Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Darren O’Donnell
du Maurier World Stage Festival, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto
September 28-October 15, 2000
“White Mice are Racist Mice”
“Whiteness equals racism equals capitalism”—that the the message as it is literally stated in “White Mice” by the Chalmers Award-winning playwright Darren O’Donnell. I missed the play when it appeared as part of the du Maurier World Stage Festival in April this year and was eager to see this remount presented by Mammalian Diving Reflex. As the quotation suggests, this play is really a one-sided lecture about racism, specifically racism in white people, disguised as a play. O’Donnell even provides a bibliography on racism in the programme. What makes this lecture-as-play based on a sociopolitical conspiracy theory watchable is the sheer theatricality of its presentation.
Before the play begins we have Naomi Campbell and Darren O’Donnell’s beautiful set to contemplate. On its own it one could imagine it as an installation in an avant-garde museum. On a square platform is a high square table and two tall chairs. On the table is a large wheel of cheese and a knife. Beyond the mousehole entrance and the see-through wall is a void where 19 globes marked with Earth’s continents and longitudes seem frozen in the midst of rising from the floor to the ceiling like bubbles in a glass. Spacey New Age music by murr [sic] contributes to the surreal atmosphere. It is therefore no surprise when the lights go down and then up to reveal two barefoot men facing us with long elegant tails protruding from the back of their trousers.
The plot, such as it is, concerns two brothers, Robert (Darren O’Donnell) and Douglas (Bruce Hunter), who live together in their mousehole in Toronto. Each short scene has Robert arriving home in an increasingly agitated state, perturbed that racism may be inherent in those with white “fur”, that capitalism furthers racism, that white culture consists entirely of appropriations from non-white cultures, that the northern hemisphere has effectively enslaved the southern, that Hitler saw the white man’s genocide of the natives in North America as a model for his own genocide of Jews, and that the only cure to all these ills and the shame of being white is the extermination of the white race. Douglas is portrayed as a fool for hoping and believing that things are getting better. Robert sends him out to look at the world “without blinking” and he returns convinced of the horror he brother has expounded.
In a real play of ideas there is at least some pretence of voicing opposing points of view. Think of the pacifist Shaw writing Undershaft’s convincing defence of arms-making in “Major Barbara”. Well, that doesn’t happen here. There is only one point of view and (given the bibliography) only one valid point of view. The only fact that would undercut Robert’s statistics-filled lectures is that he finally admits that he has learned all this from a brown mouse with whom he is in love but who has dumped him. However, this itself is damning since it means that even Robert has appropriated his self-flagellating political views from the Other. All there is left is to talk about is nothing or popular culture which, as we all know, is a capitalist product to make us forget about nothingness.
What helps save this lecture-as-play is that O’Donnell shows us he is aware that this is a lecture-as-play as when Douglas remarks “Here we go again” when Robert launches into another tirade. O’Donnell also makes us aware that he knows his metaphor is transparent. Robert slips once in speaking of “white people” and quickly corrects himself to say “mice” whereupon the two brothers suddenly act more mouse-like than at any point in the show. O’Donnell has the actors become increasingly aware that an audience is watching them until finally Robert actually steps into the audience when the mass murder of white people is on his mind. The mice stutter in high voices turning key words such as “ca-ca-capitalism” and “privilivilege” into nonsense. They engage in slapstick fights and childish arguments of “Yes it is—No it isn’t” that make them seem more like clowns than mice. All their extreme gesturing and posing is emphasized by R. S. Armstrong’s imaginative lighting. Most of all, O’Donnell and Hunter as actors are superb in their comic timing, rapid fire delivery and quick changes of mood.
Excising all mention of racism, slavery and genocide known to occur now and in the past among non-white peoples does not excuse these ills in white people but it does lessen the impact of his argument. Surrounded as our two mice are by space and other earths, I naturally assumed O’Donnell would approach these problems in human beings in general, much as he takes on logic itself as a boundary to thought in the later play “Boxhead”. Unfortunately, O’Donnell privileges the white race as the sole purveyor of racism, thus denying in others humanity’s infinite capacity for evil. O’Donnell must feel his ideas need to be mitigated in some way or else he would not have spent so much effort in doing so. Yet, as soon as one exits the theatre, the attractive, comic and self-aware theatrical coating O’Donnell has given his philosophic pill dissolves, leaving one with the deadening feeling of having sat through an 80-minute-long harangue.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Darren O’Donnell and Bruce Hunter. ©2000 John Lauener.
2000-10-14
White Mice