Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✩✩✩
by David Yee, directed by Nina Lee Aquino
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 24-May 26, 2013
“carried away on a wave of boredom”
The latest offering at the Tarragon Theatre is an ill-conceived production of an ill-conceived play. David Yee’s carried away on the crest of a wave takes on the impossible task of trying to convey in a play the devastation caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries – one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Yee’s technique is to create an anthology of ten scenes and playlets, unconnected to each other but all reflecting in some way the impact of the tsunami. Since there is no throughline the collection of scenes is essentially undramatic and ultimately unengaging.
The play gets off to a lame start with Makyo Nguyen as a scientist giving a press conference as a representative from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. This group (and it is a real organization) was established to maintain global time and reference standards, most importantly by deciding when to add leap seconds to the year to compensate for wobbles in the earth’s rotation that can cause human-imposed time calculations to deviate from natural time. A fact that may seem strange but true is that extreme weather, such as the tsunami, can slow down the earth’s rotation and thus effect time on earth. Yee tries to lighten up this communication of data by having the speaker’s infatuation with a man in the audience eventually overcome the formality of her presentation. It’s supposed to be funny but does work since it is too improbable. The same could be said for the majority of the play’s scenes.
The following vignette finds two brothers, a Swimmer (Kawa Ada) and a Runner (Richard Lee), floating on a dollhouse representing their real house swept away by the tsunami. They comically debate what items inside the ouse to jettison to make it float better on the flood waters. This debate leads the two to recall, in a forced way typical of the play, an Asian version of the Iroquois myth of two brothers fighting on the back of the sea turtle that holds up the earth.
Eventually we see in the eight episodes that follow that no characters reappear and no scene refers to anything that has happened in a previous scene except for the tsunami. Yet, even then the play’s ten scenes are only ever tangentially related to the tsunami. The focus of each is really something else. When in Scene 3 a Muslim architect (Kawa Ada) is sent to determine whether a Catholic church in India was preserved from harm by a miracle, the subject is not the tsunami itself but faith and the nature of miracles. In Scene 4 when a radio disc jockey (Richard Zeppieri) fumes about pop singers gathering to sing aid songs like “We Are the World”, the topic is not the tsunami but the hypocrisy of millionaire singers promoting themselves as caring individuals. Scene 8 leaves reality behind entirely to depict a man (John Ng) who has stepped through a hole in his missing daughter’s condo in a highrise and has been falling for 4½ years only to be pursued by a would-be rescuer (Ash Knight). The scene is probably supposed to reflect the father’s sense of grief but it is so bizarre that few people will register that fact.
In his “Playwright’s Notes” David Yee says that he read numerous accounts of survivors of the tsunami and interviewed people who had suffered losses because if it. He says, “An overwhelming majority of them experience moments of inexplicable coincidence, or profound intersection”. Yee reflects the notion of “inexplicable coincidence” by including several in his play. The problem, one that Aristotle described in his Poetics, is that drama has to deal with the probable, not the possible. While we know that coincidences happen in real life, they have to be made to seem inevitable in drama.
Since the ten scenes are not connected and do not even resonate with each other the play has no dramatic thrust and we soon decline to invest any interest in characters we will never see or hear of again. Not only that but most of the scenes even considered as separate playlets go on long after they have made their point. These two factors plus the unbelievability of many of the scenes result in 2½ hours of sheer boredom. With no forward momentum the play could just as easily have ended after Scene 5. Scene 6 would have made quite a good ending since nothing that followed it added more to our knowledge of the tsunami’s effects.
The acting is generally good but some actors are better than others in differentiating their various roles. Mayko Nguyen had the greatest success in sharply differentiating the nerdy but lovesick scientist of Scene 1 from the two very different prostitutes of Scenes 5 and 6 and the seemingly ordinary mother with a secret of Scene 9. All of Kawa Ada’s characters were also quite distinct from the loony brother of Scene 2 to the intellectual architect of Scene 3 and the strangely threatening groom’s friend of Scene 5. Richards Lee has kept his equally loony brother of Scene 2 quite separate from his compassionate but by-the-book FBI agent of Scene 9. Richard Zeppieri’s best role is the abrasive disc jockey ready to revolt against his employer. His depressed characters of Scenes 6 and 10, however, are too similar. Ash Knight’s finest role is the Catholic priest of Scene 3, so desperate for a miracle he hopes the investigator will not file his findings. John Ng’s characters are all rather the same shading merely from grumpy to angry. Special mention must be made of kindergartener Eponine Lee (daughter of the director and Richard Lee) who is perfectly adorable in her main scene as an orphaned child travelling with a man she doesn’t know.
Director Nina Lee Aquino’s concept for the production simply does not work. Camellia Koo’s set is made of two walls of semi-opaque plastic sheeting and a black floor that is flooded with about an inch of water. For especially dramatic scenes sprinklers go off over the stage. Rather than evoking any sense of a tsunami the play looks more as if it were set in someone’s leaky basement. Sprinklers going off in no way conjure up the fury of a monsoon rains. For the scene set indoors, the flooded floor just makes no sense.
Yee takes the title for the play from the words his high-class call girl uses in Scene 6 to describe what an orgasm feels like to a woman. So what then – a tsunami is the ocean’s orgasm and is it supposed welcomed as such? This is just one part of the fuzzy thinking that characterizes the whole play. Yee also, like many modern North American playwrights, can’t avoid the in-case-you-didn’t-get-it scene at the end. There he has John Ng as the hunter Vermin announce the moral of the play: “We are all connected. And we are, none of us, alone”. This moral is supremely ironic considering that is comes at the end of a play where all ten scenes are disconnected and none of the characters ever meet each other. Yee’s play caps a mediocre season at the Tarragon, where both the choice of plays and the quality of the direction has been below average. Let’s wish both Yee and the Tarragon better luck next time.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Kawa Ada as Swimmer and Richard Lee as Runner in Scene 2; (middle) Richard Zeppieri as Crumb and Mayko Nguyen as Jasmine in Scene 6. ©2013 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2013-04-27
carried away on the crest of a wave