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by John Herbert, directed by Stefan Dzeparoski

BirdLand Theatre, Dancemakers Studio, Toronto

September 3-8, 2013

“I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries”

    Shakespeare, Sonnet XXIX

Though John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes is internationally the most produced Canadian play ever written, it is more studied in Canada than staged.  Therefore, we ought to welcome any new production of this genuine Canadian classic.  Unfortunately, BirdLand Theatre’s new production is too problematic on both practical and artistic levels to received a whole-hearted recommendation.

The action takes place in a single cell and the corridor outside in a prison for young offenders.  The play opens when a new prisoner Smitty (Julian De Zotti), a first offender, joins his other three cellmates on his first day in prison.  Queenie (Alex Fiddes) is a loud, effeminate gay man serving time for being a male prostitute.  Rocky (Cyrus Faird) is a tough guy in for theft who claims he’s straight.  Mona (David Coomber) is a sensitive gay male arrested for the trumped up charge of making a pass at a police officer.  His constant suffering and love of literature are a source of mirth and derision for Rocky and Queenie. 

The plot traces Smitty’s loss of innocence and in so doing indicts the prison system as an institution that far from reforming petty criminals, only hardens them and increases their resentment of the outside world.  Daring for its day, Herbert exposes the turn towards homosexuality that prolonged incarceration with other men produces even in straight men.  For a gay writer like Herbert this fact uncovered the hypocrisy of Canadian society that judged homosexual relations as illegal until 1969 but created a prison system that fostered them.

Smitty, a straight guy with a girlfriend, finds that in prison he has to negotiate rights over his body with the other prisoners, dominance signalled by rights to be a top and submission signalled by coercion to be a bottom.  Meanwhile, beatings and gang rape from the guards are common.       

After an explicit television prison series like Oz, Herbert’s revelations fail to shock.  What does stand up, however, is the play’s portrait of prison society as a grotesque mirror of the outside world obsessed with status and power. 

Director Stefan Dzeparoski takes an approach that at first is variously ritualistic, minimalist and Brechtian.  Many of the peculiarities of the production come from the design he has approved from Joseph Pagnan.  Pagnan’s set delimits the cell within the Dancemakers Studio space by using a series of cords of varying lengths descending from the rafters and held taut with rocks.  The resulting “cell” is extraordinarily spacious and the fact that we can see past the few cords does nothing to evoke a sense of claustrophobia.  The inmates’ bunks are indicated by garbage bags held down with rocks at the corners, a none-too-subtle symbol of how society regards the prisoners.  Posted at what we imagine is the cell door is a “guard” consisting of a bullhorn on a mannequin’s body.  This puppet replaces the fifth actor who would play the role of Holy Face.  The fact that all four inmates take turns in speaking the Guard’s lines suggests they are all complicit in the oppressive structure of the prison.  This would be an asset to the production if Pagnan had not made the opening of the bullhorn look like a robot’s face.  The play is not sci-fi but a critique of the world now.

For the uniform for this young offenders’ prison, the actors wear only sweatpants over white briefs.  This sight of young shirtless, barefoot prisoners as if in some porn fantasy is obviously meant to highlight Herbert’s emphasis on homosexuality, but that theme is so overt it hardly needs highlighting.  In fact, leaving the prisoners so uncovered takes away a means the characters could use to signal desire for or revulsion towards another character.  As if we were too dull to see that the play was about prisoners yearning to be free, Dzeparoski decides to have a video cartoon of a flying bird projected on the chests of characters at various times.  This video only sentimentalizes a play that is distinctly unsentimental.   

Dzeparoski has the four actors enter as if they were acolytes with Zippos instead of church candle lighters.  They proceed to light votive candles in what look like nine stainless steel dog bowls that surround the cell.  The point of this ritualistic entrance is unclear.  Dzeparoski then has the four state their real names and the roles they will play.  Continuing in Brechtian fashion he has one on them announce the act and scene number when they begin.  After this, Dzeparoski switches stylistic modes again and directs the majority of the action in a purely realistic fashion.  The exceptions are the scenes of sex and violence that are choreographed to be abstract. 

Dancemakers Studio is not a very congenial space for plays because the ventilation system is so loud.  Actors really need to project to be heard.  Unfortunately, Dzeparoski is so oblivious to the physical nature of the space that he allows actors to speak at a conversational level and then adds unnecessary musical underscoring of certain speeches.  The result is that whole sections of the play, such as the first 20 minutes of exposition and the last ten minutes of the conclusion, go unheard. 

De Zotti and Coomber consequently stand out not just because they are more consistently audible but because their characters are richer.  De Zotti’s Smitty begins as a straight-arrow, almost too naive to be true young guy who merely wants to serve out his six months.  He marks Smitty’s descent into the world of prison power games in a stepwise fashion rather than showing his how one phase gradually leads to the next.  Having seen his performances in other plays, I’m certain he could do this if he were asked, but Dzeparoski seems content with this more schematic approach.  De Zotti’s Smitty does change radically but it would be even better if we could see how he struggles with himself in the course of this transformation.

Coomber’s Mona is the most mysterious character of the four.  What keeps him going despite the constant attacks and suffering he endures is unknown.  Coomber leads us to believe that it is Mona’s contemplation of the beauty of Shakespeare’s words – whether in Portia’s speech about mercy in The Merchant of Venice or in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXIX that gives the play its title – that allows his mind to stay pure even if his body is defiled.  Though outwardly the weakest of the four, Coomber allows an inner strength to shine through Mona that Smitty only begins to appreciate towards the end.  The final scene between Mona and Smitty is the most powerful and moving in the play, where the chemistry between Coomber and De Zotti takes their acting to a higher level.                 

So many students of Canadian drama read Herbert’s play that it really should be performed more often that it is.  Many will want to see the BirdLand production just finally to see it on stage.  What would be so much better, however, would be a production intent on exploring Herbert’s play rather than one loading it with such a grab-bag of concepts that nearly smothers its impact.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Julian De Zotti, David Coomber, Alex Fiddes and Cyrus Faird; (middle) David Coomber, Alex Fiddes, Cyrus Faird and Julian De Zotti.  ©2013 Guntar Kravis.

For tickets, visit www.birdlandtheatre.com.