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by Norman Yeung, directed by Esther Jun

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto

October 24-November 25, 2018

Nadine: “We're useless. Where are the witty lines?” (from Baise-moi by Virginie Despentes and Coralie, 2000)

Tarragon Theatre is presenting the first professional production of Norman Yeung’s Theory, which won First Prize in the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition in 2015.  The Tarragon production tends to prove the old adage that what looks good on the page does not necessarily work on the stage.  Yeung seems to want his play to be a thriller that is also a critique of extreme political correctness, but, in fact, it fails as either.

The premise of the action is that Isabelle (Sascha Cole), a tenure-track professor in film studies, is teaching a basic introduction to film class.  We see only four of her class of 100 students on stage – Davinder (Bilal Baig), Safina (Asha James), Richard (Kyle Orzech) and Jorge (Anthony Perpuse) –  the pretence being that we the audience make up the rest of the class.  Isabelle presents her class with two syllabi.  The first she says is the approved list of film all by “dead white men”.  The play may have been heavily dramaturged but not fact-checked.  One of the films in the list projected on the wall is Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa, the famed Japanese filmmaker.  Another is The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, whom most would consider Latino, besides which, Solanas is still living. 

Isabelle has her students tear up the approved syllabus and look at her own syllabus which includes more living filmmakers and more female and ethnically diverse filmmakers.  Her list even includes the notorious French film Baise-moi (2000) by Virginie Despentes and Coralie, which includes graphic violence and unsimulated sex.  Claiming that nothing offends her, Isabelle is intent on forcing her students to follow her lead even though some, like Safina, balk at the idea of being required to see certain disturbing films. 

In a show of openness, Isabelle sets up a message board for the class which she leaves completely unregulated.  Anyone is free to post about anything as long as it is related to the class.  All four students we see question whether this is a good idea, but Isabelle insists that since they are all adults they should be free to express whatever they wish.  Since Isabelle has to use a server outside of the university to set up such a site, we already know both that Yeung’s premise is improbable and that Isabelle is already jeopardizing her hopes of remaining at the university. 

When we learn later that Isabelle’s second list of films is also university-approved, we have to see that her show of tearing up the old one was simply a false demonstration of freedom.  Yet, contrary to the administration, Isabelle shows her class all of Baise-moi, rather than the approved selected clips.  Yeung may be trying to demonstrate Isabelle’s extremely liberal bent, but all he shows us is a character with no sense of practicality or concern for her students’ sensibilities or the need for compliance with university rules.     

Soon enough unsettling content begins to appear on the message board, especially from a user with the handle “richard69”.  He abuses other students in the class and taunts Isabelle for being a White lesbian married to a Black woman.  Richard69’s posts become increasingly threatening and, she thinks, he even leaves a knife outside the door of her house as a warning.

Isabelle’s only course is to block richard69 from the message board, a move that severely undercuts her pretence to openness.  She also consults Owen (Fabrizio Filippo), the head of her department, about filing a grievance against richard69, but all she knows is the writer’s pseudonym and she is told filing a grievance could potentially harm her path to tenure. 

The stress of Isabelle’s foolish experiment takes its toll on her marriage.  She becomes increasing obsessed with text and video messages and discovering the identity of richard69 at the expense of planning with her wife Lee (Audrey Dwyer) about having the baby Lee thought they had agreed to have. 

From here on Yeung’s plan takes a sharp turn away from its critique of Isabelle’s liberalism and settles into an old-fashioned thriller where texts and e-mails, rather than the telephone calls of Louise Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1943), drive a stereotypically helpless female to the brink of madness.  Yeung’s surprise ending resolves none of the play’s issues and leaves the story dangling.  One wonders how the Herman Voaden Prize committee chose Yeung’s Theory, when the play has needed so much dramaturgical aid and has still ended up as far-fetched and unsatisfying. 

Matters are not helped when an actor cannot make the lead character convincing.  Sascha Cole does not display the emotional range needed for Isabelle, who, to be effective, must appear overly self-confident at the beginning and gradually descend through obsession until she is nearly totally unhinged at the end.  Cole, however, shows little variation in Isabelle’s self-command in either voice or gesture until the final scene when she suddenly becomes a gibbering mess.

Kyle Orzech shows great talent as Richard, whose name makes him seem to Isabelle a likely candidate for the disruptive richard69 who is threatening her.  Orzech knows how to play Richard on the razor’s edge of innocence and guile so that even we can’t judge definitively whether he is merely enthusiastic or obsessed.     

Bilal Baig does well at playing a South Asian gay young man without resorting to cliché, while Anthony Perpuse provides a useful ray of comedy as a student to wants to take Isabelle’s openness further to study porn.  Among the adults, Audrey Dwyer plays Lee as a sympathetic character who serves as a rock in relation to Isabelle’s impracticality and a sensible judge of when Isabelle is on the verge of jeopardizing their relationship.  In contrast, Fabrizio Filippo plays Owen, the head of Isabelle’s department in such a laid-back manner, it’s hard to take him seriously.  For some reason, Filippo is encouraged to make Owen appear to be playing games with Isabelle when straight answers is what she wants from him and what we would expect. 

Given that the play is about a film course and involved videos that are sent to Isabelle, Cameron Davis’s projections are necessary to understanding the story.  As with any play that relies heavily on computer and smartphone use, director Esther Jun still can’t avoid the inherently untheatrical nature of watching people typing away on their devices and reacting to messages we can’t see.  Joseph Pagnan has designed a clever set that can easily shift from a classroom to Isabelle and Lee’s home, although some of the hidden cabinets are not as easy to opens as they should be.

It certainly is useful to present a play that attempts to show that the left can be as absolutist and repressive as the right.  The trouble is that Yeung has not chosen a very credible manner of demonstrating this.  When the play finishes as a simple suspense drama about a woman in peril, it feels as if Yeung has given up any pretence of writing a play about serious ideas.  We will hope he is better at keeping issues in focus in his next play.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Sascha Cole as Isabelle; Bilal Baig, Anthony Perpuse, Asha James, Kyle Orzech and Sascha Cole; Sascha Cole and Audrey Dwyer. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com