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.

Lowest Common Denominator at PAL

Thanks in no small measure to a tour de force performance by Deborah Williams, Dave Deveau's Lowest Common Denominator is a tsunami of a play, alternately buoying and buffeting its audience with wave upon wave of roiling action and intense emotion.

In this Zee Zee Theatre production directed by Cameron Mackenzie, and on at the PAL Theatre until this Sunday, Williams plays Harmony, a 40-something divorced telemarketer raising her seventeen-year-old son, Trevor (Dallas Sauer), and tentatively re-entering the dating pool via an impromptu dinner with her new insurance agent, Peter (an affecting Shawn Macdonald). Harmony's confidence is momentarily shaken on both fronts when first her son (accidentally) and then Peter (clarifyingly) announces he is gay. But Harmony is nothing if not resilient, and soon all three characters find themselves back in her kitchen, very much in their respective cups (signature Harmony line: "They say you really have to meet a gay person to understand them and now, look, I've got two"). So far, so much fun. However, when Harmony, having earlier retired to bed, returns to find Trevor and Peter in a hot and heavy lip-lock, she instantly goes into lioness mode, warning Peter and, by extension, us in the audience that we have no idea what's coming next.

And, indeed, following a very tightly focused and almost classically Aristotelian first half (down to the more or less unified troika of time, place, and action), the second act gets decidedly surreal, opening with Harmony and Peter in caftans, straw hats and sunglasses, sipping from giant coconuts while relaxing on a beach. We soon learn that we're inside Harmony's head, a space to which we will return, and in which she and Peter, in between their improbable and hilarious banter, try to talk rationally about what's best for Trevor. I actually preferred these scenes to the realistic ones they punctuate, in which a year has passed and Trevor, now 18, pursues his liaison with Peter, despite the 30 year age difference. Eventually the two move in with each other, and after initially trying to reconcile herself to the situation, Harmony goes on the attack, threatening to out Peter as a pedophile unless he abandons the relationship.

In Deveau's hands, the battle over Trevor and his well-being is, mercifully, less of a moral issue (the rightness or wrongness of inter-generational sex) than an emotional one. Neither Harmony nor Peter want to be alone. The irony is that in doing battle with each other, they will both end up losing Trevor. My only problem with this equation as the play now stands is that Trevor, as currently written, is something of a cipher; we don't get enough sense of his own agency in making the choices he does and in Sauer's performance I unfortunately couldn't distinguish Trevor's devastation and sense of betrayal at being abandoned by Peter from his anger at his mother for trying to break them up: both come across as so much teenage petulance when, I think, we are meant to understand (at least as retailed by Peter) that Trevor is wise beyond his years.

In part this imbalance is because Harmony and Peter are so well-written and their scenes together--not least the ones inside Harmony's head--so believable. I'd kill to see the two of them reunited in another play set a few years in the future--maybe a reconciliation at Trevor's wedding. With the booze flowing freely again, and maybe a couple of additional characters, I can just imagine the possibilities.

P.