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by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Shelley Tepperman, directed by Ken Gass

Canadian Rep Theatre, The Citadel, 304 Parliament St., Toronto

January 21-February 2, 2014

“A place where everyone is everyone else”

Ken Gass, the ousted founder of Factory Theatre, has launched his new company Canadian Rep Theatre with the English-language premiere of Pacamambo.  The play by Wajdi Mouawad had its world premiere way back in 2000 and it’s incredible it should have taken so long for it to be staged in English.  Intended for children nine years and older, it’s a play about coming to terms with death.  The subject matter is mature enough, but so is the dramaturgy so that adults may appreciate the conundrum the play explores as much, even more than children.

The play begins in a the office of a child psychologist (Karen Robinson) who is trying to get the 11-year-old Julie (Amy Keating) to answer her questions.  Julie was officially missing for 23 days.  She was found in her grandmother’s apartment basement storage locker with her dog, Growl (Michelle Polak) and the decomposing body of her grandmother Marie Marie (Kyra Harper).  After much persuading, Julie finally tells her story which we see enacted in flashbacks. 

      

Julie was visiting her grandmother when she died.  Marie Marie has often talked about death and what happens afterwards.  She told Julie that people go to a place called Pacamambo, where “everyone is everyone else” and where “anyone can choose who they want to be”.  Marie Marie and Julie have both decided that, although they are white, in Pacamambo they would choose to be black because they identify more with jazz and blues than with white music. 

Julie stays with the corpse of Marie Marie for so long because she is waiting for Death (Karen Robinson) to return to answer her questions.  What makes Death think she can just barge into people’s lives and take away the person they most love?

Rather like Alan Strang in Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973), Mouawad’s Julie is a young person who is living according to a private mythology, though unlike Alan, it is not one she had invented herself but has taken over from another person.  Unlike Equus, Mouawad’s play is not about the psychiatrist but entirely about the young person.  One of the strengths of Mouawad’s play, unlike Shaffer’s, is that he leaves it up to the audience to decide whether Julie’s view of the afterlife is any more or less valid than any conventional religious view.  Mouawad places us in the position of the psychiatrist in deciding to understand rather simply judge Julie’s worldview. 

As the process of the action and the description of Pacamambo suggest, the play also has points to make about prejudice.  Julie says that Marie Marie told her that humans are the only species who doubt that others of their kind are human.  If humans judge others not to be human because of what they look like or what they believe, humans feels free to kill them.  

Set designer Marian Wihak has created an alley theatre in the upstairs space at The Citadel by dividing the 72 seats in two halves facing each other.  The white door and floor represent both the psychiatrist’s office and locations in Marie Marie’s apartment building.  Rebecca Picherack’s extremes of lighting and Wayne Kelso’s moody music are the chief means Ken Gass uses in locating us in the present or past. 

Amy Keating gives vehement performance as Julie, but is still able to modulate from the intense anger of the Julie of the present to the mixture of sadness and defiance of the Julie of the past.  Michelle Polak, without a dog costume or dog makeup, gives one of the best human imitations of canine behaviour I’ve ever seen.  Growl is the main source of humour in the piece and it is a treat to see how accurately Polak mimics canine expressions of excitement, boredom, unwillingness and confusion at the strange goings on about her.

Kyra Harper lends Marie Marie great warmth and calm.  One irony that we see but that Julie does not is that Marie Marie, who continues to speak to us after death, is fully content with what has happened to her.  Karen Robinson does what she can with the fairly generic psychiatrist role but blooms when she plays Death in a seductive way that neither we nor Julie expect. 

Pacamambo has already been produced in Spanish (2005), Catalan (2013) and Polish (2013) among other languages and has even been made into an opera ( by Zack Settel in 2002).  Ken Gass has done a great service by finally bringing this early poetic work by one of Canada’s most important recent playwrights to an English-speaking audience and doing so in such a sensitive, clear-sighted production.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Amy Keating, Michelle Polak and Kyra Harper. ©2014 Jeremy Mimnagh.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.