Stage Door Review

Last Landscape
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
✭✭✩✩✩
conceived and directed by Adam Paolozza
Bad News Days with Common Boots Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
January 14-26, 2025
“In the colorful reality of life there is a continuous resistance of fact to confinement within any ‘simpliste’ theory” (Carl O. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape”, 1925)
Adam Paolozza’s latest performance piece is his most ambitious yet. In a wordless two hours of mime, movement and puppetry it aims at nothing less than to present a vision of a world without human beings. While theoretically intriguing, the show’s episodic nature and lack of narrative drive do not make for compelling viewing. At intermission the point of the show is still unclear. Nevertheless, there are moments of undeniable beauty and the interplay of light and sound is often as dramatic as any of the actors’ performances.
The show begins with Adam Paolozza, who conceived and directs the piece, entering a makeshift dwelling from the cold and removing multiple layers of clothing while listening to the radio on his phone. We hear a lecture concerning the eminent destruction of human life on earth due to human-induced climate change. The speaker refers to famed geographer Carl. O. Sauer, who insisted that geography take into account the impact of humans on the environment. Before Paolozza’s character has time to go to sleep on his cluttered sofa, five performers, whom Paolozza calls the “workers” in the programme, take apart the house and cart Paolozza off as if he were a prop.
For the remainder of the show, these “workers” stage a series of scenes. They appear playing humans in the first few – people trying to imitate the shape of rushes in a barrel or people gathered on a bench using a large tanning reflector. Afterwards, however, until very near the end, they play various animals, plants and even rocks in the sets, which Paolozza calls “scenic marionettes” that they build.
The scenes appear with no sense of forward motion although we assume they are moving forward in time simply because they succeed each other. This idea meets some confusion when Paolozza makes his second and final appearance walking through the set wearing the mask of Janus, the god with one face looking forwards, one backwards. After this, the workers stage the arrival of megafauna, specifically a giant sloth, which became extinct about 12,000 years ago.
The following scene depicts the growth of what seem to be huge white fungi from the earth. Some are mushroom-shaped, some asparagus-shaped. Only if you have read the note in the programme would you know these are meant to be Prototaxites, and only if you googled the word would you know that Prototaxites are a type of giant fungus that thrived 420-358 million years ago. You then might realize that the action in the show is now moving backwards, not forwards. But then you have to wonder why the show concludes with a scene of the workers as humans again looking at the sun.
The central difficulty of Last Landscape is that it is nearly impossible to make sense of what is happening. In his note in the programme, Paolozza tells us “The premise is simple: in some future time devoid of nature, a group of ‘workers’ enter an empty space and assemble a series of artificial landscapes, attempting to recreate the natural landscape from memory. They manipulate large ‘scenic marionettes’: set pieces which mimic the appearance & movement of the natural landscape”.
I have always believed that a work of theatre has to be sufficient in itself. We should not need any outside information, such as a Director’s Note, to help us understand what we are seeing. As it happens, even Paolozza’s note does not help us fully understand the action. For starters, the workers do not enter an empty space, as he claims. Instead, they tear down a building, push its components to the side and make the space empty themselves. Why do the workers create an empty space that they then feel the need to fill?
Paolozza states that the workers attempt to recreate the natural landscape from memory. As Paolozza has directed it, we never have the impression that the workers are trying to recreate a world they once knew. Instead, the workers seem to be moving from scene to scene quite deliberately, apparently interested only in getting the mechanics of the scene right.
What is most unfortunate is how much effort the workers put into assembling and then disassembling what Paolozza calls a “scenic marionette” and how little the payoff there is once it is built. This is especially true of the second last scene which requires an inordinate amount of time and effort to create the illusion of a brook passing through rocky shores.
Generally, shows featuring mime or puppetry have the great advantage of being able to make rapid changes from scene to scene since they rely on the audience’s imagination to fil in the change of location. Here, strangely enough, it is the effortful, physical changing of sets that takes up most of the time. I assume Paolozza wants us to be intrigued by how the workers can drape reams of plastic and over ladders on their sides to create what looks like a rocky landscape, but he cannot expect us to be intrigued by the amount of fuss it takes to clean everything up to get ready to build the next set.
Despite the show’s hazy concept and its lumbering execution, the workers’ efforts do produce several lovely scenes. One of the best and simplest is when all five stand close together and become a tree, their gently turning hands suggesting leaves. Another is when a feisty bulldog encounters several geese. The most surprising puppets are the seagulls which are models of birds attached by long poles to the workers’ heads.
Also admirable is the show’s overall design concept by Ken MacKenzie in which the sets are deliberately constructed out of humble materials. A forest is made up of tubes wound round with lots of brown paper, mesh and tape. Water is blue cloth that performers shake or move up and down. Hillsides are plastic sheeting. The puppets of the dog and the geese created by Puppetmongers follow this rule and it’s fun to see the creatures have been put together out of everyday items.
The ensemble playing the workers – Nada Abusaleh, Nicholas Eddie, Gibum Dante Lim, Annie Luján and Kari Pederson – do an impeccable job. One only wishes one could see them functioning more as performers and less as stagehands.
In a cleverer production, Paolozza would find a way to make the transitions from scene to scene as entertaining as the scenes themselves. Here the main source of continuity is the varied and atmospheric live soundscape provided by SlowPitchSound. Intimately linked with the sound are the subtle changes of lighting designed by Andre du Toit which do more to suggest changes of time and place than all the arranging and rearranging of “scenic marionettes”.
Last Landscape is certainly a theatrical experience unlike any other, but it definitely needs to be rethought. At two hours including intermission for a wordless, non-narrative performance piece is too long. Too many scenes are confusing and make no impact, such as the long, strange scene in Act 2 where workers wander about waving pampas grass for no discernible purpose. The show needs a clear throughline and a clear point. While there definitely are enjoyable highlights, they are briefs flashes of pleasure amid pools of tedium.
Christopher Hoile
Photos: Cast of Last Landscape; the ensemble as a tree with Kari Pederson, Nicholas Eddie and Nada Abusaleh in front and Annie Luján and Gibum Dante Lim in back; Nada Abusaleh in a forest, giant sloth in background. © 2025 Fran Chudnoff.
For tickets visit: buddiesinbadtimes.com.