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written and directed by Alexander Offord

good old neon, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto

November 4-21, 2015

“To the complete perdition of this land, there was discovered a mouth of Hell” (Domingo de Santo Tomás, 1550)

After a sold-out run Potosí by Alexander Offord won the Toronto Fringe Festival’s New Play Award in 2014.  Now good old neon, a new theatre company run by Offord and Nicole Wilson, has remounted Potosí with the original cast as the first in its first season of plays.  Potosí features fine acting and addresses a wide range of social and political topics and for those reasons would have stood out from the majority of comedies and one-person life-stories that occupy so many Fringe slots.  Yet, set outside of the Fringe, especially in comparison with the large number of other 80-minute-long plays that have opened recently, Potosí does not hold up very well.  The play may be about confusion, but it is also confusing and inconsistent in itself.  Offord’s desire to attack as many aspects of the modern world as possible leads him to create a number of improbable situations which no amount of fine acting can rectify.

The title comes from the city of Potosí, now in Bolivia, which the Spanish wrested from the Incas in 1545.  The Cerro Rico mountain overlooking Potosí contains the world’s largest silver deposit and was the the major source of silver in the Spanish Empire in the New World.  Yet even in the 16th century people recognized the evils of exploitation.  One Dominican missionary, Domingo de Santo Tomás, wrote in a letter in 1550 to the Council of the Indes, “Some four years ago, to the complete perdition of this land, there was discovered a mouth of Hell, into which a great mass of people enter every year and are sacrificed by the greed of the Spaniards to their ‘god’.  This is your silver mine called Potosí.”

This quotation is written on a blackboard on the back wall of Rachel Forbes’s set for Offord’s play, although the context is not made clear.  Offord’s play is set not in Bolivia but in some unnamed third-world country that has known more war in its existence than peace.  There have been reports of mass rape by the private security forces who guard the mine – the actual company Blackwater Security, infamous for their deployment in Iraq.   These reports have the potential to cause a scandal for the Canadian company that owns a silver mine.  Ms. LeBlanc, a young lawyer  has been dispatched to advise Arthur Beamish (Sean Sullivan), the firm’s resident PR manager on how best to minimize the damage. 

This situation in itself should have provided Offord with enough material to expose the cynical way in which companies from rich nations exploit poor nations and destroy their environment while claiming to benefit poor nations’ economies by providing jobs.  Implicit in the statement by Domingo de Santo Tomás on the blackboard and Offord’s plot is that modern corporations are no different or more humane that were the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors. 

The play gets off to a bad start with LeBlanc badgering Beamish over the number and severity of the rapes.  This leads us to assume that LeBlanc is pro-feminist and wants to make sure that Beamish’s company is punished for what happened.  When Beamish offers to resign, a reasonable move on his part, Offord then has LeBlanc make a 180º turn to defend everything he and the company have done from a hardcore Ayn Randian objectivist point of view.  The world is cruel and is ruled by the survival of the fittest.  Indigenous peoples who have gone extinct clearly deserved not to survive.  The Canadian company is strong.  The populace is weak but that should not prevent the company from exploiting the people.  The people’s weakness essentially asked to be exploited by a stronger power. 

In fact, LeBlanc’s remarks become so extreme that even Beamish starts to take offence.  In the end, LeBlanc decides that a simple payoff to the women harmed will be enough and work will return to normal.

After a blackout we find that work has not returned to normal because a civil war has flared up outside trapping LeBlanc and Beamish in the office for three days with the airport and hospitals closed.  In bursts a Soldier (Craig Thomas), who knocks Beamish unconscious and holds LeBlanc hostage. 

At this point, improbabilities increase.  The Soldier is on the point of raping LeBlanc, which would have made a suitably ironic conclusion given LeBlanc’s ultimate lack of concern for the women raped by Blackwater.  But no, the play continues for about 30 more minutes because LeBlanc persuades the Soldier not to rape her claiming she has access to an infinite amount of money due to her great connections back in Canada.  First, Offord wants us to believe that a man on the point of rape will suddenly be swayed by reason.  Second, the Soldier has absolutely no grounds for believing what LeBlanc says is true.  She says she knows the boss of the company.  So what?  What proof does she have?  And even then what would this matter to a desperate soldier? 

Incredibly, once she has saved herself from rape, Offord has LeBlanc return to her Ayn Rand lecturing mode with the soldier taunting him for the believing that he has any power.  Somehow, the figure of a philosophy-spouting female is enough to stop a man with little command of English from using his AK 47 on her.  When he does threaten her, she claims she is someone important and he will pay for his crime.  Again, Offord has the soldier relent without proof of what LeBlanc says, and as soon as he relents she begins lecturing again. 

Offord has his three characters constantly reacting to information that flows in from the outside world on the three phones on Beamish’s desk.  The drama is this not primarily active but reactive and since the three powers changing the fate of the three characters are not depicted clearly enough, it is quite easy not to know and, ultimately, not to care what is happening.  This, plus the fact that we don’t particularly care about any of the characters, leads to a noisy, confusing and unengaging spectacle.

Under the author’s efficient direction, all three actors do their best to make the play work.  Sullivan shows us a pitiable man whose short stay in this unnamed country has already undermined his fundamental beliefs and left him dazed and with nothing of substance to give his life meaning. 

Wilson can really do nothing make us understand LeBlanc’s philosophical inconsistencies.  Why Offord wants us to know that the aggressive LeBlanc got her job by sleeping with her boss, is one of the various reflections of his anger at the world that helps push the play off course.  Offord’s LeBlanc is thus both smart yet rigidly doctrinaire, caring about violence against women, but mostly if she is the one being attacked.      

Thomas is very forceful as the Soldier and has the more clear-cut role of the three.  He injects danger and menace into the play that Sullivan and Wilson cannot do one their own.  That’s why it’s so hard to believe his character can be talked into quietude by LeBlanc.  We also have to wonder why Offord has the Soldier unable to speak English with Beamish but perfectly able to do so with LeBlanc.

In his Director’s Notes, Offord says he play tries to answer the question, “What are the real-world implications of abstract philosophical propositions?”  This is a great question and it is brave to Offord to attempt an answer in a one-act play.  Ibsen, of course, already approached this question in his play The Wild Duck (1885), where a would-be do-gooder tries, with disastrous results, to better his friends lives by removing the “life-lie” that all people use to make reality palatable. Ibsen was able to find intimate, everyday analogues to universal questions and that kind of focus and concentration is exactly what would help Offord in making more concrete the important world problems that should concern us all.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: Nicole Wilson, Craig Thomas and Sean Sullivan. ©2014 Nicholas Porteous.