but in each of the performers' attempts to reconcile their sexuality with their own family histories and disaporas. Gay heritage, we discover, includes Atkins' boyhood fascination with the figure skating of Brian Orser, Kushnir's adult quest to discover what it means to be a gay Ukrainian, and Dunn's cross-generational channeling of an Irish love song between two men. Equally, we are reminded that gay heritage means not being complacent in submitting without question to a progressivist narrative of history that might seek to overwrite that which doesn't fit within its ameliorative ethos or about which we might feel uneasy or ashamed. Such questions are brought out most powerfully in: an alley encounter between "gay identity" and "gay desire" enacted by Kushnir; an "It Gets Worse" sequence featuring Dunn as the Roman emperor Tiberius; and a victim impact statement made by Atkins during the murder trial of HIV, in which he elaborates on what he, as a gay man born into the era of anti-retrovirals who has never known someone who has died of AIDS, has nevertheless lost as a result of the disease.

A work brimming with both intellect and unabashed sentiment, and featuring three charismatic performers engaged in a non-stop dialogue with each other, with their imagined interlocutors, and with us, The Gay Heritage Project is a production that excites and educates.

P.

Mr. Burns in Toronto

I had wanted to see Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play since I read the initial ecstatic reviews surrounding its New York premiere two years ago. So I was delighted to learn that while here in Toronto on a short visit to see family I could take in Outside the March's production (in partnership with Starvox Entertainment and Crow's Theatre) of the play at the former Aztec movie theatre on Gerrard Street East.

Washburn's play takes its title from the character of Homer Simpson's boss on that ubiquitous pop culture televisual referent, The Simpsons. In the first act of the play survivors of a nuclear disaster on the east coast of the United States distract themselves from their new post-apocalyptic reality by enacting old episodes of Matt Groening's cartoon, and in particular the iconic 1993 episode that spoofed the Martin Scorsese remake of the original 1962 version of the thriller Cape Fear, starring Robert Mitchum as the violent ex-con seeking revenge on the family of the lawyer (played by Gregory Peck) whom he blames for putting him behind bars. Already one sees the layers of citationality that Washburn suggests are embedded in our touchstone stories--be they Homeric invocations of the muses or, as with our traumatized posse in Washburn's play, repeated utterances of the Simpson paterfamilias' signature "D'oh!" And if, according to many theorists, electronic and digital media at once remediate and hypermediate older oral traditions in our post-print, post-literate era (think of the tweet as a version of the town crier or, even better, the retweet as a game of telephone), then it makes sense that when the power grid collapses we will revert, almost reflexively, to more embodied and repertory acts of myth-making and storytelling--such as spinning favourite tales around a campfire.

It is in just such a state that we find Matt (Colin Doyle) at the start of Mr. Burns' first act, manically recounting scenes from the aforementioned "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons for the benefit of Maria (Katherine Cullen), Jenny (Tracy Michailidis), and Sam (Sebastien Heins), each of whom displays varying degrees of nostalgia for the episode and the show as a whole, but who are nevertheless actively invested in the shared ritual of reenacting and remembering a cultural artifact from a past that no longer exists. When Gibson (an excellent Damien Atkins) accidentally stumbles upon their encampment we discover that this is all that binds these individuals together--that and the fact that they have survived the catastrophic disaster that has preceded the action of the play (and remember, in this regard, that in The Simpsons Mr. Burns is the owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and himself briefly flirted with a career in bioterrorism). For once the group has determined that Gibson is not a threat to their safety they immediately go through another ritual, albeit one that emphasizes the otherwise random and chance nature of their connection to each other: each member of the camp takes out a book and asks Gibson if he recognizes or may have previously encountered any of ten names read out (presumably of missing family members or friends). He does not. And then it is his turn to read out his list, which he prefaces by saying that he thought the protocol for this bizarre hybrid of stranger-greeting and genealogical remembering was now to read out only eight names. It's in these tiny details that Washburn is able to telegraph with extreme economy and subtlety how little time, in this new world, there is for normal acts of grieving, and also how new social practices and representational acts, built on the ashes of old ones, become institutionalized and circulate: through repetition. How else to explain the symbolic capital of a show like The Simpsons, even to someone like me, who rarely watched it? Or, likewise to Gibson, who is able to supply Matt the line from the "Cape Feare" episode he couldn't remember because, even though Gibson never watched the show, his missing girlfriend was a huge fan, and would routinely recite favourite lines around the house.

Act 2 of Washburn's play opens seven years later. Our rag-tag team of survivors has banded together (quite literally) to form a start-up television station, performing old episodes from The Simpsons (or what they remember of them), as well as the commercials that used to interrupt them. In this post-Netflix, post-PVRing, post-binge watching society, entertainment is still a commodity, but in ways that combine the early days of live television broadcast and an even older barter economy. Harried producer Colleen (Amy Keating) is rushing to lock down a commercial featuring Quincy (Rielle Braid, another standout in a stellar cast) and Gibson as a couple trying to unwind after work. But the group also needs to finish rehearsing two other full episodes of The Simpsons before their competitors do so. The added twist here is that cultural memory has now become the new currency, as the product our group is selling is dependent on scripts cobbled together from remembered lines from old Simpsons episodes that Jenny buys from other survivors on the open market of nostalgia. Trouble is that Jenny is pretty sure some of what she's buying isn't authentic, that desperate folks are now just making things up in order to make whatever trade they need to in order to get by. But, as Gibson's character reveals in a wrenching meltdown when he can't remember having been at the meeting where the group agreed to produce a much-disputed episode, when one's memory is not just subject to the normal ravages of time, but also potentially accelerated deterioration due to radioactive contamination, the stakes of what is ersatz and what is authentic suddenly become all the more fraught.

Finally, in Act 3, Washburn lets loose her amazingly fertile and intelligent imagination in a bravura musical sequence set 75 years in the future. In this new society, the fictional world of The Simpsons has fully fused with the lived reality of the descendents of the survivors from the first two acts. In this hybrid mythology Bart (Braid again), Lisa (Keating), Homer (Doyle) and Marge (Cullen) become the intrepid heroes who triumph against the evil Mr. Burns (Ishai Buchbinder) and his henchmen Itchy (Atkins) and Scratchy (Heins), giving rise to an origin story that is enacted in song and dance and that, appropriately for a playwright who is additionally concerned with exploring in highly metatheatrical ways the place of live performance in our thoroughly mediatized world, takes us back to the origins of western theatre (cue the masks and prosthetic extensions and Greek chorus).

Outside the March's co-directors, Simon Bloom and Mitchell Cushman, have assembled an incredibly talented (if overwhelmingly white) cast and crew. And while the production is staged largely proscenium style, they do tap into the company's previous site-specific and immersive aesthetic in making creative use of the Aztec Theatre's dilapidated charms. Most impressive, the entire two hour and forty-five minute performance is powered without traditional electricity. Flashlights and glowstick devices of various sorts are used in many scenes, but there are also a lot of illuminated lightbulbs throughout. The energy for these, it is revealed at the very end of the show, comes from a generator attached to a bicycle that cast member Buchbinder, who fittingly plays Mr. Burns, has presumably been pedalling throughout the production. Just one magic trick among many that makes this show worth the trip to Riverdale.

P.