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by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman & Joseph Jomo Pierre, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams

Factory Theatre with b current, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

February 5-22, 2015

Nancy: “I get a text, I feel close inside”

Twisted by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and Joseph Jomo Pierre, now receiving its world premiere at Factory Theatre, is one of those plays that should never have left the page for the stage.  Theoretically an updating of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (1837) to present day Toronto might seem like an interesting idea.  Unfortunately, the two-person version that Corbeil-Coleman and Pierre have devised is both undramatic and has little to do with the novel.  The play is essentially two intercut monologues with the characters interacting primarily by text messaging.  Michel Tremblay has created successful plays built of parallel monologues as in his Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra (1977).  But in Tremblay we are meant to compare and contrast the lives of the two speakers.  Nothing like that even occurs to the authors of Twisted.   

The only two characters from Dickens to be found on stage in Twisted are the prostitute Nancy (Susanna Fournier) and the orphan Ollie (Ngabo Nabea).  As we learn from their monologues, Nancy was raised in a small town outside Toronto by a crazed mother and abusive father.  She was ready to do anything to get out, including working as a prostitute for the pimp Sikes.  Ollie, meanwhile, is an orphan, bumped from one foster home to another, until he lands with a foster parent who actually cares for him.  He calls this woman “Big Bird” and she represents a blending of Miss Rose in the novel and her guardian Mrs. Maylie. Ollie is part of a criminal gang run by Dodger, clearly a reference to the Artful Dodger in Dickens. 

Nearly half of the plays 80 minutes is taken up with this exposition.  After that only two things happen.  The first is the first and only face-to-face meeting between Ollie and Nancy.  The second is the attempt by Nancy to save an underaged girl named Rose whom she is supposed to deliver to Sikes.  Nancy enlists Ollie’s help and he picks up Rose and takes her to safety with Big Bird.  In Dickens, Oliver and Nancy meet several times, most notably when Nancy saves Oliver from a beating by Fagin and Sikes.  There is no equivalent to the underaged Rose in Dickens.  The play’s second plot seems to reflect Nancy’s own attempts to warn Rose Maylie of Fagin’s plan to kidnap Oliver and take him back to a life of crime.

As the notion of a first and only face-to-face meeting suggests, Nancy and Ollie do not normally interact that way.  Usually they text each other or in rare instances speak over the phone.  When they text Simeon Taole’s projections onto the back wall of the set show us what they are texting.  If this is an effort to show how youth today communicate, we have wonder why the spelling, grammar and punctuation of these texts are so perfect and so lacking in common texting abbreviations. 

The authors have Nancy say that she prefers texting to speaking to a person since it is more real.  She says, “People think true intimacy is touching someone. Well let me tell you… I get a text, I feel close inside”.  The authors present this idea uncritically and without any suggestion that texting actually shows how isolated the two people are from each other.

What neither the authors nor dramaturge Iris Turcott nor any of the artistic directors who greenlighted the project seem to realize is that watching people texting on stage is extremely boring.  Actors Fournier and Nabea can furiously thumb away at their smartphones all they want, but what we see on stage is a static picture and reading a series of text projections in not interesting.  In fact, the play involves so much reading and so little drama, one wonders whether the play should instead have been conceived as a short story.

Perhaps because he realizes that reading texts is not exciting, director Nigel Shawn Williams overdoes it when the two characters finally meet.  All that happens is that Ollie has to deliver drugs to Nancy because Dodger is too busy.  The two see each other for the first time and all they can say to each other is “Hey”.  At this moment Williams has Taole change the projection behind the two to represent a starry sky, the kind one only sees in the midst of a farmer’s field.  Instead of awe, this only provokes laughter because the melodramatic grandeur of what we see is so out of proportion with the banality of what the characters say. 

Only about halfway through the play do the authors decide to mention that Nancy is not working on her own but is the “bottom girl” for Sikes.  Only now do we learn that girls contact Sikes through an website promising them wealth and success and that Nancy’s job is to arrange their delivery to Sikes.  What it is about Rose, unlike all the previous girls, that suddenly causes Nancy pangs of conscience is a mystery.  The authors grant the characters so little self-knowledge that Nancy doesn’t realize that in escaping from the country to the city she has exchanged one abusive situation for another.  All the tough talk they give her about what life really is like is severely undermined by this profound lack of insight into her own situation.     

The entire second half of the play is occupied by the mechanics of the plot – who is going to meet whom where and when.  Communicated by text, what is supposed to be gripping, at least in the minds of the characters, comes off as extraordinarily dull.  To top off this ineptitude, the play ends in such a way that only people who have read the novel will understand what happens.  The audience I was in, who was very enthusiastic at the start, was clearly puzzled by the end. 

The authors include all sorts of Toronto references – Tim Hortons, the Eaton Centre, Joe Fresh, Dundas Square – but rather than making the action of Dickens’ novel more immediate the references provoke laughter given the contrast between the play’s melodramatic content and the pretensions to coolness of the characters and the utter mundanity of the setting.  Writers in Toronto always try to portray the city as dangerous and gritty, but that is very hard to do in light of recent reports like that of the Economist’s Intelligence Unit that this year that named Toronto the world’s best city to live in*.  Sorry, but statistics show that compared to the rest of the world, Toronto is safe and clean and definitely not Dickens’ London.    

The production uses one of the least attractive sets I’ve seen for a long time.  Denise Karn represents Toronto with a scale model of 26 downtown buildings and the CN

Tower tilted ninety degrees towards the audience and fixed to the back wall of the set.  To leave space above for all the projections of texts, these buildings are crowded along the bottom half of the set’s back wall.  Since the buildings protrude horizontally from the wall, the actors use them like steps to climb from place to place, though in terms of blocking, Williams keeps Nancy primarily up among the buildings while Ollie walks on the space in front of the buildings.  To give Ollie a place to stand to emphasize points in his speech, Karn has added a mysterious building based on the floor of the set downstage left which looks as if it is floating at an angle high above the Toronto skyline.  The whole set is spatter painted in such a way that it looks as if it has been splashed with slush from the gutters outside.

Susanna Fournier delivers a one-note performance as Nancy and that one note becomes annoying very quickly.  Her voice takes on the same forced tone of cheekiness, whether expressing anger, fear or irony.  Fournier clearly is trying hard to make Nancy tough, but when the character displays so little self-knowledge and expresses herself in clichés, the task is impossible.  Fournier’s Nancy says in her typically puffed up fashion, “I know roses have thorns”.  Wow, are we supposed to think this is deep?

The one bright light in the production is Ngabo Nabea as Ollie.  He needs a bit more confidence on stage but his rap narration is a pleasure to listen to even if the authors come up with far too many lame rhymes.  Unlike Fournier’s affected ‘tude, Nabea exudes a natural innocence that is just about the only quality that connects his character to that in Dickens.  I frequently thought that I would rather hear Nabea perform a rapped summary of the entire novel than see such an undramatic play.  The authors fill his language too with clichés.  Over and over when describing Nancy, he comes so close to saying, “I know why the caged bird sings”. I thought why not just quote Maya Angelou and get it over with. 

One might have thought that two up-and-coming playwrights like Corbeil-Coleman and Pierre might strike sparks off each other, but this doesn’t happen.  They two found no way to translate Dickens’ gift of mixing social criticism with narrative drive and deft characterization to the stage.  Its too bad this wasn’t obvious to Factory Theatre and b current before they gave the play the go-ahead and wasted the time and effort of so many talented people.

©Christopher Hoile

*http://safecities.economist.com

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Nabea as Ollie; Susanna Fournier as Nancy. ©2015 Racheal McCaig.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.