Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Diane Flacks, directed by Andrey Tarasiuk
Pleiades Theatre with Red Boots Canada, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
May 9-26, 2012
“Ukraine’s Loss, Our Gain”
If your goal in attending Luba, Simply Luba is just to be in the presence for 90 minutes of one of Canada’s most beloved comediennes, you will likely be quite happy. If you also expect to see a well-crafted solo play that gives you insight into the star, you will likely be disappointed. It may be hard to believe but Luba Goy’s narration of her life story as written by Diane Flacks is never as funny or as informative as it should be.
The show starts off well enough with Goy entering from the audience and attempting with comic hopelessness to keep up with a sung Ukrainian-language church service led by musician Victor Mishalow from behind a screen. If only the show stayed along this line and capitalized on Goy’s talent for mime and imitation, it might be more successful. Instead, Flacks has gathered what seem to be, for the most part, inconsequential stories, torn them into two or three pieces and then interleaved the pieces in non-chronological order. This type of ordering can sometimes make sense when an underlying order appears that develops a theme, but here the Flacks’ chosen theme for Goy’s life, like that of a failed undergraduate English essay, is too broad – Goy is Ukrainian. The examples from her life are frustratingly general and they lead to no insight to Goy herself or what makes her the great comedienne she is. It could be that Goy and director Andrey Tarasiuk, who are listed as collaborating with Flacks on the script, deliberately do not want to reveal too much about Goy. If that’s true then why bill the play as the means to discover her “passionate soul and poignant story”?
We learn that Goy’s parents met when they were 19 in an internment camp set by the Germans in World War II and as a result Goy was born in Germany in 1945. Seeking work, the family moved to Belgium and then emigrated to Canada. Her father was a comic actor and her mother a dancer, so when Goy says later that as a teen she rebelled against her parents (wanting to be a dancer but then becoming a comic actor), it sounds as if Flacks is imposing a false narrative line on the material. Besides her father who died when she was only 12, Goy names Miss Barbara Blackstone, her Grade 7 music teacher, as one of her formative influences. Miss Blackstone encouraged Goy to enter a public speaking contest that she won. Then she experienced the thrill of speaking before an audience.
Just as the theme – Goy is Ukrainian – is too general so are most of the stories Flacks has chosen from her life. We earn that Goy’s mother was Ukrainian Catholic and her father Ukrainian Orthodox, but we never learn what effect this had on her. Goy imitates very well her father and his friends speaking together about how they will overthrow the Soviet government in Ukraine while her mother dismissively spits on her hot iron. She claims later that she was apolitical until she joined the Royal Canadian Air Farce crew, but this example shows she was from a political household. Did she side with her father or mother? We don’t know because the story ends in a fantasy of the father and friends doing various animal calls as signals.
She says that her favourite story was “Katerina”, a fairy-tale poem written by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko in 1838, that her father used to read to her at night. She comically enacts the story of the poem about an innocent Ukrainian maiden seduced and abandoned by her Russian lover, but we never learns why such a depressing story should be the favourite of a little girl.
She says liked the two French sisters they lived with first in Ottawa, and imitates them, but we don’t know what it is she liked, especially when they turn out to be prostitutes. She says she liked living with the Order of Grey Nuns in Ottawa, where her parents sent her to get her away from the French sisters, but again we don’t find out why. She mentions losing her virginity to her boyfriend in a tent in Stratford just after seeing a play. But what the experience was like, of either the play or the sex, we don’t know. Even the story of losing her budgie and praying for its return seems to have no point. What was so special about the budgie? Is the anecdote symbolic in some way? The most important incident would seem to be when her father was declared insane and put in an institution. But we get absolutely no information about how Goy felt about this or how it affected the family. And so it goes through most of the show.
Finally, Flacks settles down for a long section alternating Goy’s meeting at a gala dinner with Viktor Yushchenko, the first president of an independent Ukraine, with the story of learning of the death of her father on Ukrainian Christmas. There is no particular point to interleaving these two stories except that Goy wishes her father could have lived to see Ukrainian independence. Otherwise, Flacks has juxtaposed parts of the proudest moment in Goy’s life with her saddest moment and if the effect feels contrived it’s because it is.
Unsurprisingly, Goy gets the greatest audience response when she does some of her famous imitations from Air Farce – the nine Prime Ministers who served during the show’s run from 1973 on, Margaret Atwood, Queen Elizabeth, etc. Since Goy has imitated more than 3000 characters in her life so far, one wonders why Flacks didn’t think to integrate some of them into Goy’s life story rather than relegate them to her rapid survey of Air Farce.
Accompanying Goy during her tale is musician Victor Mishalow, who sometimes sings in his dark basso profondo and plays the bandura, the 67-string lute-like Ukrainian national instrument. It’s a shame that director Andrey Tarasiuk has decided to hide him behind one of the three screens that serve as Douglas Paraschuk’s simple but lovely set. His visual presence would give Goy someone to interact with, rather as Mary Lou Fallis does with her accompanist, and would allow us to see the magnificent instrument and how it is played.
It is, of course, a pleasure to spend 90 minutes with Luba Goy, but when you leave you can’t really say you know her any better than you did before. Too many stories are too vague or fizzle out rather than conclude. Tarasiuk claims that “this solo performance relates how one woman overcame whatever life threw her way”, but, in fact, that is exactly what we do not learn from the show because the obstacles and how they were overcome are never clearly presented as such, especially when Goy’s story is told in a mélange of fragments. Goy deserves a better showcase than this, and we can only hope that Luba, Simply Luba is only a workshop production on the way to a better play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Luba Goy. ©2012 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2012-05-12
Luba, Simply Luba