Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Karen Hines
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
March 28-April 15, 2017
“The opposite of aromatherapy”
Karen Hines’s account of the nightmare of home ownership, Crawlspace, sold out when it premiered at Videofag in 2015. This year it has been remounted again at the Young Centre and is selling so fast it has already been extended. If, like me, you missed it the previous time, don’t miss it again. It’s a cautionary tale and a satire of both the real estate business and of innocent home buyers. The tale is transformed into comedy through Hines’s deep sense of irony.
The 90-minute show is based on Hines’s own experiences in becoming a first-time home owner in 2006. Following advice one has heard so often, Hines decided that paying a mortgage for a home was better than paying rent and owning nothing. Hines admits at the very start that she was an “idiot”, and on one level the show is a kind of self-flagellation over every minute detail that proves she was an “idiot”. Why, for instance, should she have trusted her real estate agent just because he was good-looking and “Ran for the Cure”?
For just under $200,000 she finds that she can buy a cute lemon-yellow, recently renovated, 400 square-foot, fully detached “coachhouse”. It’s tiny, but she likes it better than any of the condos she has seen. It has only a crawlspace instead of a basement, but she doesn’t want a basement. She makes the downpayment using all her savings and feels proud finally to have made the step into real maturity through property-ownership.
Soon enough Hines, playing as she tells us a version of herself, notices that everything is not quite right. The house had been inspected but the agent was content to use an old survey of the property. Since the survey the previous owners had added a room onto the back, essential as the only closet and space for the washer and dryer and water-heater. The only problem is that the room extends onto the neighbour’s property and was not built with the legal lien. Now, since she knows this, Hines cannot sell the house unless she were to remove the room and move its contents into the living room.
Hines also notices that the not all the inside walls reach the floor which allows mice to enter. Hines has a hilarious story of her attempt to kill one of these intruders. This fact alone make Hines wish to move out, except that she can’t sell without a major renovation. The nadir of her home life comes when her house is pervaded by a noxious odour that seems to be emanating from beneath the floor. The effect, she says, is “the opposite of aromatherapy”. She discovers to her horror that contrary to what she was told there is no concrete crawlspace under the floor, only dirt and, worse, there is no entrance to it. While furiously phoning various city departments, all unwilling to help, the smell, likely from a dead raccoon, gets so bad that she can live in the house only by taking a combination of Gravol and Ativan. Imbued with the stench of death (and no doubt affected by the drugs), she begins losing jobs and goes deep into debt.
While lots of home-owners have horror stories – there are entire reality television series devoted to them – what makes Hines’s special is her uniquely theatrical way of relating the story. Fearing prosecution Hines has enlisted the help of a “performance associate” (Sascha Cole) to keep her from mentioning any real names or places and to remind her of whatever fictional names or place she has used instead. If Hines refers to a specific legal phrase, Cole helps her to repeat exactly what that phrase is. The presence of this associate helps create the atmosphere of persecution that pervades the show and suggests that even though Hines got rid of her tiny house almost ten years ago, she still cannot escape what the experience did to her life.
Hines narrates the events in a calm, almost seductive voice, as if her life has moved on and she recollects the events in all their ghastliness without being moved. The special intermission she gives herself halfway through, where we hear the sound of deep sobbing drift in through the door, exposes what we have suspected that Hines’s almost rigorous self-possession is really just a façade.
A joke that runs through the show is Hines’s self-conscious fictionalization of real events. She will say, “I just returned from filming a commercial in South Africa”, which she will then amend to “when I say that I may mean I returned from leading a clown workshop in Thunder Bay”. These frequent deflations suggest a Hines who longs for glamour but has to settle for humiliation As a comic performer Hines is expert at the strategically placed pause, the shift in tone, the shaking of hair or crossing of legs to emphasize a point while simultaneously pretending that it is not important.
She satirizes real estate agents for not correcting any misapprehensions a client may have just so they can make a sale. Hines similarly satirizes a culture that makes a person believe that property ownership is some necessary rite of passage to full adulthood. She satirizes stores like Williams-Sonoma and the Pottery Barn for selling absolutely useless objets like the “twig orb” to decorate one’s domicile. The play implicitly asks the larger question of how we came to move from the simple necessity of shelter to fetishizing the home and home decoration.
Hines’s presentation is theatrical in itself and she frequently speaks directly to members of the audience to involve us in her tale. Yet, the show’s theatricality is immeasurably enhanced by Greg Morrison’s often doom laden music and Sandi Somers’s moody lighting effects. In particular whenever Hines mentions the word “crawlspace”, we hear an echo of the word, a rise in music and a shuddering of lights as if we were in a cheesy horror film.
With its multiple layers of irony, Crawlspace is hugely amusing from start to finish. Caveat emptor (“Buyer beware”) may be the show’s theme, but is also applies to the show itself. If you don’t already own a house, seeing Crawlspace may put you off ever wanting to buy one at all.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Karen Hines and friend. ©2015 Gary Mulcahey.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2017-03-29
Crawlspace