Review - Tenderpits / Revenge of the Popinjay - AnimalParts Theatre Company, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✩✩✩

by Anthony Johnston & Nathan Schwartz, directed by Nathan Schwartz

AnimalParts Theatre Company, Videofag, Toronto

September 12-15, 2013

Johnston: “Just worry about the things you can control – like the weather”

Videofag, a 35-seat theatre in Kensington Market, has just hosted the Canadian premiere of Anthony Johnston and Nathan Schwartz’s much-lauded multimedia play Tenderpits (2010). Not only that, it has also hosted the first-ever performance of its sequel Revenge of the Popinjay. Technical difficulties dogged both productions but had the most detrimental effect on Popinjay. One of the problems with multimedia theatre is uncooperative multimedia. In some ways it’s too bad that Johnston and Schwartz’s company AnimalParts Theatre is so focussed on multimedia work because in Johnston it has an actor so talented and amazingly versatile he could charm an audience on an empty stage without any additional effects to give his performance impact.

Tenderpits falls into the oldest category of fringe theatre – the autobiographical solo show. Johnston and Schwartz make this new through their magic realist approach to the subject matter and their associated manner of organizing the material. The show begins with Johnston playing himself waiting tables in New York City. Sitting at the table are two stuffed toys. Since the toys do not speak, Johnston treats them as recalcitrant clients. Suddenly, we flashback to Johnston’s origins. Born in the town of Tenderpits somewhere in the Prairies, Johnston yearns to go to New York City to make his dreams come true. An American audience would accept this as a given, but a Canadian audience will wonder why dreams can’t come true in Canada. It happens that both Johnston and Schwartz are Canadians who are now based in New York.

Johnston depicts the emotional scene when as a boy he comes out to his family – not as gay (that is, refreshingly, a given) – but as a wizard. Then, in a hilarious demonstration of his powers, he shows his ability to be everywhere at once by taking up a rapid succession of poses all around the stage. Eventually, Johnston is aided in his quest to go to New York when encounters the legendary Drunken Moose of the Prairies who grants the wishes of anyone who rides him.

After the arduous journey projected on an antique map of North America, we find Johnston standing up while in a sleeping bag and with lots of hand action occurring in his nether regions. We assume the worst, but it turns out, as the projections show, that he is merely playing a series of video games. Johnston’s magic powers include being able to win at The Legend of Zelda and all its spinoffs. Once he steps out of the bag we see he is clad only in an adult diaper. He assures us that wearing this is a sign of his new freedom since he can “go” whenever and wherever he wants.

Thrilled finally to be in New York he decides to see his first Broadway show – Chekhov’s Three Sisters. He is so inspired by Masha’a speech about work, that he decides to get a job. His attempts include auditioning for the part of Ariel in the Disney musical The Little Mermaid and being lead singer in a post-punk band. Finally, he gets a job as a waiter in a restaurant with an entirely Latino wait and kitchen staff, with whom he fully identifies as a fellow immigrant. Given the massive responsibilities he has, he thinks he has “made it” and will make his grandmother and sister back home proud of him. Intertwined with this economic success story is his personal success at finding a partner over the internet – a man he calls the Professor with whom he has intensive “study” sessions.

While the material may be autobiographical, Johnston presents himself as a modern version of Voltaire’s Candide, innocent of the evils of the world, guiltlessly enjoying anonymous sex, happy with his semi-homelessness. He is living according to his grandmother’s notion that people can do anything they want to if they only try. Thus, this glow of positive thinking transforms the grit of everyday life into something magical. What makes this solo show so remarkable is Johnston’s ability to convey biting satire, touching naiveté and pure looniness all at once.

During the first run of Tenderpits, Johnston’s grandmother and one of his sisters died. Johnston acknowledges this in the present version of the play with their deaths becoming an impulse to live the only life he has to the fullest. Thus, when he next sneaks into The Three Sisters he is infuriated by the sisters inability to go to Moscow.

It is in the sequel, Revenge of the Popinjay, where these deaths, particularly the death of Johnston’s pseudonymous sister “Cara”, become the main subject. The show begins with a warning from Johnston that since we are in New York we have to take certain precautions. Gay couples are encouraged to be affectionate in public. Straights should attempt to look and act as gay as possible. As we discover a serial killer is on the loose in the city who targets straights and dumps their armless bodies in the river.

Johnston then launches into a discourse on string theory and a demonstration of what is it like to live in a multiverse, which knowingly is very like his earlier demonstration of his magical power of ubiquity in Tenderpits. In this episode Johnston hooks up with another guy whose name is also Anthony and who has also lost a sister. Together they form the Dead Sisters Society. He meets Anthony II, a surgeon, when he is at a gay disco on “90s Night” with his sister Cara, something he always wished he could do and now in his narrative becomes a reality. One-hit wonder Joan Osborne’s 1995 song “One of Us” (“What if God was one of us?”) becomes am important refrain in the show.

Meanwhile, Johnston is attending group grief counselling sessions led by a woman who keeps reminding the group to ignore how attractive she is. The audience becomes her group as she helps us to regress to our memories before we were born. When she asks Johnston to recount a dream he leads us so far into it we no longer know what is dream and what is the basic surreal reality of New York as he has presented it.

Anthony II asks Johnston to attend a performance of the gay rapper Popinjay at an underground nightclub that is literally far under the ground. Johnston takes on Popinjay’s persona, very like Eminem, except that he praises his own prowess at gay sex while spewing out a virulent heterophobia so extreme that he exhorts his audience to kills all straight people. When Anthony II starts flirting with Popinjay and then goes home with him, Johnston starts to suspect that Popinjay is really the serial killer that has terrorized the city. Yet, when he speaks to a pair of comical cops, they are not interested.

If Tenderpits was a fairy-tale in every sense of the phrase, Popinjay is a nightmare. Not only is the subject matter and imagery disturbing but Johnston gives his ability to transform himself instantly from one role to the next an unsettling new spin. Given the dreamlike context, we eventually become unsure what is happening to Johnston’s identity. When he goes to look for Anthony II in the hospital, the staff treat him as if he were Anthony II and he begins to perform surgery. When he meets Popinjay, we are unsure if he is talking to Popinjay, Anthony II or if Johnston has somehow morphed into Popinjay himself. And does Popinjay represent a force larger than merely a single serial killer?

Popinjay is a dark and brilliant work. The whimsical bird imagery of Tenderpits morphs into the more uncomfortable octopus imagery of Popinjay, playing on the fact that both creatures have beaks. Unfortunately, I must report on the way Popinjay was presented on opening night. The tech side of the show was totally disorganized and, for something billing itself as a multimedia theatre piece, that is a disaster. The show stopped and started according to whether various problems with sound, lighting and scenery could or could not be solved. The two shows together which were billed as running 120 minutes, wound up lasting four hours because of all the delays. Popinjay seems never to have had a tech rehearsal in the venue before since so many of the problems appeared not to have been foreseen.

This is a great pity since Popinjay has the potential to be a very powerful work. Its darkness makes it an ideal counterpoise to the lightness of Tenderpits. These two are the first two parts of a projected trilogy that I certainly hope I have the chance to see. Meanwhile, I will hope to see a performance of Popinjay once all the kinks have been worked out (only the technical kinks, of course). The management of Videofag assures me that the remaining performances of the two plays will runs only for an expected two-and-a-half hours. I hope that is so, because Anthony Johnston’s performance is spectacular.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://tenderpits.eventbrite.ca.

2013-09-13

Tenderpits / Revenge of the Popinjay