Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✩✩
by Darren O’Donnell, directed by Chris Abraham
Go Chicken Go, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
June 2-18, 2000
“Out of the Box Theatre”
“Boxhead” is the latest play by the author of “White Mice”, recently on view at this year’s du Maurier World Stage Festival. The young, prize-winning author moves from the theme of racism in that work to the rather more general themes of perception, knowledge and God--all within the space of an 80-minute play. While it is overwritten and repetitive, the piece is audacious enough to make one look forward to whatever O’Donnell and director Chris Abraham cook up next.
The play is a neo-Absurdist philosophical parable about a geneticist, Dr. Thoughtless Actions, who wakes one morning to find a box secured to his head. After a series of scenes in which he comes to grips with his predicament, Actions, in a deep state of loneliness, cut off as he is from the world, comes up with the solution of running around the globe quickly enough eventually to catch up with himself. He does this at which point another geneticist, Dr. Wishful Thinking, appears, clad exactly as Actions and also with a box on his head. The two conduct a series of experiments--cloning an echo, creating an echoless yell, to thoughts of cloning space and time. They soon fall in love, want to have a baby and have their DNA tested only to discover that they are actually the same person. Finally, God, demoted to the role of narrator throughout, whose amplified voice we hear and whom both doctors hear as an inner voice, suggests a solution that will supposedly end the doctors’ problem but will also end His own existence. During the course of the play, we find that even God has His own inner voice, that of Everyone and Everything, which is awakened briefly only to go back to sleep again.
Paul Fauteux as Dr. Thoughtless Actions and the playwright himself as Dr. Wishful Thinking speak though microphones so that, through the magic of the sound designed by Henry Monteforte and Tyler Devine and expertly managed by Stephen Souter, their voices are electronically mixed to make the high, cartoonish voices of the two doctors, the lower voices of God the Narrator and the even lower voices of Everyone and Everything. Nina Okens's bright costumes help give the show the look of a live cartoon. The action takes place behind a scrim on a totally black set by Cand Cod. The complex lighting pattern by Steve Lucas and Sandra Marcroft involves various squares and rectangles of light suddenly appearing not only on stage but in the audience. The whole work is accompanied live by the percussionist Roman DiNillo, whose blacklit white gloves seem to reinforce the play’s theme of duplication and, when not at playing instruments, serve to mime parts of God’s speeches.
It may sound damning, but at 80 minutes the play is too long. The sections involving the cloning of space and time lead nowhere and, except for their value as interesting ideas, could have been omitted. The section where God tries to distract the “young Gods” present (i.e. the audience) by focussing its attention on something insignificant leads to a comic nude scene which seems to be its only raison d’être. The increasing use of profanity, while initially funny, eventually gives the show an unwelcome sophomoric tone. The references to current Ontario politics seem out of place in such an abstract work. O’Donnell could also learn from Samuel Beckett how to suggest that his characters are caught in a cycle of repetition without being repetitive himself. With alterations along these lines, the show could be tightened and made smarter.
Otherwise, O’Donnell and inventive director Chris Abraham present the audience with more intriguing ideas and striking images per minute than one usually finds in a full-length show. While O’Donnell cites various recent works as his sources, the play actually is a rapid traversal and critique of various philosophies of the world as an extension of the self from Lord Berkeley to Fichte and Schopenhauer to 20th-century Existentialism. O’Donnell, who has a degree in shiatsu therapy and a sympathy with Eastern thought, satirizes the West’s focus on the self and the individual by showing the blindness this leads to, not just in human beings, but also what they choose to call “god”. He even brings this critique to bear on the theatrical experience. After all, we the audience have chosen to be in a box assigning our own values to the illusions we see and the voices we hear.
This is not mainstream theatre and is not meant to be. For the adventurous, this play will be a tonic opening up other possibilities of what theatre can do. Somehow the time is right for an absurdist satire just now when people have access to so much “information” but know so little about themselves or how they think.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Paul Fauteux and Darren O’Donnell. ©2000 Go Chicken Go.
2000-06-20
[boxhead]