Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✩✩✩
by Fabrizio Filippo, directed by Richard Rose
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 27-May 29, 2016
“When a Thriller Doesn’t Thrill”
Tarragon Theatre concludes it 2015/16 season with the world premiere of The Summoned by Fabrizio Filippo. At least the Tarragon deserves credit for trying something different. Filippo’s play is a sci-fi comedy, a genre common at fringe festivals but one that seldom appears on mainstream stages. When playwrights do venture into science fiction – as in John Mighton’s Possible Worlds of 1990 (multiple dimensions), Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur of 2005 (the end of the world) or, best of all, Caryl Churchill’s A Number of 2002 (cloning) – the tone is serious. The Tarragon calls The Summoned a “technological thriller”, but for that to be true the play would have to thrill. What works best in the play is its comedy. For anyone familiar with sci-fi, the play is a fairly tedious wind-up for a less than dazzling payoff.
The action begins with Filippo, whether in character or not is unclear, presenting what seems to be a TED lecture with the motto “If it can be done, it will be done”. Without transition Filippo suddenly takes on the role of narrator apparently playing Aldous, the son of Kahn, a secretive billionaire tech visionary who has just died. Following Kahn’s extremely detailed instructions opened after his death, various people important to him have been summoned to an airport hotel in Toronto for the reading of his will. Joining Aldous and his mother Annie (Maggie Huculak) are Laura (Kelli Fox), the company’s lawyer; Gary (John Bourgeois), the company’s CEO; Quentin (Tony Nappo), head of security for the event; and Isla (Rachel Cairns), a stewardess.
The majority of the play is taken up with the characters greeting each other and wondering why Kahn has had them gathered in such an elaborate and secretive fashion for a reading of a will. Quentin spends his time bullying the others to submit to Kahn’s requests or else forfeit any benefit from the will. In the role of narrator, Aldous provides readouts of background information on the characters as they arrive which are displayed on a blue screen that occupies the whole of the back wall of the playing area. The only mystery other than the need for such high security is the presence of Isla. She is Aldous’s girlfriend but otherwise no one knows why she should be there. When Aldous provides his readout for her, we learn that Isla is not her name and that there is no reliable information about her.
Intercut with the nervousness and ennui of the hotel guests and staff are scenes from Kahn’s past with Aldous playing Kahn and Isla playing Annie. These are meant to enlighten us about Annie’s obviously conflicted attitude toward Kahn, who set her up running the hotel and otherwise virtually abandoned her and Aldous. The main difficulty is that Filippo has done little to make us care about either Kahn or Annie and learning about their past does not make us more intrigued.
This is, in general, the central difficulty of the play. Filippo seems to think that if he tells us something enough times we will experience it. If he reminds us often enough about the high security surrounding the reading of the will be will be excited and feel the tension. If he tells us enough times that Kahn is a genius we will believe it though we never know what realm of IT Kahn is supposed to have revolutionized. The problem is that repeated telling does not equal experiencing, whether it concerns tension or genius. Repetition of information merely becomes boring.
Filippo has also not created any characters we are even interested in. Laura, Gary and Isla are all caricatures – the high-powered lawyer, the fretting CEO and the airhead stewardess. Filippo has succeeded in giving Aldous no personality at all. As for Annie, she is clearly upset, but Filippo has left any more than that undefined. The main source of interest is Quentin who provides some comedy in appearing both disorganized and officious at once.
Filippo’s notion is to use the majority of the action to throw up a variety of questions about what is happening in order to have all questions answered in a would-be wow-them scene at the end. Since Filippo fails to intrigue us with any of his questions, by the time of the final scene we really don’t care what happens. While the final scene may seem exciting and inspired to those unfamiliar with sci-fi, to sci-fi fans it won’t seem all that remarkable. Without giving Filippo’s big reveal away, I can say that episodes of television’s Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989 and 1994 had the same theme as did episodes of Stargate SG-1 in 1989 and 1999. In film, the theme occurs in Avatar (2009), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and is the central concern of Self/less (2015). In sci-fi stories the topic goes back to the 1950s to such tales as Jerry Sohl’s The Altered Ego (1954) or Frederick Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World” (1955).
Many of the cast do their best to make the show interesting. Working with virtually nothing, Kelli Fox infuses Laura with a quirky enough personality that she becomes the one character you might actually like to know. John Bourgeois provides some comedy as an executive cracking under pressure, but even he can’t make Gary’s desire to be loved any more than a joke. In Quentin, Filippo has creating his most engaging character since we’d like to know whether Quentin’s shambolic appearance and haphazard ways consciously or unconsciously mask his love of control.
While Aldous is a cipher and Isla a cartoon, Filippo and Rachel Cairns both seem to come alive when they play Kahn and the younger Annie, a passion and intelligence coming to the fore that was absent in their main roles. I have admired Maggie Huculak many times in the past, but what precisely she is trying to communicate as Annie completely eludes me. Is Annie supposed to be depressed, unwell, annoyed, indifferent or fed-up? It is hard to know and hard to care since she is so noticeably lacking in the energy of those around her.
The star of the show is really the video design of Kurt Firla, who accurately projects information appearing on smartphones on the blue screen behind the actors. Of course, if people spend much of their time staring at computer screens during the day, staring at a simulated computer screen as part of a play will not be all that much of a treat.
Though the play is only 85 minutes long, the couple seated behind me kept checking their watches to see how much longer the show had to go. This may not be indicative of the general view of the audience as a whole, yet it certainly reflected by own reaction. Filippo’s strategy of waiting until the final moments of the play to make sense of the action, takes the great risk of boring the audience if they are not involved. And no amount of damp fireworks at the end from Filippo or Firla are enough to redeem the preceding hour or so of indifference.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Fabrizio Filippo; Kelli Fox, Rachel Cairns, John Bourgeois, Maggie Huculak, Tony Nappo and Fabrizio Filippo. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2016-05-04
The Summoned