Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Oren Safdie, directed by Alysa Palmer
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
September 21-October 24, 2004
Oren Safdie’s Private Jokes, Public Places takes the simple structure of a thesis defense and turns it into a critique not just of academia but of hierarchical systems in general. Gently nudged into satire by director Alysa Palmer, it packs more intellectual punch in only 75 minutes that most plays twice the length.
Margaret (MJ Kang), a Korean-American architecture student has designed a public swimming pool as her graduate project. Her supervisor William (David Jansen) has invited two distinguished architects as judges. Colin (Victor Ertmanis) is an old school modernist who views all the movements since modernism as rubbish. His polar opposite, Erhardt (Dan Lett) is a German theoretical architect who views buildings as personal expressions, all the better for breaking the rules. At first Colin and Erhardt’s intellectual posturing doesn’t even connect with Margaret’s project but when it does the project and Margaret herself become the battleground for their theoretical arguments.
Initially the play focusses on the paradox of architecture as a private vision of a public place and the disconnect between theory and practice, but it quickly shifts to the hierarchical structure of academia where an establishment, no matter how internally divided, has power to choose whom to accept into itself. With Margaret as the candidate, the play expands its critique to sexual and racial hierarchies as well. Unfortunately, Safdie, son of architect Moshe Safdie, allows the architectural discussions to remain opaque, so those who don’t know their Le Corbusier from their Mies van der Rohe may wish the program included a glossary.
The performances are excellent from Jansen’s ineffectual William and Ertmanis’s blustering Colin to the threatening intellectual and sexual suavity of Lett's Erhardt. Kang ably portrays the dilemma of the defense candidate who must defend her ideas without aggravating her judges until finally her personal integrity is put in question.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-09-30.
Photo: Victor Ertmanis, M.J. Kang, Dan Lett and David Jansen. ©2004 Tarragon Theatre.
2004-09-30
Private Jokes, Public Places