Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✩✩✩
written and directed by Anton Piatigorsky
Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto
February 23-March 11, 2017
Roger: “I’m sick of all this artifice”
Someone watching Breath In Between will find it very hard to believe the same playwright, Anton Piatigorsky, wrote the witty and erudite Eternal Hydra (2009). It’s a philosophically murky piece that pretends to explore the nature of relations between people. Yet, to do so, Piatigorsky fails to create any real characters. They are merely mouthpieces for competing points of view. Piatigorsky throws realism aside for action that is almost entirely symbolic making it very difficult for the cast to breathe any life into the author’s arid, morbid discourse.
The play begins with the entrance of Roger (Kyle Gatehouse), who announces that he has killed two people who answered a notice posted on the internet requesting people who wished to be killed to visit him. Two people answered his notice – Laura, about whom we know nothing, and Maxim, a police officer from Nashville, Tennessee. Roger fulfilled his part of the bargain and disposed of their bodies, but, strangely, this has not led to any feeling of content.
The most obvious approach to Roger’s actions that a playwright might take would be to investigate the ethics of consensual homicide. That is not Piatigorsky’s concern and, surprisingly, he never even brings the topic up. Rather, his main focus is the existential question whether it is ever possible for two people to connect in any real way. In his “Message” in the programme he states outright that the play is non-realistustic: “On stage, we offer a variety of carefully considered theatrical metaphors, a story of radical intimacy”.
Since the way to many man’s heart is through his stomach, she prepares a symbolic meal that consists of several courses featuring the hearts of various animals beginning with a hummingbird’s, working through wallaby’s and kinkajou’s and ending with her own. If we had any doubts that the play was symbolic, this scene should allay them for good.
Unfortunately for Amy, sex, love and her cooking are not enough to cure Roger of his existential loneliness. Roger has another problem that he had not previously mentioned. He occasionally is possessed by the spirits of the two people he killed and can never be free of them.
The scene suddenly shifts to prison. How the murders were discovered and Roger incarcerated is of no interest to Piatigorsky. Besides, since Roger was in a metaphorical mental prison anyway, we have no reason to think that this new prison represented by a projection of bars is any less symbolic. Amy has become a prisoner, too, symbolically, because she is pregnant with Roger’s child, whom they self-punishingly have named Maxim. This leads to the most interesting scene in the play when Roger possessed by the spirit of the Maxim he killed converses with Amy possessed by the Maxim who grows inside her to live.
In other works about repressed memories, as in movies like Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) or plays like Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations (1980), only by reenacting the past can Roger discover the truth and free himself from possession by his victims. We can only wonder why it took two years in the play’s time scheme for Roger and Amy to reach this conclusion.
According to certain philosophers existential loneliness is inherent in the human condition. For Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) each individual is separate from every other individual, lives and dies alone, and there is no real way to bridge the gap between them. Humans have to accept this and learn to cope with it. Roger is particularly incapacitated by this supposedly because he felt alienated from his father. Amy is also aware of her condition, but she takes the view of the early existentialist Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55). He said that religion cannot be understood rationally, so that we have to make a “leap of faith” to embrace it. Similarly, Amy thinks that people have to make a “leap of love” to embrace life.
In fact, Piatigorsky is so focussed on Roger’s “plight” that he never gives us any explanation for such important questions as why Roger’s two victims wanted to be killed.
Piatigorsky wants us to think of his play as metaphorical, but there are metaphors that are concrete and ones that are vague, ones that illuminate and ones that do not. As a metaphor Breath In Between is both vague and unenlightening. This makes the play, even at only 80 minutes long, tedious to watch.
When the play premiered at SummerWorks in 2012 it was directed by Brendan Healy. Having someone from outside mediate between the meaning of the play and an audience was likely a good thing since the director would have had to find strategies to make the play understandable. This time the author himself directs and makes the false assumption that his work need no clarification.
As Roger, Kyle Gatehouse is unable to make Piatigorsky’s often artificial speeches sound natural. He tends not to emphasize the most important words in a sentence, especially if they are at the end. Strangely, though, he is much clearer when is portrays Roger when possessed by either Laura or Maxim.
In contrast, Julia Krauss is much more successful in making Piatigorsky’s language sound natural even when it includes such specialized phrases as “existential terror”. She is good at portraying Amy possessed by Maxim, but why the adult Maxim should ever possess someone who did not kill him is a mystery. One of the few high points of the play is Krauss’s delivery of Amy’s speech decrying the grotesqueness of motherhood.
The most notable feature of Shannon Lea Doyle’s design are the clear plastic half-masks she has created to represent Laura and Maxim. They alter the features of the wearer to eerie effect. Richard Feren’s music engendered an atmosphere of pervasive gloom, but Piatigorsky overuses it in having it continue throughout most of the play’s running time.
In his “Message” in the programme, Piatigorsky echoes Kierkegaard in saying that “Receiving a play as an audience member requires a great leap of faith”. That may be but sometimes an author has situated his play so far away from anything recognizably engaging emotionally or intellectually that no leap of faith will bring the play any closer. So it is with Breath In Between that seems to exists in its own bubble of existential loneliness even with an audience present.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Julia Krauss and Kyle Gatehouse; Kyle Gatehouse as Rofer; Julia Krauss as Amy. ©2017 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.
2017-02-25
Breath In Between