Stage Door Review

For Both Resting and Breeding

Sunday, January 19, 2025

✭✭

by Adam Meisner, directed by Maja Ardal

Talk Is Free Theatre, 164 Cowan Avenue, Toronto

January 17-31, 2025

ISH84: “The past is just a guessing game”

Talk is Free Theatre gave Adam Meisner’s play For Both Resting and Breeding its world premiere in Barrie in 2018. Now TIFT has brought this brilliant satire to Toronto and given it an intimate production that suits it perfectly. The play’s action may be set in the future, but the play’s effect is to make us look at the peculiarities of our life in the present with new eyes.

For Both Resting and Breeding it set in the year 2150 when human beings have become gender neutral and use the pronoun “Ish” to identify themselves. The characters refer to events such as the Erasure, the Great Transition and the Great Rebuilding which suggest that some cataclysmic event has occurred between the present day and the time of the play.

The story concerns two historians, ISH40 and ISH62, who plan to restore the only house in M City that remains from 1999. They not only want to make sure the structure is sound with the help of engineer ISH34, but they want the museum to reflect everyday life in 1999. To do this the restoration team will also act the parts of a typical family of the time that would inhabit such a house.

The five-member team sort out the roles they will play with ISH40 and ISH62 playing the father and mother, ISH34 playing their young son and ISH20 their teenaged daughter with ISH84, the oldest member of the team, playing the grandmother. The team has to pour through historical records and artifacts to learn how their characters would behave and what they would know in order to make their presentation of “millennials” as they call them as historically accurate as possible. What is so unusual about Meisner’s play is that instead of portraying the world of the future directly, Meisner makes us infer the nature of the future by how the people of that time reflect on the past.

In 2150 humans have perfected “external reproduction” making sex not only unnecessary but viewed as abhorrent. The views of 2150, especially as embodied in ISH62, are that the gendered world of the past was one of repression and disgusting interpersonal contact. In 2150 the goal of life is work. For what they can tell, the goal of life in 1999 was a great amount of purposeless activity. The clothing of 1999, especially for women, reveals skin and thus did not serve the purpose clothing should have of covering it up.

As it happens, the team’s study of the past has unintended consequences. ISH40 and ISH20 find that they rather enjoy playing their gendered 1999 characters. In fact, they find that they are becoming so attracted to each other that even a process like “breeding” does not seem as horrid a prospect as ISH62 claims. ISH62 notices how close ISH40 and ISH20 are becoming and is worried about what the consequences will be.

Soon after the play begins, we notice that not only do the characters use “Ish” for all third person pronouns, but that the first person pronoun “I” has dropped from use. Sentences typically begin with a verb. This makes the language of the future sound mechanical and passionless which would seem to be the playwright’s point. In the genderless society of the future, people have also lost the concept of themselves as individuals. Through studying the past, some of the team come to see there are alternative, more fulfilling ways of thinking.

The special joy of the show is watching how the people of 2150 regard artifacts and practices of the people of 1999 as exciting, disgusting or confounding. In one sequence a cache of 1999 junk is unearthed and the team, like a group of little children, leaps at chance to play with phone, a device they have heard so much about. As for practices, ISH40 and ISH20 have seen historical photos of people kissing, but, hilariously enough, they don’t know precisely how to do it.

The costumes Laura Delchiaro has designed for the people of the future are jumpsuits in drab colours of a similar cut with loose cloth beanies and slip-on shoes of cloth and rubber. The uniformity of appearance expresses the future society’s lack of gender differentiation. It is all the more fun, then, when we see the characters adopt what their research has shown as the everyday wear of a typical family in 1999.

The cast is excellent across the board. Under Maja Ardal’s astute direction, they all manifest the same speech patterns and movements reflecting a world where self-expression is not encouraged and where touching others unless absolutely necessary is to be avoided. All five present expressionless faces and use expressionless voices. Their world is one where work is the prime purpose in life. That’s why they are so fascinated by the singular focus on purposeless activity so prevalent in 1999.

The stern humorlessness that Ardal brings out in ISH62 is tremendously funny. This character is the most prudish of the five, but Ardal makes clear that ISH62 is torn between their ardent desire to reflect the past as accurately as possible and their strong disapproval so many aspects of past fashions and behaviours.

Richard Lam and Jamie McRoberts are ISH40 and ISH20, the two workers who are assigned to play father and daughter but who find that playing husband and wife corresponds better to the feelings they think they might have for each other. Lam and McRoberts make the naïve, tentative courtship of this couple one of the most delightful aspects of the play. McRoberts intimates that even beneath the long-forgotten feeling of sexual attraction, ISH20 feels something for ISH40 when they are role-playing even if they are not sure what it is. McRoberts shows there is a strong spark of rebellion in some humans that all the past catastrophes have not extinguished. When ISH20 walks in high heels for the first time the combination of glee and awkwardness is delicious. Lam portrays ISH40 as the gentler, kinder foil to Ardal’s ISH 62. Underneath this future human’s expressionlessness, Lam signals a conflict of impulses for and against the acknowledgement of emotions.

Alexander Thomas and Amy Keating are ISH84 and ISH34 who are assigned to play the grandmother of the fictional family and the young son. Both are wonderful at showing how these two people of the future throw themselves into their roles with pleasure and find in that role-playing a kind of freedom they don’t know in their ordinary lives.

The team concludes that in 1999 a house was “for both resting and breeding”. TIFT has found a real house in Toronto to stage the play. The ultra-modern kitchen where the action takes place holds only 21 audience members so that the performers are frequently only inches away. With such immediacy we feel as if we are overhearing the actors speaking and feel complicit in their actions. We also quickly start to view the artifacts and habits of 1999 as as strange and incomprehensible as the characters do.

In For Both Resting and Breeding, Adam Meisner has written a marvellous play that manages to satirize both the new selfless puritanism of the future and the self-centred hedonism of the recent past. The greatest effect that wells up unexpectedly is how, despite the satire, we come to care for these people of the future and are as overjoyed as they are to find that relationships and “purposeless activity” can make life worth living.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Maja Ardal as ISH62, Richard Lam as ISH40, Amy Keating as ISH34, Alexander Thomas as ISH84 and Jamie McRoberts as ISH20; Alexander Thomas as ISH84, Richard Lam as ISH40, Jamie McRoberts as ISH20, Amy Keating as ISH34 and Maja Ardal as ISH62; Maja Ardal as ISH62, Jamie McRoberts as ISH20 as Daughter, Alexander Thomas as ISH84 as Grandma, Richard Lam as ISH40 as Father and Amy Keating as ISH34 as Son. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.tift.ca.