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by Jonathon Young & Kevin Kerr, directed by Kim Collier

Arts Club Theatre Company with Electric Company Theatre, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

October 9-20, 2012

“As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.” Jacques Derrida

Tear the Curtain! is an ambitious multimedia piece that initially asks the question, “What is the better medium for representation – theatre or film?”  It was written specifically for the Arts Club Stanley Stage by Electric Company Theatre members Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr to reflect the dual nature of the Stanley Theatre in Vancouver which was once a theatre for live performance and then a movie theatre.  As befits the subject Tear the Curtain! is presented alternately in the form of film and theatre with some sections combining both media.  This question is complicated enough, but when the story moves beyond it, as it does in Act 2, it gets stuck in a mire of self-referentiality and deconstructionism from which it does not escape.

The show in set in a fictionalized Vancouver of the 1930s where there is so much professional dramatic activity in town that a theatre critic can actually have a daily column.  (Even in the 1970s in Toronto, theatre critics covered student and amateur productions to earn their keep.)  The show begins as a film where Mavis (Dawn Petten), girl Friday at a large newspaper, drives theatre critic Alex Braithwaite (Jonathon Young) to the Stanley Theatre see a production Ferenc Molnár’s 1920 drama The Swan starring Mila Brook (Laura Mennell).  Alex immediately falls for Mila in a way that has never happened to him before.  Meanwhile, we discover that there are two rival groups vying for control of a parcel of land.  One headed by Max Pamploni (Tom McBeath) wants to build a movie theatre and make Mila its star.  The other headed by Patrick Dugan (Gerard Plunkett) wants to make it a live theatre and keep Mila as it star. 

On his way home, Alex happens to run into a mysterious top hatted man who claims to be Stanley Lee (James Fagan Tait), the founder of a theatre company called The Empty Space (an anachronistic reference to 1968 book about theatre by Peter Brook).  It was during a performance by that company, that the young Alex saw a performance so intense that it changed his life.  Alex becomes obsessed with Lee seeks out his hovel in the park and steals his notes about how theatre can be the medium to connect people with their unconscious.

In that were not complicated enough, Mila, herself, is also a spy and lets Pamploni think she’s on his side so that she can gather information on him.  The group she is working for is headed by Sender (Hiro Kanagawa).  Its hero is Lee, whom they like everyone else presumes is dead, and they goal is “Liberty” – on the one hand the concept, on the other a mechanism that they think will lead to that concept.  They run a decrepit cinema where Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète (1932) shows in a continuous loop.  Act 1 ends with Alex making the crucial decision to publish Lee’s notes as his own work under the titles Tear the Curtain!            

Up to this point the plot is relatively clear.  The film noir style conjured up by designer David Roberts along with the period costumes of Nancy Bryant create the appropriate atmosphere of anxiety.  The main peculiarity is that cinematographer Brian Johnson has filmed his sections in colour rather than film noir’s archetypal black and white.  Conceptually, however, the greatest problem is that film noir is a style intimately associated with the 1940s and ‘50s – not the 1930s – so that, well done though it may be in terms of dialogue, character types and design, the style does not suit the period.  Indeed, as the play progresses the plot turns out less to be an example of film noir than of a series like Twin Peaks or a film like Mulholland Dr. by David Lynch, focussing as it does not so much on crime as on the growing madness of Alex.

While the question of film versus theatre was clear in Act 1, Act 2 decides to move into the thornier question of whether words can adequately represent reality.  Here the ideas of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction loom large and eventually everything becomes equivalent to everything else – all attempting to hide the nothingness that is at the centre of existence.  At this point an already complex play becomes far too convoluted and ultimately nonsensical to follow.  Any characters like Alex whom we might have cared about we lose intersect in.  And when “Liberty” is finally unveiled, the show loses any sense of seriousness and turns to satire.            

            

The great pity of Tear the Curtain! is that the show used up the time and energy of so many people in creating the fantastic set, in shooting the atmospheric film sequences, in perfectly finessing the transitions from film to theatre and back, while all that effort leads to nothing.  The play concludes with a series of false endings.  After each we think, “Well, that must surely be it,” when another comes.  After about four of these completely different endings, we give up.  The ending that the creators have chosen as the last has nothing to do with what has gone before since some point in the middle of Act 1.  We’re left with the horrible thought that three-fourths of the play has actually been Alex’s fantasy, but we don’t have enough evidence to decide whether that is true. 

Mimesis and deconstruction are rather large topics to tackle in any single work, especially one that also tries both to imitate and mock a style seemingly for its own sake.  Young and Petten are most successful on both stage and screen, accurately gauging their performance to the medium, while Mennell is more successful on film.

One of many disappointments with the show is that it is so fixated on the alternation of film and theatre that it neglects the possibility of combining the two in one as was so exquisitely demonstrated earlier this year by La Belle et la Bête by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon.  One would think from dialectical way in which theatre is posited as the thesis and film as the antithesis that a synthesis of the two would be the logical place the show was headed.  But no, the introduction of the adequacy or inadequacy of language, fascinating as the topic is, derails the whole scheme the first act has established so that rather than being about everything as the play overweeningly suggests, it winds up being about nothing.  It is style for the sake of style – and the wrong style besides.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Jonathon Young and Dawn Petten. ©2012 Bruce Zinger.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.