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co-created by Ame Henderson and Bobby Theodore

Public Recordings, The Theatre Centre, Toronto

December 1-12, 2010

300 Tapes is a waste of 90 minutes.  The show’s publicity claims that this “bold experiment in storytelling thoughtfully and playfully provokes questions about authenticity.”  The main question it provokes is how Ame Henderson and Bobby Theodore could possibly have spent two years creating the thing.

Supposedly, the three actors involved--Joe Cobden, Frank Cox-O’Connell, Brendan Gall--each recorded 100 tapes worth of memories and stories.  If that is true, they wasted an extraordinary amount of time since only about 20 minutes of these recordings are used in the show.  The rest of the stage time is occupied with Ame Henderson’s “choreography” of needless movement--of the three actors shifting identical chairs to identical places, rummaging through tapes, fumbling while loading them or dropping them in synch with each other.  The “questions about authenticity” only exist if we think there is any authenticity involved in the first place.  All we have is note in the programme to support that claim.  Besides, we have no way of knowing whose stories are whose.  The three men are actors after all.  Only if you were so naive as to believe actors on stage always speak the truth would you be surprised they did not.  Where exactly is the “bold experiment”?  

The piece is “bold” only if you know nothing about the past.  Has neither Henderson nor Theodore heard of the “unreliable narrator,” a fixture in literature since at least Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) and in film since at least Rashomon (1950)?  Has neither studied Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) about the compromises involved in portraying “truth” on stage?  In particular, has neither seen or read Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) about how changes of personality change views of the “truth”?  Their work adds nothing to what these earlier works have already explored and plumbed to far greater depths.    

At least the 20 minutes of stories are pleasant enough before repetition, up to three times, makes them tedious.  Cobden is best at acting as if he were actually speaking his own thoughts, Gall is the most histrionic and Cox-O’Connell is rather too focussed on trying to be natural actually to be so.  In any case, since all three wear headphones and are supposedly speaking what they hear on tape, the acting styles matter little.  We really don’t care who is telling whose story and Henderson and Theodore do nothing to make us even mildly interested.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-12-02.

Photo: Frank Cox-O.Connell. ©Bobby Theodore.