✭✭✭✩✩

by Sarah Berthiaume, translated by Nadine Desrochers, directed by Michel Lefebvre

Youtheatre (Montreal), Young People’s Theatre, Toronto

December 1-11, 2015

“Hope Remains”

In her 2012 play P@ndora Quebecois playwright Sarah Berthiaume takes on the subject of the influence of pornography on teens.  She deserves credit for trying to tackle such a fraught topic, but like her plays Yukonstyle (2013) and  The Flood Thereafter (2008) seen here in 2013, tends to allegorize her subject to such an extent that it becomes less rather than more clear. 

The action focusses on a sixteen-year-old girl named Pandora (Bria McLaughlin), who is best friends with Amber, the prettiest, most desirable girl in school.  This takes a toll on Pandora’s self-esteem as does the whole system in high school of instantly pigeonholing people that she says puts the Indian caste system to shame.  She likes a guy Alex (Sean Colby), considered by others as a geek, who writes stories he posts on his blog.  Pandora would like to get to know Alex but she assumes that he, like everyone else, is not interested in her. 

One day she seeks solitude in the girls’ washroom where she encounters a mysterious figure named Firefox (also Colby), who, one hopes, is intentionally named after the well-known and trademarked web browser.  He, a boy with the head of a red fox, passes her a cigarette lighter with a web address on it.  Despite vowing to ignore it, she gives in and finds that it is a porn site.  She enters it clicking on the button affirming she is 18 and sees a porn video with a boy wearing a fox head and a girl wearing a chicken head mask.  A boy she finds handsome enters and has sex with the girl.  When the girl removes her mask, Pandora is disturbed that she has Pandora’s face. 

Pandora becomes obsessed with the video and trying to find out how her face could appear in it.  At a party she and Alex manage to escape the others and he gives Pandora her first kiss.  Rather than being delighted, she becomes worried that he will expect her to be like the girl in the video.  When her iPhone starts leaking black all over her pants, she suddenly flees Alex and finds she is pursued by Firefox.  Will she escape him or not?  And, what does it all mean?

The first confusion comes from Berthiaume’s use of the Pandora myth, first related in Works and Days by Hesiod (fl. 750-650 bc), and iterated at the start of the show.  Pandora, the Eve of Greek mythology, was given a box and told by her husband Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, never to open it.  Of course, Pandora gave in to her curiosity and opened the box only to find it contained death and all the evils that would forever plague mankind.  She closed the box just in time so that Hope remained in the bottom. 

In P@ndora, Pandora is not forbidden to do something but told to do it.  Disdain of Firefox, fear or prudence keeps her from following his suggestion, but she gives in to curiosity.  What she unleashes, however, is an evil only into her world.  It affects Alex only when she allows it to. 

In fact, the myth of Pandora is not really an apt correlative for what Berthiaume is trying to express.  As the Q&A with teens following the opening of the show revealed, the problem is that the internet has made pornography more available than ever before and the media in general abounds in sexualized images of women and how they should act.  The problem thus is that all the evils in the world have already been released and are well nigh inescapable.  The Pandora of Berthiaume’s play already exists in that world. 

The question of whether Berthiaume’s Pandora does or does not see herself in pornographic images is more to the point.  The fact that she does see herself in them and that that interferes with her relationship with Alex is also important.  Being stained, metaphorically by her iPhone, is clearly a sign of shame. 

The production from Youtheatre of Montreal is simple but effective.  A large box outlined in steel with a plexiglass top dominates the stage and serves as a desk and a bed.  It is filled with randomly piled fluorescent tubes which also line the perimeter of the acting space.  Lighting designer Martin Sirois creates many exciting effects by selectively lighting the tubes along with a harsh strobe-like storm alternating blackouts with bright lights that strain the eyes.  The lighting is coupled with Guillaume Lévesque’s doom-laden sound design that cuts out unexpectedly for the party scene and does not give us the muffled sounds outside the room that Pandora and Alex mention. 

Michel Lefebvre’s direction is crisp and both actors give fine performances.  Berthiaume has made Pandora so articulate and intelligent that it is hard to believe that such a character would have such a struggle.  Nevertheless, Bria McLaughlin wins our support right from the start with her sympathetic portrayal.  Sean Colby ably distinguishes between the meek Alex and the malevolent Firefox with both voice and gesture.  Colby reads Alex’s stories, which reflect the struggles that Pandora experiences, with great clarity and feeling.  The prime confusion with Colby’s performance comes from Berthiaume, namely is his doubling of good and bad characters meant to be significant or just convenient? 

While the play closes with one of Alex’s stories, one feels that Pandora should really have the last word on what were, after all, her own struggles.  In the Q&A after the show, the assembled teens, the vast majority being femalr, seemed already to be quite aware of the negative effects of pornography and of the mass media in general on the image young women have of themselves.  Berthiaume’s play did not therefore appear to enlighten them as much as present an allegorical puzzle to work out (e.g., “Who or what is Firefox?) – thus rather the opposite of what a play on this subject sets out to achieve.  The most valuable aspect of Berthiaume’s play is as a starting point for group discussions not only on pornography but on the role of the internet in our daily lives.

For ages 15+.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: Bria McLaughlin as Pandora and Sean Colby as Alex. ©2015 Youtheatre, Montreal.

For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.