✭✭✭✩✩ / ✭✩✩✩✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩

by Viktor Lukawski et al. / Michele Smith et al. / Michele Smith et al.,

directed by Viktor Lukawski / Michele Smith & Dean Gilmour / Michele Smith

ZOU Theatre / Play It Again Productions / Ahuri Theatre, The Theatre Centre, Toronto

April 17-May 18, 2014

“The First Hatchlings from a New Arts Incubator”

The new Theatre Centre at 1115 Queen Street West is home to two theatres.  The larger theatre upstairs opened on March 19 with Alana Mitchell’s Sea Sick and is currently home to Studio 180’s production of Mike Bartlett’s Cock.  The second smaller theatre on the main floor is called the BMO Incubator for Live Arts and has just opened with the world premieres of three one-act plays.  As one might expect from an incubator for the arts, the plays are of variable quality, but the main point is that Toronto now has a venue where such experimentation can be undertaken.

The productions will be supported through a new collaborative producing model, The Independent Creators Cooperative, that will provide the producing companies with artistic and administrative mentorships with award-winning creators Theatre Smith-Gilmour (Dean Gilmour and Michele Smith, Co-Artistic Directors) and Why Not Theatre (Ravi Jain, Artistic Director). 

The three hour-long physical theatre pieces play in different sequences over the run.  On opening the night the first piece was Ahuri Theatre’s Ralph + Lina written by Michele Smith, Dan Watson and Christina Serra.  This is the most successful of the three and the most reminiscent of the work of Theatre Smith-Gilmour in its strong narrative thread and in its mixture of humour and melancholy.  The action begins in Peterborough, Ontario, Ralph (Watson) and Lina (Serra) fighting over the covers as they lie in bed, signalled by standing up holding a sheet in front of themselves.  When the alarm goes they break into a hilarious, super-efficient morning routine where every action serves a double duty, like Ralph’s lifting Lina on his shoulders into her hanging dress.  Their struggle over who will read the morning paper turns into an antagonistic tango.  The action is minutely and imaginatively choreographed and beautifully executed. 

When Lina has to repair Ralph's shirt before he goes to work, the smell of the shirt wafts her back to the time when they first met in Italy and he was Rafaele and she was Carolina, who worked sewing handkerchief hems for Rafaele’s demanding mother.  In the lunch breaks Carolina shares with Rafaele physical hunger soon turns to emotional hunger.  The two become engaged only for the radio to announce that Italy is now at war and all young men must enlist or be executed.  The show alternates between scenes of Rafaele at war and Carolina at home.  Once Rafaela has been gone for seven years, Carolina’s parents pressure her to marry the doltish man Eduino (also Watson), they have chosen for her.  She holds off as long as she can, but the very day she reluctantly agrees to marry Eduino, Rafaele returns.  Carolina and Rafaele concoct an outrageous plan to help Carolina escape marriage.  Carolina’s next trial is waiting for Rafaele to find wrk in Canada so she can join him.

This is physical theatre at its finest integrating movement, dance, acrobatics and relying on minimal use of dialogue.  Watson and Serra, husband and wife in real life, have easy, palpable rapport with each other.  Serra, in particular, has a wonderfully expressive face adept and conveying conflicting emotions.  What the depiction of hyper-fertility in the final scene means is not exactly clear but it does involve the whole audience in a celebration of the couple’s happiness.  Of the three one-acters, Ralph + Lina is the only one that seems completely finished and ready for a larger audience.

The play’s premise is that Desdemona and Ophelia return from the dead to reenact their deaths and to castigate the male-dominated world in order finally to rest in peace.  The problems begin with the title.  To whom does “my” refer?  Neither Desdemona’s father Brabantio nor Ophelia’s father Polonius is mentioned in the play, and in both cases the fathers predecease their daughters.  So who is there to utter the words of the title?  The next problem is that Desdemona and Ophelia are hardly parallel cases.  One can see why the ghost of Desdemona might be angry with her murderer, although she expresses no such feeling in the play.  But why has the afterlife given her no insight into Iago’s role in the action?  Ophelia, of course, commits suicide, but contrary to what DMMD implies, it is the death of her father that drives Ophelia to suicide, not Hamlet’s rejection of her. 

The action of DMMD begins with Desdemona (Nina Gilmour) and Ophelia (Danya Buonastella) dragging themselves onto the stage wile making strange noises.  Dressed both in white and looking much the worse for wear over the past 400 years, they are pleased to have and audience.  They first reenact Desdemona’s death with Ophelia playing Othello to a recording of Verdi’s opera with Othello in a silly helmet made from a colander.  Then they reenact Ophelia’s death.  Since Hamlet did not kill her, they try to create a link by Gilmour’s marching a Ken doll dressed as Hamlet over Ophelia’s body while reciting he “To be o not to be” speech in a poor imitation of a lower-class British accent.  What purpose does this serve?  Does this mean Hamlet only contemplates suicide whereas Ophelia actually carried it out?  Next Gilmour manipulates Ophelia’s corpse as if she were a marionette and delivers her final flower speech.  Again the point is unclear. 

Leaving Shakespeare behind Gilmour and Buonastella shift gears completely and  stage a Republican women’s meeting with Gilmour now playing far-right speaker Ann Coulter, who explains why good-looking women are Republicans and family women and bad-looking women are Democrats and baby-killers.  This causes both Gilmour and Buonastella suddenly to imitate pregnancy and birth.  Having two boys, the two refer to their babies by the names of various tyrants and dictators of history in between bouts of waterboarding the babies to find out “information”.  So are these babies supposed to be future villains or victims? 

The play concludes with the two women barbecuing and then eating the babies except for their heads that they carry on skewers.  The show then commits the greatest sin possible in physical theatre – the two deliver the message of the play, as if we has got it through their actions – in words.  Gilmour states that all men should be killed and Buonastella calls all men scum.  The two then drag themselves off again as they had arrived. 

Gross misandry aside, what really condemns this play is its extreme self-indulgence and low quality of acting.  Every scene goes on for far too long and the themes are not so much developed as repeated.  Since the plays is done in the buffon style of clown, the intent may be meant to be outrageous, but the result, being neither humorous nor intriguing, is only extraordinarily tedious.  DMMD may have been a hit at the Fringe, but in the context of this triple bill, this is the most obvious one to avoid.

The third show on opening night, ZOU Theatre Company’s Business As Usual is the most sophisticated in its use of light and properties.  The set by Ken MacKenzie consists of three panels with waist-high windows with venetian blinds and equipped with fluorescent lights when needed.  These are moved in various configurations around a table and chairs to suggest different locations within the same office building.  In one especially effective scene the three are moved in tight to make a box representing an elevator.  Director and co-creator Viktor Lukawski says in his programme notes that the show grew from “images of businessmen stuck in cyclical routines, aiming for great heights, but sinking under the weight of their own excess”.  This is exactly what the show depicts, its main flaw being that it seems more like a collection of skits than a narrative, although it would not be hard to create a narrative if the piece more clearly focussed on the two workers Johnson (Adam Paolozza) and Johnson (Nicolas Di Gaetano) and their Boss (Viktor Lukawski).  

The skits depict a humiliating business environment where those lower down on the hierarchy literally have to wipe the bums of those high up.  The particular company whose corporate headquarters we are shown is suffering from a wave of suicides by businessmen whose deals have collapsed in the post-crash economy or who simply can’t take the meaninglessness and indignity of the daily grind.  The show begins with a man jumping more than 100 floors to his death, but throughout the action the three actors portray others sailing past or sliding down windows or taking the fateful step off the ledge. 

In one puzzling scene the Boss speaks at length to an incommunicative gorilla in a business suit, the point being both the cliché that life inside the building is like a jungle and that the Boss construes talking in front of someone as having a conversation.  In another scene the Boss indulges in a fondness for posing his two flex-neck desk lamps in sexual positions.  The best scenes, however, are those involving all three actors as Johnson and Johnson, who are supposed to be working on a memorial service for the suicides, vie for points with the Boss in seeking advancement and engage in competitions of oneupmanship with each other to establish dominance.

The second half of the piece moves towards a satisfying conclusion, only to end with a scene of Johnson (Paolozza) literally drowning in work under his desk, that more logically would have appeared earlier.

Though the sequence of scenes seems disjointed, there is no doubt of the physical and verbal acting abilities of the actors and of the inventiveness of their use of props and space.  One of the most memorable scenes is that in the elevator where the three men retain their macho exteriors as long as the doors are open, but gradually dissolve into tears and then heavy sobs until he doors open once again and their flip back to “normal”.  This is a very clever show that with more work could be quite a hit.

As mentioned above the three shows in the BMO Incubator Space at The Theatre Centre are shown in ever-changing sequences and can be seen individually or together in different groupings.  For the complete show schedule and further information visit www.3shows.ca.  It is exciting to think what further theatre pieces with hatch from The Theatre Centre’s new incubator.                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Dan Watson and Christina Serra, ©Lacey Creighton; Nina Gilmour and Danya Buonastella, ©2014 Johnny Hockin; Adam Paolozza, Viktor Lukawski

and Nicolas Di Gaetano, ©2014 Kadri Hansen.

For tickets, visit www.3shows.ca.