Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✩✩
by Colleen Wagner, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams
Obsidian Theatre Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
March 9-25, 2006
Obsidian Theatre Company’s first production of a play by a white author is Colleen Wagner’s 1996 Governor General Award-winning drama The Monument. Obsidian gives it just about the best production one could imagine--a first-rate cast, incisive direction, evocative design and gorgeous lighting. The problem is that these assets only underscore the play’s inherent weakness.
Stekto (Garnet Harding), a war criminal accused of the rape and murder of at least 23 women, is released from his death sentence by mysterious woman Mejra (Yanna McIntosh) provided he agrees to do everything she says. This implausible deal is never explained, but Wagner needs it to set up a situation where victimizer becomes victim and vice versa that forms the tedious majority of the play’s 100 minutes where Mejra subjects Stetko to verbal and physical abuse. Since Wagner treats the two as symbols not characters, we care nothing about either. Today we have grown more cynical and doubt, unlike Wagner, whether people desire or can truly grant forgiveness.
Given the text’s limitations, Harding and McIntosh give superb performances. McIntosh displays a fierce, barely contained rage, while Harding succeeds in humanizing a man we would otherwise dismiss as a beast. The real tragedy is that horrors of war found in today’s news make Wagner’s parable look more like a fairy-tale.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-03-16.
Photo: Yanna McIntosh and Garnet Harding. ©2006
2006-03-16
The Monument