Review - Body 13 - MT Space, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Joan M. Kivanda & Gary Kirkham, directed by Majdi Bou-Matar

MT Space with Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

January 17-26, 2013;

Conrad Centre, Kitchener

January 30-February 2, 2013

Tom: “You wait and then you’re 89”.

The Kitchener-based theatre company MT Space that wowed audiences and critics alike with its show The Last 15 Seconds has return to Toronto with its latest creation, Body 13, that premiered at in 2011 at the Impact 11 festival. In the 90-minute show speech, movement and music complement each other to depict seven characters’ day at a Canadian beach. It’s a delight, humorous, deceptively simple story that explores desire – both sexual and non-sexual – as it comes into conflict with difference of gender, culture and age.

The performance initially focusses on Rita (Pam Patel), who is waiting for the right moment to scatter her father’s ashes in the lake. The other six characters tell her they are sorry for her loss, but in different ways they, too, are dealing with loss. Assaf (Badih AbouChakra), wounded in the Lebanese civil war, walks aimless up and down the beach contemplating his past life and the daughter he left behind. Tristan (Trevor Copp), a gay Newfoundlander, is alone and suffering from severe social anxiety. Ato (Tawiah Ben M’carthy), a gay Ghanaian who can’t set his cultural taboos aside, is also alone jogging up and down the beach. Iman (Nada Humsi), a recent refugee from Syria, accidentally meets Rae (Jessalyn Broadfoot), her immigration officer, off-duty and trying to enjoy a day of calm. Meanwhile, Tom (Brad Cook), the best man at his best friend’s wedding, is trying to compose the toast he will have to give later that day. He has also lost a cufflink and wanders up and down the beach peering at the sand looking rather like a long-legged shore bird.

The seven interact with each other in various ways, but except for a fantasy group orgy scene halfway through the action, they characters gradually coalesce into three groups. Ato saves Tristan from harassment over his sexuality by Tom and the two, Ato and Tristan, try rather comically to find if they have anything at all in common other than sexual desire. Iman would clearly like to be friends with Rae, but forbids her discussing case files with a client. They, too, search for something in common to discuss other than Iman’s life and Rae’s power to accept or reject Iman’s application. Rae has a second difficulty since she find that despite the difference in age between them, she is sexually attracted to the feisty older woman. Assaf keeps advising Rita about when to scatter the ashes and a kind of dissonance develops between them. Eventually they realize that he is treating her as if she were is daughter and she as if he were her father. They each has problems in those real relations but they come to see that they actually can leave that baggage behind to get along with each other.

The who is left out of these pairings is Tom. Of the seven he is the only one to reduce the other characters to labels, calling Tristan a “faggot”, Assaf a “wanker”, and Rae and Iman “lesbians”. Tom thinks he mind get along with Assaf since his father was in the military, but he is repelled by Assaf’s apparent fascination with Ato. He flirts with Rae and Rita, but ignores Iman because of her age. By the end of the play, when he hear Tom’s toast to the groom, the source of his aggressive behaviour becomes clear. He furious that his best friend is marrying because it will mean a change.

While the play has shown desire as a force that can break down boundaries between people, it is only until we hear Tom’s speech that we realize the political implications of what has gone before. Tom is rigid in his superficial pigeonholing of people because he is resistant to change. Desire may attract the other six characters to each other, but unless they are open to change, to overcome whatever biases they may have concerning gender, rage and age, desire would lead them nowhere. The play thus sends with the six celebrating their freedom in a nude dance behind a scrim while Tom remains in the foreground, unhappy and trussed up in his morning coat and white tie.

Body 13, like other MT Space shows, is an ensemble creation and the precision and harmony with which the ensemble works is a delight throughout. It is probably unfair to single out any performances from such a tight-knit group, but I must mention how beautifully sinuous M’carthy’s “jogging” is as Ato and how Humsi, though not tall in stature, can fill the entire stage with her personality.

Every movement of the ensemble is choreographed to the original music reflecting the varied backgrounds of the characters by Nick Storring and played live by Storring with Colin Fisher and Germaine Liu. Jenny Jimenez’s set consists of two bright white squares at right angles – one the performing area, one a backdrop that turns out to be a scrim through with Jimenez’s lighting can illuminate either actors on floor level or the band on an upper level. Denis Huneault-Joffre has created brightly coloured costumes for five of the characters. Rita is in white for mourning and so blends in with the white background. Tom the outsider, however, is the only one in greys.

Body 13 may be about “the politics of the sexualized body” as the company states, but its snapshot of a day at the beach also captures the essence of Canada today. Canada is a nation of immigrants – some who can leave their backgrounds behind, some who cannot. In either case the country represents a mixture of possibilities that only comes from mingling with people from all around the world. The play demonstrates that those who want the country to remain white-dominated and repressive blind themselves to the reality of change going on all around them. Kitchener is lucky to have such a company as MT Space resident in the city. Toronto is lucky every time they visit.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://www.passemuraille.on.ca.

2013-01-18

Body 13