Cock at Performance Works

Mike Bartlett's play, Cock, on at Performance Works in a Rumble Theatre production through this Sunday, centres on John (Nadeem Phillip, in an affecting though somewhat physically mannered performance). A hugely ambivalent character, John is torn between sticking it out with his long-time boyfriend, M (Shawn Macdonald, with trademark smirk), and taking a risky leap into the unknown with W (Donna Soares, giving as good as she gets), a woman John has started seeing while on a break from M. So far so melodramatic. However, what makes the play so absorbing to watch is its unique structure and rapid-fire dialogue (like Aaron Sorkin without the pontificating), along with director Stephen Drover's tense and kinetic staging of the action in the round. The characters circle and spar with each other, as if at a boxing match, and scene breaks are punctuated with quick semi-blackouts.

Those initial scenes concern John and M, with John first talking himself into leaving M and then explaining why he has returned. When M learns through their verbal jousting that part of the reason John has come back is to sort out how he feels about W, the stakes are raised considerably, and what John has both relied on and resented about M--his possessiveness--turns into an all-out war to keep him. We then shift abruptly to scenes between John and W, witnessing how they met and first come to have sex--in an hilariously choreographed scene of John's fumbling exploration and W's not unpleasant reactions made all the more remarkable for the fact that Phillip and Soares are on opposite sides of the stage floor's bullseye. The final panel in Bartlett's dramatic triptych brings all three characters together for a dinner party at which John is meant to decide between M and W--having previously hedged his bets by telling each of them that he is leaving the other. However, in true deus ex machina fashion, Bartlett introduces a fourth character, M having invited his father, F (Duncan Fraser, somewhat low energy), for moral support.

And, indeed, F does succeed in provoking one of the more impassioned speeches from John, who in response to F's statement that he has to decide "what he is," asks why can't it just be about "who" he wants to be with, regardless of gender? To be sure, Bartlett has in some senses written a true post-identity politics play. My only concern is why, among the reasons John lists to be with W, he cites a future that involves having children and growing old together? That, in the end, John opts for "what he knows" rather than "who he desires" perhaps says something about Bartlett's cynical take on the continuing problem of categorical fit in our society: the boxes are too small, but we continue shoving people--and ourselves--in them anyway.

P.

Indian Arm at Studio 16

I confess that Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf was not a play I was familiar with even two weeks ago. But when I learned it was to serve as the basis of Hiro Kanagawa's contemporary adaptation, Indian Arm, on at Studio 16 in a Rumble Theatre production directed by Stephen Drover through next Saturday, I duly did my homework.

One of Ibsen's later works, Little Eyolf revolves around another dysfunctional marriage, with Rita and Alfred Allmer in this case substituting for Nora and Torvald Helmer of A Doll's House (one even hears the character echos in the similar sounding surnames). Rita and Alfred are parents to a disabled child, Eyolf, whom Rita resents for coming between her and her husband (indeed, in typical Ibsonian fashion the boy's physical handicap is even linked to his mother's surfeit of passion, the result of an accident as a baby while his parents were absorbed in their lovemaking). However, onto this proto-kitchen sink/social problem narrative Ibsen, unusually for him, also overlays an allegorical frame in the character of the Rat-Woman, a Pied Piper-like figure who lures the now adolescent Eyolf to his death by drowning. In the wake of this tragedy, Rita and Alfred take turns blaming each other before coming to a kind of mutual understanding and forgiveness at the end. There is also a subplot involving Alfred's stepsister, Asta, and an engineer who is courting her, but that doesn't really figure in Kanagawa's version.

Indian Arm is the first play in a new commissioning project inaugurated by Rumble that will see classic plays from the Western dramatic canon adapted to contemporary Canadian (and, one assumes, largely West Coast) contexts (up next is Colleen Murphy's take on Titus Andronicus). For Kanagawa that has meant making the boy, Wolfie as he is called here (and played affectingly as a mentally disabled teenager by Richard Russ), an adopted First Nations child whose sudden interest in his heritage (encouraged by his father, but viewed with suspicion by his mother) is symptomatic of a larger narrative of Indigenous cultural inheritance that the playwright is interested in telling. To that end, we learn that Rita (Jennifer Copping) and her younger half-sister Asta (Caitlin McFarlane) are also dealing with the complicated legacy of their recently deceased father, Eric the Red, who in the 1960s built a cabin on traditional Tsleil-Waututh lands near Deep Cove and was allowed to remain living there by the local band council as a result of his compassion towards survivors of an Indian Residential School. One of those survivors, the elder Janice (played with a suitable mixture of gravitas and sly wit by Gloria May Eshibok), now keeps appearing outside the cabin, charming Wolfie by telling him that the Tsleil-Waututh people are also Children of the Wolf and disabusing an increasingly vexed Rita of the notion that her father was some saintly saviour of Indigenous peoples.

This is just one instance where Kanagawa weaves in references to other of Ibsen's works--in this case Ghosts. Indeed, one of the strengths of his adaptation is that, for those in the know, it is at once a recognizable updating of Ibsen's original and a wholly independent work that speaks powerfully to its local contexts of production--where, for example, Indigenous land claims and an obsession with real estate development are thoroughly and complexly intertwined. In particular, Janice--as a version of the Rat-Woman--is both allowed to represent a Trickster figure (the mischief-making Mouse-Woman of Haida legend) and to become a fully realized character in her own right, one who has a past with Rita's father and who, in the present, is also dealing with a troubled youth from her own community.

The trickier bit for the playwright is handling Ibsen's unique brand of nineteenth-century domestic melodrama. I was feeling neither the just-below-the-surface sexual heat nor the deeper layers of emotional resentment between Copping's Rita and Gerry Mackay's Alfred during the first act (which was compounded by Mackay stumbling over several of his lines). In the couple's climactic confrontation in act two things felt more real, in the same way that, as a result of Janice's return and her filling in of hers and Eric's backstory, Rita's conversion to the cause of Indigenous sovereignty seemed more justly earned.

At the heart of that cause is a deep-seated connection to the land, a focal point of Kanagawa's script that is wonderfully materialized in Drew Facey's amazing set, which manages to put us in the middle of a forest. There are still a few dramaturgical things to smooth over in this production, but what I like most about this play is that it refuses to apply the same principle to its politics.

P.

Men in Bathing Suits

"We are the talking dead." So says Burns (Kyle Jespersen) at one point in Penelope, Enda Walsh's sly and savage take on Homer's Odyssey, on at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre through October 13 in a Rumble Theatre production directed by Stephen Drover. Burns is one of four remaining suitors vying for the hand of the most famous abandoned wife in Ithaca. Over the past 20 years he has witnessed more than 100 of his kind die trying, either failing to outlast Penelope's exceedingly discriminating selection process or, as with his friend Murray, succumbing to the suggestive rhetoric of their rivals. Among those rivals still standing are Quinn (Alex Lazaridis Ferguson), a vain alpha-male who treats Burns like his personal lap-dog; Dunne (Sean Devine), theatrically Falstaffian in his outsized bodily appetites; and Fitz (Patrick Keating), the older, drug-addled intellectual who, try though he might, cannot "forget the prize." Having all had the same prophetic dream that Odysseus is set to return this day, each man has one last chance to pitch woo to Penelope (a mute Lindsay Winch), who watches their attempts at seduction via closed-circuit television in her villa, and who, should she choose one of them, would save them all.

Did I mention that all of this takes place in a drained swimming pool (the stunning set is designed by Drew Facey), with the suitors comically clad in speedos? The metaphor is an apt one: having been deprived of their medium, the men are all message, one in which we literally see the measure of each. Walsh presents this rhetoric of masculinity as a continuum. On one end is the abject yet still idealistic Burns, who believes in the possibility of platonic love between two men, and that he shared just such a bond with the dead Murray. At the other end is Quinn, a combination of David Mamet's Ricky Roma and Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko, who thinks that men are hardwired to be competitive, that hate and mistrust are what motivate them, and that the early bird always gets the worm--or, as is the case in the play's hilarious opening set-piece (where Ferguson, especially, establishes his cartoonish he-man bona fides), the sausage.

Quinn is the embodiment of capitalist ideology. Having convinced Dunne and Fitz that if they work together to form a company whose sole goal is to ensure that one of them succeeds in winning Penelope's hand, he then purposefully scuttles Fitz's speech when it looks like that one will not be him. Interestingly, when it comes time for his own moment in the spotlight before Penelope, Quinn doesn't speak at all; instead he stages an elaborate pantomime where, conscripting Burns' help, he plays both the male and female leads in a succession of recycled romantic plots (Napoleon and Josephine, Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara, Romeo and Juliet, JFK and Jackie). Perhaps because he only knows how to use words to wound he hasn't the facility for seduction of the others; or perhaps he, unlike them, realizes that he doesn't have to mean what he says. That is, he doesn't have to be sincere (hence his burlesquing of the very ideal of love), he just has to win.

I won't spoil things by revealing whether or not that's the case. What I will say is that all of the actors in this tightly helmed production are superb, forswearing all vanity to revel in the richness of Walsh's language. And I'll also plug my own post-show talk on October 10th, when I'll have more to say about the performances of masculinity on offer in the play.

P.

PuShing Further

Since Thursday, I've attended two world premieres and one remounting at the PuSh Festival.

First up was The Passion of Joan of Arc, a screening of Carl Th. Dreyer's acclaimed 1927 silent film (starring the incomparable Renée Falconetti as the nationalist martyr) in Christ Church Cathedral, accompanied by a newly commissioned score by Stefan Smulovitz, and featuring soprano Vivane Houle singing text by poet Colin Browne. The place was packed (this was a one-night only event), and the energy in the Cathedral was electric.

The performance did not disappoint. On its own, Dreyer's film, with its famous close-ups and what my colleague Laura U. Marks (who was in the audience) would call its "haptic" qualities, overwhelms the senses. Add in Smulovitz's brilliant new score, and especially the auratic counterpoint he creates between strings and wind instruments, and the effect was positively spine-tingling. Christ Church's grand cathedral organ helped in no small measure, in this regard.

On Friday it was over to the Cultch to take in the opening of Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, another commission by PuSh. Berlin-based RP is famous for working with local "experts" to create their community-based shows. In this case, the group decided to build a piece around the Lower Mainland's video gaming industry, bringing in computer programmer Brady Marks, game tester Duff Armour, traffic flagger Ellen Shultz, and former politician and Railway Club owner Bob Williams to aid in the construction of the piece, and to guide us in the audience in our interactivity.

The animating concept of the show is an on-line world called Bestland, in which audience members are given an avatar based on where they are sitting in the auditorium, and which they then manipulate via an individual console attached to their seat. Based on a series of questions posed by our experts, we get to choose our sex, gender, and various other aspects of our identity, as well as the general social, political, economic, and ethical framework for the type of society we think Bestland should be.

As a concept, the piece is brilliant; however, the practicalities of its interactive execution still need some refining, it seems to me. First off, the piece is too long: two-plus hours with no intermission. Second, our on-screen avatars are difficult to keep track of. Brady showed each of us our positions, and pointed out the "Drop" and "Jump" buttons we could press to keep track of where we were on screen. But the general indistinguishability of the avatars (they are triangle-shaped blobs of varying colours that attain different props as the show progresses), and the chaos of movement on screen as audience members hit their console buttons with mad abandon, made it difficult to figure out where one was during several crucial moments when key questions were being posed to us. Then again, it struck me that these questions were the real crux of the performance: we were told repeatedly by Duff that it was just a game, and that we could make whatever choices we wanted, choices we wouldn't normally make in life. But, of course, in games, as in life, there are always consequences, and with each additional question posed the burden of decision became that much more fraught.

Vancouver is the first test audience for this audacious show, and I have no doubt that as it travels to Brighton and Seattle and Toronto and various other cities and festivals in the coming year it will become even more complex and intriguing. For now, I was simply thrilled to be part of its unveiling.

Finally, last night we took in the final show of Rumble Productions and Theatre Replacement's Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut at Performance Works on Granville Island. First shown at the 2008 PuSh Festival, the show concerns performer James Long's discovery, in 2005, of a suitcase full of photo albums in the alley near his East Vancouver home, and the theatrical narrative he and his collaborators proceeded to construct around the documents. When, however, the family behind the photographs gets wind of the idea, they threaten legal action, and the play becomes instead at once an hilarious and deeply moving rumination on the documentary process and the ownership of memory. All of this is revealed slowly and cannily via various visual means in the production, in a manner akin to time lapse photography, with the suck-in-the breath moment coming at the end of the performance when one realizes that all along Long had really been talking at a displaced remove about his own family. There's a lot of humour in the work, but also a great deal of self-loathing, and the first clue in this regard should be the bunny suit.

P.

After after the quake

Alessandro Juliani (left, as Frog) and Tetsuro Shigematsu (as Junpei) in Pi Theatre and Rumble Productions' mounting of after the quake at Studio 16

It took two tries, and it was very touch and go right up to the end, but Richard and I did finally manage to secure rush tickets for this past Saturday’s penultimate matinee performance of what so far this fall theatre season has proven to be the hottest show in town. I’m referring to Pi Theatre and Rumble Productions’ acclaimed co-production of after the quake, which just finished its sold-out run at Studio 16.

The nail-biting around the tickets was definitely worth it. This production had all the elements of thrilling theatre: a great story simply told; a uniformly superb cast; sharp direction; and an overall design concept (set, sound, and lighting) that integrated seamlessly with the theatricality and thematics of the play.

Adapted by Steppenwolf Theatre Company member Frank Galati, after the quake is based on two stories from acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s 2002 collection of the same name. The stories in Murakami’s book are set in the months between the devastating earthquake in Kobe in January 1995 and the deadly subway attacks in Tokyo two months later. Suspended in a surreal dream state, Murakami’s characters struggle to make sense of their lives and forge links with one another amid the general malaise and fear dominating society. Quotidian acts of connection take place against superhuman feats of rescue and sacrifice. To this end, in the play we are introduced to Junpei (Tetsuro Shigematsu), a writer who lives to tell stories to Sala (Leina Dueck), the nightmare-plagued daughter of Sayoko (Manami Hara). Sayako is divorced from Takatsuki (Kevan Ohtsji), Junpei’s best friend from university, and over the course of the play we learn how this triumvirate first met, the bond they forged, and how both men eventually fell in love with Sayako, with Takatsuki beating Junpei to the punch in declaring his intentions. Junpei sublimates his feelings for Sayako through his writing, and the linking story in after the quake is the one Junpei is composing in his head about a mild-mannered and put-upon bank clerk, Katagiri (Ohtsji again), who is visited by a giant frog (the superb Alessandro Juliani) and enlisted in Frog’s plan to rescue Tokyo from an imminent earthquake by doing battle under the Shinjuku subway station with Frog’s mortal enemy, Worm.

I am a big fan of presentational theatre, and one of the things I like most about Galati’s adaptation is the multiple levels of narration that he has retained from Murakami’s writing: the play’s narrator (Juliani again) tells us Junpei’s story, who tells us Katagiri’s story, who is in turn told about his life by Frog, who seems to know everything about him. At various points in all levels of the diegesis, characters address the audience directly. Like little Sala, then, we are enfolded into the magic of the storytelling, and because this is furthermore done within the context of the theatre (where the wires are meant to show), we willingly suspend disbelief and travel along with Katagiri and Frog as they attempt to save the world.

The fact that we have such wonderful actors as our guides helps immensely in facilitating this journey. All the performers—most in multiple roles—are superb, but Juliani really stands out as Frog. With only a pair of amphibian-like gloves, a bowler hat, and a walking stick—and aided at key moments by the voice and visual enhancements of sound and lighting designers Yota Kobayashi and Itai Edral, respectively—Juliani loosens his long limbs, steps liquidly across the stage, and makes us believe he is indeed a frog.

The play’s direction was as it should be—unobtrusive—and this is all the more remarkable given that Pi and Rumble Artistic Directors/Producers Richard Wolfe and Craig Hall were sharing duties on this production. Yvan Morissette’s set—a marvel of sliding doors and screens—was as elegantly simple and structurally complex as the play itself. And what a delight—in a city as densely populated with Asian Canadians as this one—to finally see a critical mass of said citizens represented on our stages.

One final mention must go to box office manager Tara Goertzen-Travis, who for three-weeks, night after night, dealt with rush ticket hopefuls like Richard and me with patience, grace and infinite amounts of good humour. Here’s hoping her job is much easier if and when the production gets a well-deserved remount next year.

P.

Singing Songs of Sixpence

Yesterday Richard and I trekked to the Cultch’s new studio space extension on Victoria Drive, the Vancity Culture Lab as the venue has been so dubbed by those in charge of marrying corporate donations to creative ferment, and the first phase of the Cultch’s ongoing expansion to be opened to the public. We were there to see the Rumble Productions/Theatre Conspiracy co-production of David Harrower’s Blackbird. The play is a two-hander about a 59-year old man, Ray, who works as some sort of floor manager in a pharmaceutical plant in an unnamed part of England, and Una, a young woman in her late 20s, who has tracked Ray down at his place of work. Ray, or Peter as he now seems to be called, is clearly not happy to see Una, and has escorted her into the plant’s garbage-strewn cafeteria at the top of the play in order that their conversation not be overheard or interrupted by his co-workers. The entire 90-minute play takes place in this sterile, brightly lit industrial space (for which the Culture Lab is ideally suited), and apart from a few brief moments when the lights are accidentally turned out by departing co-workers, and a final interruption that at once rescues and condemns him, Ray is unable to escape the intensity of Una’s emotional and verbal assault. Very quickly we learn why Ray is so nervous; he and Una have had a previous sexual relationship, one that began when Una was twelve.

But Harrower’s play is far from a clichéd revenge drama. Una’s motives for tracking Ray down are complex, and far from clear, even to herself. She accuses Ray of ruining her life, of destroying her relationship with her family, of subjecting her to years of finger-pointing and gossip from neighbours in the small town where their relationship began, and where she has continued to live. But she also admits that she felt drawn to Ray from the moment he first talked to her at a backyard barbecue hosted by her parents, that she still loves him, and that her anger at him stems as much from his apparent final abandonment of her in a hotel room in Newcastle as from the sexual liberties he earlier took with her there.

Ray himself is not your stereotypical predatory pedophile. Indeed, Harrower is at pains to present him as equally sympathetic a character, a man who is as surprised as he is horrified to discover he has fallen in love with a child, who has paid dearly for that discovery (six years in jail, to be exact), who has striven to rebuild his life as honestly as possible (including revealing to his new wife his prior conviction on morals and molestation charges), and who now sees that life unraveling before his eyes as Una’s return awakens the shame, fear, and, yes, lingering desire he thought he had long ago buried.

Taughtly written, the play alternates between sharp, staccato duologues and quieter, more lyrical monologues as the accusatory force and suspicious search for motives on the part of each character gradually gives way to earnest attempts on both their parts to find a form of closure for their relationship. This culminates in two moving speeches about the void in their respective lives that resulted from Ray’s fateful decision to step out for a cigarette prior to what was to have been their absconding together from Newcastle for Amsterdam. What Una has ever since imagined to be her desertion Ray clarifies was in fact his momentary failure of nerve, one long enough to allow the authorities to catch up with them, and to plunge them both into a nightmare denouement from which they have yet to emerge. Under the assured direction of Norman Armour, and with the aid of a haunting piano score deployed by sound designer Candelario Andrade at the moments of Una and Ray’s most naked revelation (I recognized the piece being played, but haven’t had time as yet to research it properly), performers Jennifer Mawhinney and Russell Roberts deliver precise and compelling portraits of two individuals caught in a cycle of mutual dependency that goes far beyond sexual obsession.

As with Paula Vogel’s equally riveting and disturbing portrait of Uncle Peck in How I Learned to Drive, Harrower does not fully exculpate Ray by the end of Blackbird. But neither does the play make him into some grotesque monster beyond redemption or comprehension. Both plays ask very difficult and morally ambiguous questions that are of course impossible even to entertain in popular media representations of the evil pedophile. Is it possible to draw a line between consent and abuse in any way other than the juridical? In inter-generational relationships should adult guilt and childhood innocence automatically be presumed? Is sexual maturity in fact an historically, socially, and personally fluid process? And whom exactly are we protecting in holding on so resolutely to the category of child in a culture that over-sexualizes children to such an extent as ours?

These questions are foregrounded even more starkly by Harrower through the introduction, late in the play, of Ray’s stepdaughter, of whose existence we, along with Una, had thus far been unaware. Having arrived, along with her mother, to pick Ray up from work, she bursts through the lunchroom door with her soccer ball, and sends Una scrambling to a corner to hide. However, when the soccer ball gets away from her, the girl discovers Una’s presence. Eventually she is sent away, leaving a shocked Una to confront, on behalf of the audience, Ray about whether or not he has tried anything with his ward. He denies ever considering the possibility, indeed curses Una for even suggesting it, and quickly runs out of the room in search of his wife. Una is left destroyed on the floor, at which point—whether within the real-time of the play proper, or as a purely symbolic concluding tableau, it remains unclear—the step-daughter returns with her soccer ball. She freezes in place, smiling beatifically off into the distance. Una looks at her in horror. We look at Una looking at her in horror. Blackout. Silence. Stunned applause.

This is actually the second production of Blackbird that I’ve seen, having caught its acclaimed West End transfer in London in the spring of 2006, following the play’s premiere at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival. I mention this not because I’m an original cast or first night diva, but because the London production (directed by Peter Stein, and starring Jodhi May and Roger Allam) featured a different ending. Following Ray’s stepdaughter’s abrupt and shocking entrance, and Ray’s subsequent exit, there is no return by the little girl. Instead, the blackout is followed by a door slamming, the sound of heels on concrete, the squeal of a car’s tires. After this, the lights come back up; the industrial lunchroom has been replaced by a car park, and Una is chasing after Ray’s blue Toyota (presumably his wife and stepdaughter arrived in a separate vehicle). Una succeeds in stopping the car, tugs Ray from it, and they struggle for a few minutes on the pavement, before collapsing onto one another in a cathartic heap. Final blackout.

I haven’t read the published playtext, but I suspect the coda to the London production was unscripted and improvised by Stein. I’m not sure which I prefer. Armour’s ending, while perhaps more faithful to the text, does seem to sway the moral balance somewhat against Ray—at least to judge by the reaction of the women sitting in front of us, with whom we had a brief conversation in the lobby upon exiting. Stein’s version, while a bit melodramatic and smacking, after 90 minutes of intensely dramatic verbal jousting, a bit too much of technical staginess, does have the virtue of leaving us with the image of Una and Ray together in a kind of mutual misery, both unable to “fly off into the light of the dark black night,” as Paul McCartney’s own song of sixpence puts it.

Either way, the play is a tasty theatrical dish to set before any audience.

P