Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Chris Tolley and Laura Mullin
Expect Theatre/Spark Collective, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 3-13, 2013
“To the Memory of Those Fallen in Toronto’s Wars”
Awake, a hit at the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival, is an earnest meditation on gun-related violence and the toll it takes on a community. It focusses on the shooting death of Amon Beckles in the Jamestown in 2005 when a gunman entered a church during a funeral service for a young man, himself a victim of gun violence, and shot Amon six times in the chest. An example of verbatim theatre, Awake is based on more than 100 interviews by creators Chris Tolley and Laura Mullin with the people of Jamestown and the police to capture the voice of people, who unlike the majority of Torontonians, live with gun violence or the threat of it every day.
The title clearly has two meanings. On the one hand the show is staged as if it were a memorial service or wake for all those who died of gun violence. The original projection in 2011 was staged in the Walmer Street Baptist Church which gave the show an immediate reference point that the present re-staging at the Factory Theatre tries hard to reproduce primarily through the music of organist Richard Wilson.
Awake is also a call for the rest of us in Toronto who do not personally know of anyone killed through gun violence to wake up to the reality that it exists in this city and to feel compassion for those have lost friends and relatives to it throughout the years usually without the closure of ever having these murders solved.
As verbatim theatre everything that is said during the performance was at some time actually spoken to the interviewers. Why this technique does put the voices of the community on stage, it does not mean that those voices have not been edited. For more than 1000 interviews to make a 90-minute play they would have to be. Besides that, whom the creators chose to interview and to exclude, what the creators chose to include or exclude and how they have arranged what they have included all affects how we perceive the play. Thus, while the play purports to give us access to the lives of the people of Jamestown, we have to be aware that this information is still filtered through the sensibilities of its creators. By focusses solely on the people of Jamestown what the show is missing is any sense of context.
The two characters who could provide context to the recounting of lives lied among guns and threat of instant death are the Pastor (Richard Stewart) and Officer X (David Shelley ), a policeman. Tolley and Mullin intersperse the laments and boasts of the other characters with excerpts of a pastor’s actual eulogy for the funeral of Justin Shephard, another young man killed by gunfire. The Pastor uses the example of Cain and Abel in Genesis as the text for his eulogy with the refrain, “Where is your brother?” and Cain’s retort, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” The problem with parables is that they can work in more than one way. The Pastor uses the Biblical brothers as an example that we in the neighbourhood are all one family and have to acknowledge responsibility for each other.
At the same time, the fact that one of the first two brothers on earth slew the other also slows that violence is inherent to man in his fallen state of grace. What is the response to that? In the Old Testament the answer is the lex talionis, “an eye for an eye”. The Pastor shows the folly of revenge by saying that eventually we run out of eyes and teeth. The problem as the examples from the populace show is that revenge has no end. One the two principals in a feud are killed the revenge passes on to friends and relatives seeking a “justice” that a cycle of violence will never achieve. What the Christian pastor strangely omits, or what Tolley and Mullin omit, is the New Testament response to the lex talionis of “turning the other cheek” (Matt. 5:38-39) and “loving your enemies as yourself” (Matt. 5:43).
The second outside source of information could be Officer X, but except for a statement that officers need counselling to deal with seeing so much violent crime, Tolley and Mullin choose statements that place Officer X in the negative light in which neighbour residents view him. He is the “other enemy”. By doing this Tolley and Mullin miss out on the chance to feed information into the play to put Toronto’s gun violence in context. Amon Beckles dies in 2005 which was dubbed the “Year of the Gun” because there were 53 gun homicides in Toronto that year in contrast to the 27 the year before. While senseless violence is never acceptable and the injuries felt are real, the creators should not elicit fear when the facts show that Toronto is still one of the safest large cities on the continent. In 2007 the homicide rate in Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people versus 33.8 in Detroit, 15.5 in Chicago and 6.3 in New York. In 2006 Regina’s murder rate was 4.5 per 100,000 and Edmonton’s 3.7. The creators could also have used Officer X to inform us why Toronto murder rate is so low compared to cities across the border not to instil complacency but vigilance. What can we do to keep our murder rate low? Instead, the play leaves us with the helpless feeling that gun crime is only getting worse and that there is nothing to be done about it. Given the play’s topic a sense of perspective on gun violence in Toronto would not just be useful but is necessary.
On a practical level, the show could use a character like the Pastor or Officer X to gives us more information about the two young men whose deaths we are mourning. Their mothers like all mothers have a biased view of their children. How was it they were drawn into gun violence? Why would someone seek out Amon to kill him is such a public place? We need more than just a general sense of loss to feel the grief of the two mothers more keenly.
The play focusses primarily on the emotional response of the mothers of Amon Beckles and Justin Shephard played with extraordinary intensity by Beryl Bain and Quancetia Hamilton. The play shows that the two women have completely opposite responses to the deaths of their sons. Nadia Beckles loses her faith in God and becomes numb to the world around her. She is outraged in the midst of her grief when no one at the church will say they know her dying son because they fear retaliation. Audette Shephard, in contrast, helps found UMOVE (United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere), made up of mothers who have each lost a child to violence.
We gain insights from the character Heart (Lauren Brotman) about why teens turn to drug dealing rather than taking regular jobs. The answer is that the profits are so much greater. At the same time we learn from Andrew (Muoi Nene) how a father stopped dealing drugs because he wanting to make his children safer from involvement in gangs and guns. Peyson Rock primarily provides the beats for rapping and dancing but as Wisdom reveals that even young men in Jamestown can see the foolishness of submerging their identity into that of a gang.
Songs beautifully sung by the cast and moves elegantly choreographed by Nicola Pantin give the snatches of verbatim speech a lively theatricality. The creators say that the Jamestown residents’ “strength inspires us and reminds us of the power of the human spirit to transcend unimaginable tragedy”. I, however, was left admiring the courage of someone like Audette Shephard but feeling more like Nadia Beckles – helpless, numb, isolated and desperately in need of a context for the outpourings of pain I had just witnessed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Peyson Rock. ©2012 Steve Carty.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival.
2013-01-07
Awake