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by Rouvan Silogix & Rafeh Mahmud, directed by Mike Payette

Tarragon Theatre & Modern Times Stage Company with Theatre ARTaud, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

November 27-December 15, 2024

“We can’t escape the military-industrial complex”

Craze is one of those plays that the Tarragon has been producing lately that never should have made the leap from page to stage. The play is a co-pro between Tarragon Theatre & Modern Times Stage Company with Theatre ARTaud and is written by Rafeh Mahmud and his brother Rouvan Silogix, who happens to be the Artistic Director of Modern Times and Founding Artistic Director of Theatre ARTaud. Despite the credentials of this co-author, the play is so poorly written that it never explores the very questions it raises.

The play begins as a rip-off of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Renee and June return late to their elegant modernist house after an launch party given by June’s PR firm. The most unusual feature of the house, one not in Albee, is that Renee, an inventor, has created a Siri-like support system named Buddy with a masculine voice that answers questions, checks on news and the status of appliances and other tasks. Buddy apparently also has a thorough knowledge of June and Renee’s lives.

As in Albee, the already soused husband and wife continue drinking and arguing once they’re home. Exacerbating matters, June has invited a younger couple, a new hire Selina and her husband Richie, over for drinks. June has invited them because she assumes they are polyamorous as is she. Like Honey in Albee, Selina is prone to throwing up. In a direct steal from Albee, Renee comes up behind June with a rifle that fires a small flag (or would if the prop worked correctly). In a break from Albee, the authors have June make a move on Selina and Richie make a move on Renee.

These would-be seductions go nowhere because the authors shift modes from naturalistic to surrealistic. An armed officer breaks into the house and is revealed to be Renee and June’s son, Alex. This is just a symbolic expression of the fact that the thought of their dead son Alex has just burst in upon the minds of his parents.

At this point the action becomes a series of flashbacks moving from before Renee and June were married up through the death of their son. Renee, as we had heard in the first part of the play, is an inventor and has come up with a type of drone that has aroused interest in the military. Renee is opposed to using his invention for military purposes but June persuades him that the money will help them to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

The authors take us rapidly through Alex’s life until he is 19 and wants to leave home. He has a scholarship to travel to a war zone (really?) where he hopes to bring peace and harmony (really??). Alex’s parents are against his plan but he insists. But what do you know – a drone flies by and suddenly no more Alex. Here, Silogix and Mahmud have changed their inspiration from Albee to Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), in which a father’s decision causes the death of his son in war.

Silogix and Mahmud are not yet done with their mash-up of pre-existing ideas. Though they have shown us Alex dying on the battlefield, soon thereafter Renee the inventor enters with an automaton that looks just like Alex and has his voice. We note that Renee’s nickname for Alex is Buddy and assume that somehow Renee has made Alex the Siri of the house.

Mind uploading is not a new idea in sci-fi. By a strange coincidence a remount of the Canadian play called Honey I’m Home by Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton, which premiered in February this year, is playing concurrently with Craze. It opened November 22, running to December 1 at Factory Theatre. In this play Janine uploads her consciousness into her home. There are already so many so-called “mind uploading movies”, ranging from The Colossus of New York (1958) to Transcendence (2014), that they form a sub-category of AI sci-fi films.

Silogix and Mahmud want to leave the revealing of android Alex as the climax to the play, but the result is that they fail to explore any of the fundamental questions that this development raises. First of all, the authors give Renee and June no expression of grief or guilt over the death of their only child. What are we to think? Are the parents such horrible people that they don’t care? Second, where is the discussion of the ethics of transplanting the consciousness of their son into a lookalike android? Nowhere. Third, where are Renee and June’s reactions to the result of this transplant? Also, nowhere. Fourth and most bizarre, how do Renee and June move from accepting android Buddy to having Buddy somehow become the Siri of the house? Does neither one of them realize how grotesque it is to have made their own dead son their AI slave? And where Is android Buddy? Further, since it seems Siri Buddy can think, what does Siri Buddy think about what his parents have done?

Neglect of such important issues is enough to make Craze a “don’t see”. But the play reached that status long before the son-as-android revelation. In the first section, though the authors are riffing off Albee, their dialogue is relentlessly clichéd and unwitty. The structural problem in beginning with Albee is that after the plot switches to flashbacks about Alex the play has no use for either Selina or Richie. They are left to wander making clichéd robotic movements, stopping occasionally to make nonsensical outbursts. Selina is convinced she does not want to have children because her great-great-great-great-grandfather was a warrior against the Mongols and she does want to pass that warlike gene on to a child. First of all, four or even five “greats” is not enough to place anyone in the mid-14th century when the Mongol Empire ended. Second, four “greats” gives Selina 64 ancestors in that generation. Thinking that genes from one of those relations will dominate over the other 63 points to a significant lack of rational thinking in Selina or in the authors.

Meanwhile during the flashbacks, Richie, for unknown reasons, is divested of his shirt and calms Selina down by telling her “DNA is not in my blood. It’s in my family”, which is pretty close to meaning nothing.

Director Mike Payette is not able to make sense of the play or to exact uniform performances from the cast. The best performance comes from Augusto Bitter as Alex. He makes a fine transition from Alex as a little boy to Alex as an idealistic teenager to Alex as an android, marking each stage with a change of voice and body language. His voice as Siri Alex is smooth and calm with a hint of menace rather like the voice Douglas Rain used as HAL the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

As Renee, Ali Kazmi, who has given great performances elsewhere, most notably as Dr. Astrov in Crow’s Theatre’s Uncle Vanya in 2022, spends the first two-thirds of the show shouting all his lines. Since I’ve never seen him do this before, I have to assume he was directed to do so. As June, Lisa Ryder seems to be channelling Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha in the 1966 film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with more sensuality and less ferocity.

Kwaku Okyere as Richie and Louisa Zhu as Selina are suitably bland as a young couple trying to relate to their older hosts. How Selina can launch into a long, rapid speech right after throwing up (and not wiping her mouth) seems unrealistic as does Richie’s unmotivated kissing of the unwilling Renee. Nothing the two say or do matters since the authors dispense with them halfway through the action despite requiring them to be on stage.

Ting-Huan 挺歡 has designed quite an attractive modernist set that includes a turntable in the centre that rotates to show the bathroom where Selina throws up and later the battlefield where Alex dies. Flaws in the set derive from flaws in the authors’ text. Renee is supposed to be such a technical genus, yet he seems unable to access a surveillance camera to see who is at the door. He could since Siri Alex uses visual identification to say who is there. Even so, why not have simple peephole like everybody else except that that would ruin the surprise entrance that the authors want.

Also, why does the front door have no latch or lock? It just pushes open, meaning that there is no reason for Alex to burst through a window for his entrance. The bathroom door also just pushes open, requiring people to put their hands on the painting on one side – an odd way to treat a painting that everyone says they like.

Worlds on stage, even in absurdist or surrealist plays, have to make sense on their own terms. The world of Craze does not make sense on stage since the authors nowhere deal with the implications of the story they are telling. If you want to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? just rent the 1966 film or wait until the new Canadian Stage production arrives in January next year. Silogix and Mahmud provide only the most tepid possible imitation of it. If you want to hear a story about a father whose decision has caused his son’s death in war, rent the 1948 or 1987 film versions. There Miller, unlike Silogix and Mahmud, confronts the question of how guilt and deception can destroy the parents and relations who are left alive. For a show about uploading a mind to AI, try one of the “mind uploading” films.

Tarragon Theatre and Modern Times Stage Company used to be known for producing some of the highest quality plays in Toronto. Think of Harlem Duet at the Tarragon in 2018 or Modern Times’s The House of Bernarda Alba in 2022. A co-pro of the two promised much but delivered little. Let’s hope both companies get back on track soon.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Lisa Ryder as June, Ali Kazmi as Renee and Augusto Bitter as Alex; Augusto Bitter as Alex; Kwaku Okyere as Richie and Louisa Zhu as Selina. © 2024 Roya DelSol.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com.