Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Ellie Moon, directed by Brendan Healy
In Association with Crow’s Theatre, Nightwood Theatre & Necessary Angel, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave., Toronto
October 7-21, 2017
“Never let me say ‘No’ again”
In Asking For It, Canadian actor Ellie Moon purports to examine the nature of sexual consent, both what it is and how people request it and communicate it. This is an important and complex topic and it is not surprising that Moon arrives at no clear results in her examination. What is extremely surprising is that In Association Productions (in association with three of Toronto’s most important theatre companies) has mounted as a finished production something that is completely undramatic and unfinished. The show is not a play but rather seems like part of a workshop for a play in its earliest stages.
The 90 minutes of the show’s running time is divided into two parts. In the first part the four actors – Christine Horne, Ellie Moon, Steven McCarthy and Jaa Smith-Johnson – sit at a table at mics and read their lines from scripts in front of them. The only action, if it can be called that, is when the actors for no particular reason change seats. The first part closes with the only fully enacted sequence of that section when Moon and Smith-Johnson play Moon and a boyfriend on the verge of deciding to have sex. They still use mics but not scripts.
In the second part of the show Moon portrays one particular evening in Toronto when she goes out with one of her oldest friends “Maria” (Horne). Here the actors do not use mics or scripts but mime actions and have only chairs as props. Moon takes “Maria” unwillingly to a consent awareness meeting led by an enthusiastic male speaker (Smith-Johnson), they meet up with a mutual friend who is a male bisexual (Smith-Johnson) and the two women go home on the subway. There “Maria” tells the drunken Moon that at some point in researching her play she will have to speak to people whom she does not know. As a test Moon goes up to a stranger (McCarthy) and tries to get his views on sexual consent. The interview ends with the stranger becoming angry and insulting Moon. The second part of the show ends with Moon and “Maria” siting on opposite sides of a table with mics and scripts again where “Maria” decides to interview Moon for a change. We are led to believe that Moon has had the mic in her iPhone on the entire evening and has thus recorded everything we’ve seen.
From a dramatic and theatrical point of view Moon’s show is not even close to being a play. But that has not prevent Crow’s Theatre from advertising it as such:
“A documentary play that looks at gender roles and sexual consent in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal, Asking For It considers the various ways in which sexual consent is understood personally, culturally, and legally. Moon speaks with people of all ages and backgrounds about their assumptions and experiences around consent to sexual relations, and with crown prosecutors and legal experts about the current state of sexual assault law in Canada”.
This description makes Moon’s show sound substantial but that is exactly what it is not. Seeds (2012) and The Watershed (2015) by Annabel Soutar are documentary plays, but there the verbatim script has been memorized, movement choreographed and the subject matter presented in highly theatrical ways where the visual presentation helps support the topics discussed. In Asking For It all we get are a series of opinions read out followed by an enactment of a single night in the life of Moon and “Maria”. In fact, contrary to the show’s description, the view of only one crown prosecutor, who is also a legal expert (Horne), makes it into the show and that single interview is the only one to ground the show in fact.
Otherwise, as Moon tells us, she interviewed people who had responded to a request that she had posted on her Facebook page. This means that Moon spoke only to people who already know her and two long interviews in the show are with her own sisters. “Maria” tells Moon that she will have to interview people she doesn’t know, but except for the one interview shown, the text of Asking For It seems to be made up only of interviews with family and friends. What kind of research is that?
Moon does not tell us how many people responded to her Facebook request, how many of those she interviewed or how many hours of recorded interviews she had before she whittled down to the 90 minutes of the play. She does tell us that interviewing men was difficult because at one point they could sense that she was gathering information and therefore told her what they thought she wanted to hear. All of that material she tells us she could not use. The question is, however, how much of what is in the play is what Moon wanted to hear, and what is her criterion for choosing what she does and does not want to hear?
The best thing that can be said for Moon’s show is that she does include a wide range of opinions. She has men discuss how they have to read body language to decide if they can go further or not while noting that if sex has to be punctuated by ongoing verbal consent the two partners can hardly be “in the moment” which is one thing that sex is all about. Moon includes the voice of a policeman (McCarthy) who actively opposes feminism since he thinks it leads to the frustration that in turns leads to rape. While it is good to have this negative view included, it would have been even better to have the only other professional voice other than the lawyer speak more about what his experience with rape victims has been. He does make a point never followed up in the show that male rape victims usually do not even report the crime because of the shame associated with it.
Moon includes a friend who is into BDSM (Horne) and is unhappy that such desires are thought of as perverted. She also talks to a stripper (Horne) who tells her how “empowering” her job is to her. Moon even admits that she told one of her boyfriends who got her “into the mood” after she had said she didn’t want to have sex, “Never let me say ‘No’ again”. Meanwhile the transcript if the statement of one of Jian Ghomeshi’s alleged victims, read in turn by the entire cast, of how Ghomeshi brutalized her is the most explicit example of the male view that the behaviour of certain women means they are “asking for it”. Given how diverse the views are that Moon has collected and her lack of a conclusion, the title of the show gives a false impression of what the show is really about.
In the “in case you didn’t get it” technique typical of much Canadian drama, Moon tells us at the very end exactly what the play is about. The audience may have wondered why Moon has revealed so many personal details about herself when her she need merely take the stance of a neutral interviewer. The answer is, as she makes clear, that the play is not about exploring the problem of consent in general. Rather, it seems, it is about Moon herself. She wonders whether continually demanding consent at each stage of a sexual encounter does not inhibit the discovery of self that sex can bring, a point the show has made at least twice before. This view is likely not the one that people attending a “play” called Asking For It will expect.
While Moon always plays herself, there is no doubt that the other three actors all do a fine job in differentiating the voices of the different interviewees in the play whether reading from scripts or not. Director Brendan Healy has attempted to give Moon’s show at least the sheen of a finished work by having André du Toit use numerous lighting cues to spotlight the different speakers and by having Richard Feren create different ambient sounds to conjure up the different environments in which Moon recorded her interviews.
Nevertheless, someone should have taken Moon aside to suggest she should take her show back to the drawing board. She should decide what her actual goal is. If it is really to document Canadians’ views of consent in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal as the show is presently advertised, Moon needs to interview far more people than friends and family. We hear only from a crown prosecutor, but what about hearing about the experiences from lawyers who have defended women who have been raped and from their clients? How does a lawyer defend a woman who claims to have been raped by her boyfriend or her husband? How does an existing relationship make a defence more difficult and can it be overcome? If this is Moon’s goal and she is wedded to script-reading and microphones, she should think of making a radio documentary where visual appeal and theatricality are unimportant.
On the other hand, if Moon’s real goal is to try to understand her own desires in the wake of the Ghomeshi scandal, a more suitable form for her ideas would be a solo show where she should drop the pretence of comprehensiveness and impartiality. In a solo play Moon could play all the parts of her friends and family and show how their views affect her own thoughts on the subject.
As it is, Asking For It doesn’t do justice to its subject and certainly doesn’t do justice to its audience who have bought tickets not to see a workshop or a work-in-progress, but who expected to see a fully realized play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Ellie Moon, ©2017 Dahlia Katz; Ellie Moon and Christine Horne, ©2017 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.
2017-10-08
Asking For It