✭✭✭✩✩

by George F. Walker, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna

TR Warszawa/Luminato/Harbourfront New World Stage,

McBride Cycle, 2923 Dundas St. West, Toronto

June 4-10, 2007

What happens when a Polish avant-garde director gets his hands on a play by George F. Walker?  The answer is both “too much” and “not enough.”  Grzegorz Jarzyna basically uses Walker’s play Risk Everything (Zaryzykuj Wszystko in Polish) as raw material for his for his own exploration of popular culture and theatre.  Jarzyna’s “reimagining” of the play is fascinating for about 30 of its 90 minutes but soon becomes tiringly distracting.  Anyone seeking a production aimed at bringing out the nuances of Walker’s text will have to look elsewhere.

Risk Everything (1997) is one of the six linked one-act plays in Walker’s “Suburban Motel” series.  Denise (underplayed by Agnieszka Podsiadlik) would like to live a normal life with R.J. (a comically nerdish Jan Drawnel), her TV-addicted ex-con husband, but Denise’s mother Carol (the outrageously shameless Aleksandra Konieczna), a slatternly gambler, is trying to cheat a homicidal gangster of $68,000.  Her scheme brings them all into mortal danger including her new lover Michael (a jittery Piotr Rogucki), a porn director from next door.  Only this bare outline of the plot remains.  The translation into Polish trims whole speeches to one to two lines and Denise’s entire important monologue about money is cut.  The actors speak mostly in Polish but often improvise in heavily accented English.  As a result the happy ending seems to come out of nowhere.     

In his director’s note, Jarzyna respectfully calls Walker’s play “trash” since it is constructed from the detritus of multiple genres of popular culture and says that all of Walker’s characters “seem to wallow in a dump.”  To emphasize this the set in the front section of the empty McBride’s Cycle already looks more like a temporary squat than a motel room.  The frequently used toilet is in the store’s show-window.  Carol herself is discovered in a garbage bag.  By the end after numerous retch-inducing episodes, the set and the actors are covered in every sort of (simulated) bodily fluid plus a miscellany of partially consumed bits of food and drink.  Perhaps, the first row should be designated a “splatter zone”. 

The humour of the situation is that the show has two audiences--those who have paid to see it and the unwary passers-by on the other side of McBride’s windows.  Sometimes the cast purposely seeks to involve them in the action, but more often laughter erupts Candid Camera-style when we see their innocent reactions to Michael in nothing but shoes and posing pouch, Carol peeing in the toilet, Carol humping Michael or trying to hump R.J. and the staged beating of R.J. and Michael that leave them with very realistically smashed-in faces.  It is interesting, if only theoretically, to compare the “reality” on stage with the “real” reality just outside to our own peculiar position as voyeurs of both.  Yet, Jarzyna makes all the artistic points he wants from the situation early on, leaving us to contemplate the audacity of his concept at the expense of any insight into George F. Walker’s.              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-06-06.

Photo: Aleksandra Konieczna and Piotr Rogucki. ©Pavel Antonov.