Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Guillermo Verdecchia
Factory Theatre and QuipTake, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
October 16-November 2, 2014
Cam: “Find out the meaning of this hectic life we call life”
The Art of Building a Bunker may have been a hit when it premiered at SummerWorks in 2013, but it’s an uncomfortable piece of work. The play is billed as “a viciously funny and tragic story”. If so, it’s a comedy that punishes you for laughing and a tragedy where you care nothing for the central figure. As a solo show it highlights writer/performer Adam Lazarus’s quirky talent, but it feels like an hour-long sketch that has been padded out to 90 minutes.
The premise is that Elvis Goldstein has been required to pass a course in “sensitivity training” or lose his job. What he did to merit this training is never stated. Neither do we know what the other members of the course may have done. The five others are the ever-questioning Peter and a sex-obsessed subcontinental male plus three stereotypes – a sexy Spanish woman, a racist South African man and a quiet Chinese woman. The name of this last is “Laura”, although Lazarus confuses Japanese with Chinese and has her call herself “Raura”. If you think this is funny, it is only the tip of the bad taste iceberg Lazarus and co-author Guillermo Verdecchia have set afloat.
The only genuinely comic character Lazarus plays is the sensitivity trainer, Cam, whose language is a mixture of New Age speak, political correctness, made-up words like “understandingness” and an overarching set of metaphors about the journey of the spirit that amount to a grandiose way of saying “paddle your own canoe”. He speaks down to his class as if they were kindergarten students and is insensitive enough to think he can appropriate First Nations imagery simply because he took a course in North American shamanism.
A key point that writer Lazarus and Verdecchia need to make clear right from the outset is that Elvis approaches the course with no intention of learning anything. As he sees it, his goal is to figure out how to outwit Cam into believing he is trying to change. Lazarus and Verdecchia, however, show Elvis complaining, floundering and failing in class and worrying about it so much that it rather obscures the point that he is determined that the course will have no influence on him.
Finally, the big day arrives and Elvis delivers his speech. At first it seems that he has actually intended to comply with the course guidelines. But after he finishes his assigned speech, Elvis cannot prevent himself from taking it all back and revealing his true colours as a racist, bigot and sexist driven by an overwhelming paranoia that he has to save himself and his wife and child from the evil that pervades the world. Lazarus and Verdecchia have updated Elvis’s speech so that he now buys into the media-spread hysteria about Ebola and fears ISIS will take over the globe. But the speech so carelessly mingles world events with minor incidents on the TTC that it’s clear that Elvis needs professional psychiatric help much more than simple sensitivity training.
With this final speech, the strategy of Lazarus and Verdecchia is evident. They have had us side naturally with Elvis in his opposition to his patronizing, hyper-politically correct sensitivity trainer. This has helped us ignore the casual bigotry of Elvis’s everyday remarks. Compared to the subcontinental male, Elvis seems moderate since he is offended by the fellow’s gross sense of humour. Compared to the South African male, Elvis seems moderate since he is offended by the fellow’s overt racism.
Yet, until his final speech, Lazarus and Verdecchia give us no clear idea what Elvis really thinks or why he is building a bunker beneath his house. We learn that Elvis is Jewish and has married out of the faith causing some of his friends to accuse him of contributing to a second Holocaust. But is that the primary reason for his paranoia, one of many contributing factors or not relevant? We never find out.
The speech comes as a shock because in it extremism and looniness it isn’t remotely funny. If we had had any sympathy with Elvis, we lose it at the end. Dramatically, the speech is also a shock because we realize how the writers have manipulated us. To achieve this revelation of Elvis’s true nature they have had to deliberately hold back information about him for 85 minutes of the 90-minute show even though Elvis is the narrator of the action. This helps explain why there are so many time-wasting scenes in the centre of the play that lead nowhere. Even with this revelation, the writers give us no explanation why Elvis should react with extreme paranoia to the same news that everyone else is exposed to.
It’s frustrating to have followed a character for an entire show only to find we still don’t know him or why he has become the way he is. The result of the writers’ manipulation may leave us feeling surprised but also leaves us deceived and unsatisfied. You don’t need sensitivity training to know that’s not good.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Adam Lazarus, ©2014 Dahlia Katz; Adam Lazarus, ©2013 Hugh Probyn.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2014-10-23
The Art of Building a Bunker