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by Jeremy Taylor, directed by Kat Sandler

Scapegoat Collective, Storefront Theatre, Toronto

September 3-20, 2015

Gordon: “Hunger is the best sauce”

How do you write a comedy about a modern cannibal and his willing vicim?  To many the subject is either to repellant or too pathetic to be a subject for comedy.  Yet, Montrealer Jeremy Taylor has crafted an intelligent play from this gruesome subject matter.  In lesser hands, the topic could easily have become simply a gross-out comedy.  In Taylor’s it becomes a neo-absurdist comedy of manners.  Just as the the cannibal in Taylor’s play is keen to test the boundaries of what is moral, Taylor himself is keen to test the boundaries of what is comic. 

Big Plans, which had a workshop production in Montreal in 2011 before it premiered as SummerWorks in Toronto in 2012, is based on a real event that happened in 2001 in the case of the Rotenburg Cannibal, so named after the small town in Germany where he lived.  As in reality, Taylor’s cannibal Gordon (Andy Trithardt) has placed an advertisement on a cannibal fetish website that he  was “looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”.  As in reality, Gordon has received several replies but the victims have backed out before the deed could be done.  As in reality, Gordon accepts someone who does not fit his initial criteria.  In reality the victim was older than ideal.  Taylor even preserves the real victim’s age in the contract Gordon has drawn up.  In the play the victim Henry (Daniel Pagett) is the right age but not only is not “well-built” but has family connections.

The initial aspect of the comedy of the play derives from the characters’ personalities – the struggle within the perfectionist Gordon between his desires and the true nature of his victim and the downhearted Henry who apologizes for not meeting Gordon’s requirements.  The second aspect of the comedy, not based on the real case, is that Gordon denies there is any sexual component to his plans, whereas Henry has assumed that there must be.  After all, as in reality, Gordon’s plan is sever his victim’s penis which he will cook and they will both consume.  Taylor has Gordon try to relate his desire to eat another human being to the idea behind cannibalism in world history that the cannibal through consumption acquires the power os the person consumed.  Henry, on the other hand, a hopeless romantic in more ways than one, keeps assuming that Gordon will eventually admit that such intimate contact with another man has to be sexual.

The proof that Taylor is not interested in the grotesque details of the incident is the array of non-naturalistic theatrical devices he uses to present the story.  Gordon begins the play as a narrator speaking directly to the audience, a role he takes up periodically throughout the action.  The odd thing is that he begins his narration as if the events have already occurred which leads us to think that we will be seeing a recreation of what happened.  After Henry arrives, however, the pretence shifts to suggest that the events we are seeing are happening now before us.  Further developments in the action and the conclusion in particular call into question when and where the events actually are supposed to be happening. 

Both Gordon and Henry acknowledge that there is an audience present, rather upsetting for Henry, who was expecting this event to be private.  But Gordon assures him that our role is as “witnesses” that everything that they do is consensual.  Indeed, the fact that what the two men did was consensual and agreed by contract is what made the legal proceedings against the real cannibal so difficult.  The real cannibal videotaped his actions so in some sense we as “witnesses” replace the function of the videotape. 

Taylor uses two other effects to call into question the reality of what we see.  One is the magic refrigerator cleverly designed by Jenna McCutchen which, though shown to be empty, keeps repeatedly producing items that Gordon requires during the action.  The second – quite a surprise if you haven’t seen the poster for the show – is the arrival of Gordon’s mother (Maria Ricossa) at the most inopportune moment possible.  This is obviously Taylor’s own addition to the real events, a point highlighted by Gordon’s questioning whether she is really there or not.  Her presence, besides filling us in, much to Gordon’s embarrassment, about Gordon’s past and his proclivities, is clearly meant as a representation of Gordon’s momentary qualms of conscience before he commits the deed.

As when she directs her own comedies, Kat Sandler directs Big Plans with energy and sharpness.  Her pacing is impeccable and gives due weight to the reflective sections of the show.  This is the third time that Andy Trithardt has played Gordon and there is no doubt that he is ideal for the role.  His Gordon is obsessive-compulsive but comically unaware of of how it inhibits him.  Gordon is also completely egocentric, given to wild flights of fancy about his daring, which is why the appearance of his mother so angers and deflates him.  His denial of his true sexual orientation is so violent it only confirms what it denies.  Yet, Trithardt is able to give Gordon a kind of charming ineptitude that makes us regard him less as a monster more as a severely flawed human being.

Daniel Pagett has a fine comic turn as Henry.  Pagett makes Henry such a pathetic individual that the worse side of ourselves may think he might as well be put out of his misery.  The better side of ourselves will think that if Henry would allow himself enough time to get over the “shame” of being gay, he would never seek such an extreme form of obliteration.

Maria Ricossa issues such cold-hearted satire of her son that we hardly wonder why he should have turned out so unusual even as she wonders briefly what she did wrong.  Her character may literally come out of nowhere but Ricossa dominates the stage as soon as she appears.

On opening night the audience was divided between those who gave themselves to full-throated laughter and those who laughed little or not at all.  Both responses are valid, but anyone attending should know that Taylor is not writing in the mode of a juvenile gross-out comedy like Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical (1993) seen here earlier this year.  We may laugh but Taylor also wants us to ask ourselves why we are laughing.

Taylor is not the first to write a thoughtful comedy about cannibalism.  That honour may go to the absurdist Fernando Arrabal’s 1967 play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, which was even performed at Stratford back in 1970.  At the conclusion of that play the Emperor, representing the intellect and civilization, asks the Architect, representing savagery and emotion, to devour him, which the Architect performs.  In Taylor’s play just the reverse occurs.  The intellectual Gordon consumes the emotional Henry.  While the play does ask as in the original case if there are any limits to consensuality between adults, we have to wonder in light of Arrabal’s play what Taylor’s play says about the present where intellect now obliterates emotion.  Big Plans the play cleverly realizes big plans of its own in making its audience laugh as well as think.  It’s a great start to the Storefront Arts Initiative’s first season.  

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Daniel Pagett as Henry and Andy Trithardt as Gordon; Andy Trithardt as Gordon and Daniel Pagett as Henry. ©2015 John Gundy.