Review - tagged - Green Thumb Theatre, Toronto

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by Dave Deveau, directed by Leslie Jones

Green Thumb Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto

April 23-May 8, 2015

Constable: “If these things were said to her face or written down

on paper we could arrest all of you”

Green Thumb Theatre deserve a lot of credit for commissioning the play tagged about cyberbullying. Dave Deveau’s play premiered in Vancouver in 2013 after several reported cases of teens who had committed suicide after such bullying. A play that criticizes teens’ use and abuse of social media could easily go wrong. Any suggestion that we should go back to the way things were before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram would be useless. Any preaching would turn off teens’ attention. Deveau’s clever solution is to write the play in the form of a mystery, where an investigating officer tries to get to the truth of an incident that happened at a party. By pulling us into the story of who did what, Deveau also pulls us into evaluating the behaviour of the two teens under suspicion.

Craig Alfredson’s symmetrical, antiseptic set shows two tables, each with two chairs in front of a wall with a television-sized screen above each table. These are two adjacent interview rooms in a police station. Jerri (Agnes Tong) sits at the table stage right. Webber (Scott Button) sits at the table stage left. A Constable (Gili Roskies) moves smoothly back and forth between the wall-less rooms without the tedious miming of opening and closing doors. Leslie Jones’s direction, recreating the original direction of Patrick McDonald, thus places the focus heavily on what the two teens say and what similarities or differences arise.

The Constable begins with Jerri, a spoiled 17-year-old girl with attitude up to her eyeballs. Since her father is a policeman she is certain that whatever happens, he will be able to get her out of trouble and cause trouble for the Constable. She is initially so uncooperative, that the Constable allows her to stew and turns her attention to Webber.

Webber, also 17, is the class nerd and is always using his cellphone around school to film the live webcasts he hosts that almost no one watches. His sign-off line is “Be good to each other”, which in the course of the action becomes so ironic he can barely use it. We learn that he was enamoured of Sam, a popular girl at school, and though a wimp, took a shirtless selfie of himself with “SAM” printed across his stomach. He sent this just to Sam, only to find that she thought it so hilarious that she forwarded it to everyone on her Listserv. The result was that Webber become the butt of jokes at school from then on.

When the Constable finally breaks Jerri’s façade of cool, we find that she decided to hold a party and invited everyone from school. Webber was there and Sam came. What the Constable tries to pry out of Jerri and Webber is how Sam came to pass out at the party when no one else drinking (illegally) did. More to the point, the Constable wants to know why everyone at the party just stood around the unconscious Sam taking photos instead of trying to help her, take her home or at least take her to another room. Even worse, who wrote the word “SLUT” on Sam’s forehead, photographed her and sent it to a Facebook page were it was shared by everyone. The teens may have thought it was just a joke, but they didn’t realize that in the eyes of the law touching a person without their consent constitutes assault and disseminating the photo is bullying.

Deveau intersperses the scenes of interrogation with Jerri and Webber’s flashbacks to the day at school before the party and to the party itself. These scenes do not provide further clues to who is guilty of assault, but they are the only scenes that show how Jerri and Webber interact – Webber always seeking attention, Jerri always disdainful except if Webber can be useful to her.

One statement of the Constable echoes throughout the play. She wonders aloud what makes these teens so brave online but so cowardly in person. While pursuing the question of who specifically is guilty of assault, the Constable’s inquiry demonstrates that everyone at the party was guilty of a lack of responsibility

toward someone who they claimed was a friend. Everyone who forewarded the photo of the unconscious Sam was guilty of lack of respect for another person.

Implicit in all this, whether in Webber’s goofy webcasts or in the cyberbullying of Sam, is the essential question of where people can draw the line anymore between what is private and what is public. Are people fully aware of the implications when they forward a private photo like Webber’s shirtless selfie or the photo of an assault like that on Sam? Deveau leaves us with these questions and thus with much for us to discuss.

The actors in tagged, all in their twenties, are expert at playing their roles. As the Constable, Gili Roskies never falters in presenting a professional manner of behaviour in dealing with the teens even when they are unforthcoming or downright rude. Yet, she shows quite subtly that the Constable constantly has to prevent herself from reacting as she would like to. How Roskies pauses, takes a breath, contracts her lips all convey the struggle that the interviews provoke in her to react emotionally rather than logically. As a result, Roskies’ performance is the most intense of the three.

Agnes Tong succeeds in embodying that girl present in every high school whose egocentricity and sense of entitlement make her completely oblivious to her utter lack of respect for other people. Yet, Tong does not play Jerri as a simple villain. Rather, as the action progresses she shows us that her all-pervading air of disdain is really just a façade to hide her fundamental insecurity.

As Webber, Scott Button supplies some comic relief in the mix. Button makes it most obvious with his character that his ebullient online persona barely disguises the loneliness underneath.

From the Q&A session after the show of the opening matinee performance, it seemed that the audience had a desire to know more about the background of the characters than Deveau provides, with Jerri the one people wanted to know most about. The audience also seemed to wish the play had revealed how the guilty party was punished. Here Deveau is right withholding that information because by doing so he places the emphasis on nature of cyberbullying itself and on the complicity of all those who did nothing to stop it.

Whether we like it or not, electronic devices are an integral part of the lives of people now, especially of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of time using them. Drama has to address this reality and tagged is one of the best plays do so in a way that still emphasizes values of theatre over technical wizardry.

tagged is intended for audiences aged 13 and up.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.

2015-04-23

tagged