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written and directed by Blake Brooker

One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, Young Centre, Toronto

December 4-13, 2008

The lights go up on a nude male (Michael Green) who welcomes the audience to Doing Leonard Cohen by One Yellow Rabbit and, oblivious to his unclothedness, proceeds to give it warnings about the play’s mature language and themes, and, as an afterthought, its use of a small bit of nudity.  This jokey approach characterizes the whole evening which seems to send up Cohen as a poet and novelist as much as it revels in his use of language.  It contrasts completely with the sophisticated wit of Sylvia Plath Must Not Die, now playing in repertory with Cohen.  They are an excellent pairing about poets of the 1960s--Sylvia their newest work, Cohen their signature piece from 1997, the first focussing on two death-obsessed female poets, the second on one sex-obsessed male singer, poet and novelist.  That Cohen turns out to be less engaging than Sylvia only shows how the renowned Calgary troupe has grown in depth and subtlety over the years.

 

Doing Leonard Cohen is divided into two acts--the first presenting, incredibly, 50 of Cohen’s poems from 1956-78, the second staging a condensed version of his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers.  The first act is the most effective constantly pairing minutely choreographed movement with the poetry so that the movement seems like an effortless extension and commentary on Cohen’s words.  Michael Green at first seems like the central Leonard Cohen, but the other three actors--Denise Clarke, Andy Curtis and Onalea Gilbertson--also speak Cohen’s poetry and come to represent the male and female, introverted and extroverted sides of his work.  The poetry literally dances and seduces as the actors elegantly stride, twirl and gesture while the four combine and recombine as couples and threesomes.  The act concludes with Clarke delivering “Suzanne” in a way that makes the familiar lyrics sound completely new.

The second act falters because OYR never get deeper into Cohen’s novel than particulars of its narrative.  Green is the perplexed narrator, Curtis the hedonist bisexual F. and Gilbertson an undercharacterized Edith.  Clarke is listed as “Nicco” in the programme, but in fact functions more like the spirit of Iroquois saint Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-80), one of the narrator’s obsessions.  The fact that the cast pronounces all the dashes in the name of vanishing native tribe of the “A-----s” is just one sign of OYR’s irreverence.  We see that F. may be simply another side of the narrator, but strangely the kaleidoscopic nature of the book has been flattened to merely a nonsensical story with delusions of grandeur that threatens to dissipate all the positive energy the brilliant first act has generated.                    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-12-05.

Photo: Michael Green and Denise Clarke. ©Jason Stang.