Review - Das Ding (The Thing) - Theatre Smash with Canadian Stage, Toronto

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by Philipp Löhle, translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte, directed by Ashlie Corcoran

Theatre Smash with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

April 14-May-1, 2016;

Theatre Smash with Thousand Islands Playhouse, Firehall Theatre, Gananoque

September 9-25, 2016

“Das Ding dingt” (“The Thing things”), Martin Heidegger, 1950

Toronto has seen quite a lot of recent German drama in the last few years and it is clear that exciting experiments in form and content are taking place there that are not yet taking place in North America. Think of Maria Milisavljevic’s Abyss seen here in 2015, Roland Schimmelpgfennig’s The Golden Dragon in 2012, Marius von Mayenburg’s The Ugly One in 2011 and Schimmelpfennig’s Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God in 2010. All four involve the simultaneous group narration and enacting of a story filled with coincidence and mystery that also functions as a satire on social issues.

The same is true of Philipp Löhle’s play Das Ding (The Thing) from 2011, now receiving its North American premiere from Theatre Smash and Canadian Stage. It’s point is to demonstrate the interrelatedness of things in the era of globalization. It follows the journey of “the Thing”, in this case a cotton boll, from its growing and harvesting through its processing, its weaving into a T-shirt, its being worn, torn and discarded until it is finally recycled. The personified cotton fibres that travel from Africa to China to Germany, whence half travel to Romania and half back to Africa, symbolizes people in any one place are connected via such objects to people everywhere else.

To reinforce this notion, Löhle invents a plot in which people who deal in each stage of the transformation of the cotton fibres turn out also to be connected in a personal way. Scenes involving different sets of people are intercut with scenes detailing the processing of cotton.

The main focus is on the newlyweds Thomas and Katherine (Kristopher Bowman and Lisa Karen Cox). They are having marital difficulties because Katherine has discovered that she harbours desires to be an exhibitionist. It starts accidentally when she notes with unusual pleasure that the man in the house opposite has seen her when she steps out of the shower. Soon enough she has set up her own website where people can watch her masturbate live.

A second group is Siwa and Guy (Naomi Wright and Qasim Khan), two farmers who grow, harvest and sell organic cotton and who debate whether they should save money by using genetically engineered cotton which will benefit Monsanto more than it will them. Siwa is African and has a son Fela (Philip Nozuka) while Guy is French-Canadian and is Katherine’s former boyfriend.

The third group is Wang and Li (Kristopher Bowman and Qasim Khan), two Chinese men who set up several companies – one to hire out janitors, one to recondition military supplies, one to make T-shirts and one to supply Romanians with cottonseed meal, a waste product of cotton production, which is used as food for pigs. Li becomes enamoured of a woman on the internet who just happens to be Katherine and he vows to meet her.

The fourth group is made up of Katherine’s younger brother Patrick (Philip Nozuka), who is interviewed by a whole series of journalists (all played by Naomi Wright) because a photograph he took of his younger sister’s bedroom has won an international prize and is travelling the globe in an exhibition. Thomas, Katherine and Patrick all wear T-shirts made by Wang and Li from the cotton grown by Siwa and Guy. Thomas also happens to work in the fabric recycling plant where used cotton clothing made by Wang and Li among others is recycled.

All the scenes involving the Thing (played by all five actors at various times) are quite amusing because they are couched in the tone that might be used in a documentary film for young children. The cotton fibres are hilariously anthropomorphized with talk about what they think, feel and say to one another. All this is gleefully acted out by the actors who flip up the hoods of their white hoodies while one or two of them provide the narration.

Das Ding itself is on stage throughout the show in the form of an extremely imaginative object designed by Drew Facey. It is a huge white ball, almost as high as the lighting grid in the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs. It is covered in white T-shirts, symbolic of the product it will be used to make, and sectioned like the gores of a sphere, the top half of which fold down to reveal a seating area inside. The T-shirts cleverly hide holes where heads can pop out and a television monitor.

We first see Das Ding when we enter the theatre. Qasim Khan dressed as a king with a golden crown and long white cotton robe is seated on top. It turns out that in the prologue to the play, Khan is King Manuel I of Portugal (1469-1521) seated, it appears, literally on top of the world. In comes the lame explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521), played by Naomi Wright, who tries to convince his sovereign that he can sail to the spice island by sailing around the tip of South America. The petulant and childish Manuel pooh-poohs the idea and Magellan decides to see if the Spanish monarch (Charles I) will finance the voyage. The prologue ends but as we know from history Magellan does round Cape Horn and his crew become the first people ever to circumnavigate the globe.

Thus, Löhle introduced the theme of globalization. The main difficulty with the play is that while this prologue and the documentary sections of the play are quite amusing in tone and invention, the sections dealing with the people affected by cotton in various ways are not. The main exception to this are the series of interviews between the journalists and Patrick. The more the journalists keep trying to pry from Patrick the secret of his photo, the more it becomes obvious that Patrick’s photo was just a lucky accident. He was not even the one who submitted it to the photo contest.

None of the other three stories are even amusing. In the principal story involving Thomas and Katherine, director Ashlie Corcoran seems unable to establish the right tone. Is the newlyweds’ dispute serious, comic or satirical? Making things worse, the plot involving Li’s successful trip to Canada to find the porn queen of his dreams is so unbelievable that it arouses more scepticism than laughter. Yet, this encounter between Li and Katherine is necessary so that Löhle can have the ending he wants.

This is truly an ensemble work and Corcoran ensures that all five actors work together tightly as a team. Nevertheless, Naomi Wright does stand out as the only one of the five who makes any attempt to distinguish among the various characters she plays. Her many journalists who follow their own agenda in questioning Patrick, oblivious to his answers, are especially good.

There are many plays before Löhle’s that demonstrate how we are all connected in ways that we do not realize from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1783) to Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch (2007). These plays, however, usually make some point about the fact that their characters are interrelated. In Lessing it is that they all share Abrahamic religions. In Lepage it is that they all display various aspects of the voice and what it can achieve. In Das Ding, all that Löhle seems to suggest is that we are linked by raw materials that become commodities, which is not all that insightful or interesting. It touches on the commodification of everyday life via the internet, but it is so tied to creating parallels with the cotton industry that it does not investigate the many other issues it raises.

We can enjoy Das Ding for its wild theatricality enhanced by Denyse Karn’s projections, its boldly race- and gender-blind casting and for its unusual structure of shuffled fictional and documentary scenes. Otherwise, the 85 minutes of the show leave us only partially amused and with little to contemplate.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

2016-04-16

Das Ding (The Thing)