My Funny Valentine at The Dance Centre

Zee Zee Theatre's tenth anniversary production of Dave Deveau's My Funny Valentine is currently running at The Dance Centre, following a successful tour to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. It's an anniversary in two senses: it's the first play by Zee Zee playwright-in-residence Deveau that the company shared with an audience, beginning with workshop presentations overseen by Zee Zee Managing Artistic Director Cameron Mackenzie in the summer of 2009; and, more soberly, it also commemorates ten years since the death of Lawrence King, whose murder in February 2008 by a male classmate to whom he'd had the temerity to send a valentine inspired Deveau's own love letter of a play to all who have suffered violence for following their hearts.

This is not the first time My Funny Valentine, which has won many awards, has been remounted by the company. I previously attended and blogged about the last Vancouver production at the Firehall here. I won't rehearse all that I said in that earlier review about the play's structure. But I will note that one of the unique  features of Deveau's play--and also a way he solves the conundrum of writing for and to the ghost of someone whom we can only ever know through media reports, or as some group's positive or negative symbol--is how he tells his story at a slight remove, through the voices of those who knew the boy or have come to be affected--including, in some cases, positively or opportunistically--by his murder (Lawrence is never identified by name). These characters are all played by a single actor, in this case SFU Theatre alum Conor Wylie, who is as convincing inhabiting the body language and drawn out vowels of the bored and cynical tween Gloria as he is the at once bluffly swaggering and emotionally desperate working class masculinity of a homophonic father.

That said, two characters stand out for me, both in terms of the quality of Deveau's writing and the luminosity of Wylie's performance. The first is Helen, a teacher at the high school of the murdered boy who cannot let his death go. She is the only character we meet more than once, and the recurring conceit of her nervously and clumsily spilling whatever she is drinking all over herself is a sign of how shattered she is by these events--to the point where she burns through both her job and her marriage. Her final appearance at the end of the play, ten years after her student's murder, also allows Deveau, in this most recent staging, to do some subtle updates to the script--in part to show us all that hasn't changed in America in the past decade. The second character I found most affecting was little Ronda, a motormouth of a girl who has two Dads and who is awaiting a liver transplant--a final act of love from the dead boy that this time is reciprocated fully and completely, because that's all Ronda has herself been shown in her life. Wylie is able, in turn, to convey this joyful contagion to us in a way that is simple and direct and that feels like a blessing--just when we need it most. All while talking a mile a minute about hating the smell of tuna fish sandwiches.

Today's matinee audience was a bit sparse; no doubt we were partly competing with the weather. The play continues for another week and I urge folks to get out and see it. Quite simply, Deveau has written a classic, and Wylie is giving a star turn.

P

My Funny Valentine at the Firehall

Dave Deaveau's My Funny Valentine, on at the Firehall Arts Centre through March 2 in a Zee Zee Theatre production directed by Cameron Mackenzie, is based on the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, a gay 15-year-old murdered by the male classmate to whom he had given a Valentine's Day card. Coming exactly 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, and with a similar gay panic defense being mounted in the subsequent trial, the case drew international attention.

Just as the Shepard case inspired Tectonic Theater Project to interview residents of Laramie, Wyoming affected by the killing, and to stage their voices in the much produced and multi-award-winning The Laramie Project, so has Deveau done extensive research into the press and interview responses of different members of King's hometown of Oxnard, California. However, eschewing TTP's route of producing a large ensemble work of documentary theatre, Deveau has chosen to craft a series of fictional monologues based on what I'm assuming are composite characters developed out of his research, and all delivered by a single actor, in this case the hyper-talented Anton Lipovetsky.

Lipovetsky, identified as The Collector in the program, is already on stage when we enter the theatre, unshaven and scruffily dressed, busy sifting through papers and clippings and photographs that form a circle around a small shrine of objects and artifacts (the set and costume designer is Marina Szijarto). Snatches of media reports about the shooting are broadcast as audience members settle into their seats, appropriate given that the first voice we hear from Lipovetsky once the performance begins is that of the small potatoes local reporter who first broke the story. Among other things, we learn that he interrupts some romantic canoodling with his wife in a rented motel room because, in turning on the TV to drown out the sounds of their lovemaking, he nevertheless still has enough hard news instincts to know a scoop when he sees one. Details like this reveal Deveau's own sharp instincts as a playwright: not just that one can tell King's story in this circumlocutionary way without sacrificing any of its drama, but also that our identification with each character whose voice we hear over the course of the next 90 minutes will in part stem from what about each goes on in spite or despite or even as a result of King's loss.

Those characters include an 11-year-old girl dreaming of a career in the glamourous world of high fashion; a homophobic salesman whose son went to the same school as King; and two teachers--one male, the other female--differently affected by King's murdered. The voice of the female teacher, Helen, is the only one that recurs in the play, and it is also where Deveau's writing, Lipovetsky's acting, and Mackenzie's directorial choices combine to produce the most affecting results. Helen, who is always searching in her purse for something she cannot find, or spilling coffee or wine down the front of her blouse, has been completely undone by King's death, even as she rouses herself--and others--to action, losing her feckless husband in the process. And in the course of revealing how--as a teacher, a woman, a person--her heart has been broken as a result of these events, Helen also reminds us what is so unfunny about them: that tolerance is not enough; that gun control is not enough; that even hate crime legislation, in paradoxically memorializing the crime and its victim(s), fails to interrogate adequately the violence that produced that crime in the first place.

As I have written elsewhere, also in connection with Matthew Shepard, part of this interrogation involves acknowledging that Shepard and King and Aaron Webster and Brandon Teena and Sakia Gunn and Reeva Steenkamp and the women at the École Polytéchnique and from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, died not because they were queer or feminist or prostitutes, but because their killers were all straight men. This play, in making its "gay protagonist" an absent presence, forces us to confront this issue. Like Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, it deserves to be seen every February around the world.

P.