Review - Wormwood - Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

✭✭✩✩✩

by Andrew Kushnir, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 18-December 20, 2015

“The glory and the freedom of Ukraine is not dead yet”

Andrew Kushnir’s latest play Wormwood, now receiving its world premiere at the Tarragon Theatre, is set in 2004 during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. If you think you will learn more about the revolution or about Ukraine by attending the play, you are sadly mistaken. Kushnir’s play is, in fact, a semi-allegorical anti-fairy tale that could be set in any country undergoing political upheaval. His characters are stereotypes and his story is less than compelling.

The play is an innocents abroad story with two Canadians, as usual, being the innocents. The two innocents are Ivan (Luke Humphrey) and Markiyan (Ken James Stewart) who are sent to observe the contentious election between the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-European Viktor Yushchenko. They are sent to the town of Zaporizhia in eastern Ukraine, where they are supposed to be billeted together in a hotel. However, The Professor (Ben Campbell), who picks them up at the train station, tells them that Markiyan is to be sent to stay in a hotel in another city and that Ivan will stay with him. They two object since what The Professor says is directly contrary to their briefing, especially since they are to have no contact with the locals. But, seeing no way out, they accede and Markiyan is sent away.

This is the first improbability in the play. Kushnir needs Ivan to be alone and held captive by The Professor and his “housekeeper” (Nancy Palk) and her daughter (Amy Keating) for the sake of his plot. But Ivan and Markiyan are not just student backpackers. They supposedly have been briefed about their situation by an international organization (they have official badges), so why don’t they object and contact their organization? Second, even if Markiyan is sent away, why doesn’t he contact their supervisor or the organization and try to rescue Ivan from his situation?

Next Ivan is beaten and his passport stolen. For unknown reasons he believes The Professor that if he waits long enough the passport will turn up. Sorry, Ivan the innocent abroad has just turned into an idiot abroad. Anyone who has been through this experience will tell you that the first thing you do when your passport is stolen is to report the theft to the local police. You must do this because the copy of the police report is necessary in obtaining a new passport. At this point any shred of a notion that Kushnir’s play has to do with reality vanishes.

Recuperating in the house of The Professor gives Ivan time to find a key to open the shutters on the strangely locked window overlooking a garden between The Professor’s house and that of his neighbour The Doctor (Scott Wentworth). There Ivan sees and falls in love with the apparently mute Artemisia (Chala Hunter), daughter of the Doctor.

Finally, the day of the election arrives. Ivan, who has recovered from the beating though he is still influenced by the drug the Professor gives him, decides not to monitor the election. Since Kushnir has already thrown realism out the window, it should be no surprise that Ivan suffers no consequences for not turning up to do the job he was sent to Ukraine to do. No one, like Markiyan, who has disappeared from the story, or a supervisor comes to find him and no one tells him him when he is to return home with the other observers.

Because of this we see that the whole notion of Ivan as an observer of the 2014 election was just a ploy, poorly executed, to get a Canadian man of Ukrainian heritage into Ukraine and to give the play a false aura of relevance. The aspect of Ukraine that Kushnir is most interested in is the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986

. We learn that the Doctor’s wife died of radiation poisoning because of working as a”liquidator” at Chernobyl and that Artemisia also has radiation poisoning but is still alive, or to put it more correctly, is “not dead yet”. The phrasing is important because as we learn, the Ukrainian national anthem begins with the words, “The glory and the freedom of Ukraine is not dead yet” (“Ще не вмерла України, і слава, і воля!”). Thus Artemisia is not so much a real person as a symbol of Ukraine, which is why she must remain in the poisoned garden between the houses.

The name Artemisia happens to be the name of the genus to which wormwood belongs, hence the title, and thus the girl embodies the bitterness that is the heritage of being Ukrainian. Kushnir has the Doctor go too far, however, in saying that Chernobyl means “wormwood” in Ukrainian. It literally means “black grass” and thus should refer to “mugwort” (“Полин звичайний”), part of the same genus as “wormwood” (“Полин гіркий”), but a different species. Kushnir obviously prefers the notion that Chernobyl means “wormwood” because wormwood has literary significance in English from Shakespeare and The King James Bible on, whereas “mugwort” does not.

Kushnir presents the play as if it were being told by a Kobzar (Scott Wentworth), meaning an itinerant storyteller, who typically accompanied himself on the bandura (also known as a kobza). Here Wentworth speaks and Victor Mishalow plays the bandura.

Obviously, the tale the Kobzar tells is not about the Orange Revolution or about Chernobyl, but about a Ukrainian-Canadian attempting to come to terms with his poisonous heritage, or as Kushnir puts it in his Playwrights Notes, “How do I reconcile an inherited mythology and modern-day Ukraine?” The answer the play seems to show is that he can’t and two and a half hours seems a rather long time to depict a character’s failure without enlightening us as to the reasons for that failure.

To add further difficulties to our enjoyment, Kushnir has decided that except for Ivan and Markiyan, all the characters will speak in Ukrainian or with Slavic accents. The point must be to show how alienated Ivan feels from his surroundings, although he does speak some Ukrainian. This might make sense if the story had a documentary quality or at least was realistic, but since it is not, the realism of people speaking in Ukrainian is not necessary.

Is it going to be a pleasure to the many Ukrainian speakers of Toronto to hear non-Ukrainian-speaking actors speak their language phonetically? Does hearing non-Slavic actors put on pan-Slavic accents that are supposed to be Ukrainian serve any purpose? Just think how tedious it would be to see a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters if everyone put on fake Russian accents. This is rather the effect Wormwood gives.

It’s not surprising that the most effective section of the play is a dream sequence in Act 2, where all the characters speak English without accents. The Housekeeper tells the gruesome but hilarious story of how she came to lose one eye and Ken James Stewart appears as a fearsome Cossack ready to discuss hairstyles.

Given the problems with the story and its presentation, the quality of acting could retain our interest, but that is not often the case. As The Professor, Ben Campbell does his one-size-fits-all wily peasant act that we have seen many times before, only here with a pa

n-Slavic accent. As The Kobzar, Scott Wentworth seems to be channeling his Tevye from The Fiddler on the Roof at Stratford from 2013. Fortunately, Wentworth tones down the folksiness when he plays The Doctor and delivers an authentically moving account of his wife’s death.

Luke Humphrey is very effective at playing Ivan as a naive, verging on incredibly foolish foreigner. We would like to like him or at least emphasize with him, but Kushnir has made him so reckless and trusting that we don’t invest any emotion into what happens to him. Chala Hunter gives perhaps the most grounded performance and, despite being mute, she makes us feel the conflict that love for Ivan stirs up in her.

Nancy Palk's Housekeeper is not far off from being a domestic wicked witch whereas Amy Keating’s Daughter does to make her doll-like character more human in her surreptitious pity for Ivan.

It’s a pity Kushnir gets rid of Ken James Stewart’s Markiyan so soon since he would have been a good foil for Ivan. Stewart is a fine singer and at least he gets to join in songs with Wentworth’s Kobzar, but you can’t help feeling he is underused. The same is true of the bandurist Victor Mishalow, whose lovely playing could accompany more of the action.

The main virtues of the production are the beautiful set of Camellia Koo and the moody lighting of Graeme D. Thomson that project the fairy-tale atmosphere of the play better than the script itself.

This year saw the production and later a remounting of an immersive show by Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva called Counting Sheep that captured to an infinitely greater degree than Wormwood the feelings of chaos and fear that surrounded the Orange Revolution and the dismay at how that event was portrayed to the rest of the world. Kushnir’s Wormwood seems to be all about its author’s alter ego, Ivan. Counting Sheep was actually about Ukraine and about what it felt like to be in the midst of a revolution and to see ordinary people become heroes by dying to support a nation’s independence. It’s no surprise that Counting Sheep based on facts and first-hand experience was more effective.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.

2015-11-22

Wormwood