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by debbie tucker green, directed by Philip Akin & Kimberley Rampersad

Obsidian Theatre Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

February 9-25, 2018

3: “Protocol didn’t happen in my house to me and mine”

There are many reasons to see hang, now receiving its Canadian premiere from the Obsidian Theatre Company.  The play could not be more topical, well acted or tautly directed.  But though this is only February, it hard to see how there could be a finer female performance in any play this year than that of Sarah Afful as the play’s central character.  The detail and intensity she brings to her characterization is extraordinary and she seems to have judged word by word how to illuminate the emotional and intellectual conflicts as they change in response to the aggravation of the other characters.  Afful’s performance is simply unmissable.

A word often used by the other two characters in hang is “nightmare” although they what designate with this is trivial.  The play hang itself by debbie tucker green (all lower case), however, truly is a nightmare and it is not trivial at all.  Set in the near future it involves three characters named simply 1, 2 and 3 who meet in what seems to be a huge anonymous building filled with other similarly uncomfortable meeting room.  Designer Steve Lucas emphasizes the unpleasantness of the room by imagining it in a neo-Brutalist style with a concrete wall, almost as if a bunker, and of an irregular shape. 

Sarah Afful plays 3, a woman seething with unresolved emotions, led to the room by two employees, 1 (Zoé Doyle) and 2 (Vladimir Alexis), employees of a nameless government agency, or, what may be worse but more likely, of a private company that the government has contracted to carry out its more distasteful business. 

3 is keeping an appointment with 1 in order to deliver her decision.  Despite 3’s assertion that she has already made her decision and will not change it, 1 and 2 persist in trying to assuage 3 with typically institutional expressions of care, and offers of comfort before they allow 3 to tell them her decision.  green’s satire of the generic concern of 1 and 2 is so accurate in skewering the habitual expressions of sympathy the two must use on hundreds of others every week, that it would be funny if the general situation were not so grim.

Why 3 has come and what her decision is about are topics that green successfully though perhaps too artificially postpones until the second half of the 75-minute running time of the action.  Employees 1 and 2 speak almost entirely in ellipses as if deliberately avoiding the very subject about which 3 has made her decision.  Meanwhile, 3, angered by the false “worry”, “care” and “sympathy” of 1 and 2 lashes out at them for even presuming to understand what she has gone through and for believing that the presence of a friend or some water or tea will in any way make her feel better.

What we discover is that 3 has been the victim of some horrendous crime, never specified, which has left her two children traumatized and on meds and ruined the loving relationship between 3 and her husband.  The incident of two years ago has taken an irreparable toll not only on 3 but on her whole family and, for unknown

reasons, has caused all of 3’s friends to desert her.  3 is a Black woman but her assailant was blue-eyed.  He has apparently been tried and is now a prisoner, although in the corporate-speak of 1 and 2 he is a “client”.

Since green has so deliberately delayed mentioning what 3’s decision concerns, I do not want to give away that information.  Yet, I will say that from the interplay of 3 with the fragmented words of 1 and 2, we gather the awful feeling that in the nightmare world of the near future green is depicting, victims are allowed to have a direct say in what happens to those who have perpetrated crimes against them. 

While we are absorbed by the increasing tension of learning 3’s decision during the action, after the play is over what begins to obsess us is what kind of world the play’s characters are living in.  As we know from the recent wave of female and male allegations of abuse against men in power, many have spoken out about what they would like to see happen to their abusers if they were able to determine it.  Though green’s play premiered in London, UK, in 2015, she envisions a future where victims are given the power to determine just that. 

While her depiction of the ineffectual officialese of 1 and 2 is satirical, her critique of the system they are part of is not.  In this future the death penalty, so desired by conservative parties in the UK, USA and Canada, has been reinstated.  And victims of crimes are allowed to have their wishes for the criminals fulfilled.  green thus emphasizes that the death penalty no longer represents justice but institutionalized revenge.  Privatizing whether or how a sentence is carried out, does not give the injured more freedom or more satisfaction as proponents of the death penalty would imagine.  Rather, as green so clearly shows, it only causes the victim like 3 further trauma.  The government legal system has thus offloaded responsibility onto the individual with little care about how forcing the victim to take such responsibility is really just a second form of abuse. 

green’s emphasis throughout the play on the protocols that 1 and 2 have to follow to prevent them from influencing 3’s decision and then on all the paperwork that follows once she has decided can only remind one of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” in describing the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1963.  All the bureaucracy surrounding the obtaining and documenting of 3’s decision indicates how desensitized 1 and 2 have become to the work they are actually doing and how unable they have become to empathize in any real way with the torture the victims must now suffer in reliving the past crime and in determining

their assailant’s fate.  In the first half of the play 1 and 2 ask 3, much to her annoyance, to make all sorts of decisions about what to drink, whether to hang her coat, whether to call a friend.  Once we think about the action after the play is over, we realize that 1 and 2 don’t treat these trivial decisions any differently than they do the major, gut-churning decision that 3 has come there to make.  

The prime symbol in green’s nightmarish vision is a “development” that 1 and 2 are required to report to 3 but about which they can recommend no specific action.  That “development” turns out to be a handwritten letter from the attacker addressed to her.  3 struggles within herself whether to read it or not and neither 1 nor 2 can help her.  We understand perhaps long after the play has ended that 3 avoids reading the letter before making her decision because she is afraid it will influence her.  And it will influence her because it has the potential to humanize someone she has regarded for two years as a monster.  green’s larger point is that acknowledging the humanity of one’s enemy diffuses the desire for revenge and that the oppression of whole groups of people depends on their constantly being demonized.

Acting as a foil to Afful’s amazingly complex portrait of 3, Zoé Doyle and Vladimir Alexis in the roles of officials 1 and 2, play the kind of anonymous bureaucrats who seem to be concealing information despite their generic outward stance of being helpful.  Both green and co-directors Philip Akin and Kimberley Rampersad make sure that the two have individual personalities.  Doyle plays the senior of the two and she subtly makes clear that despite the impassivity 1 wishes to project, 1 is, in fact, affected by the emotion of 3’s outbursts.  We see this when she repeats some of 3’s phrases almost word for word with anger creeping into her voice when 2 interrupts.  Alexis as the junior official is eager to please and more a stickler for following protocols than 1, who feels she can override them if necessary.  2’s greatest speech is unfortunately on a topic I wish to keep hidden.  All I can say is that the glee and oddly extensive attention to detail with which Alexis has 2 outline his gruesome subject matter provides the greatest evidence for the bureaucrats emotional dissociation from the distasteful work they do.

Akin and Rampersad’s direction is exemplary in generating a steadily rising tension throughout the action.  The one main flaw has to do with his blocking of the play which keeps Afful seated in a chair on stage left for almost the entire play.  Audience members, seated in the far house right seats will be disappointed to find they are looking at the back of Afful’s head for almost the entire play.  A glance at the photos for the original production at the Royal Court shows that 3 was seated facing out toward the audience, there are was no table and 1 and 2 were kept off to the side.

Given this caveat, arm yourself with tickets for the house left seats the better to appreciate Afful’s fantastic performance and come to see that want some might see as a dream solution for victims will lead only to a nightmare of further mental cruelty.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Zoé Doyle as 1, Vladimir Alexis as 2 and Sarah Afful as 3; Sarah Afful as 3; Vladimir Alexis as 2 and Sarah Afful as 3. ©2018 Racheal McCaig.

For tickets, visit https://www.canadianstage.com/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=hang