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by Rosamund Small, directed by Mitchell Cushman

Outside the March, 149 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto

April 29-June 1, 2014

Anna: “People are terrible.  They keep trying to die”

Outside the March is an exciting theatre company that has made a name for itself with its innovative site-specific productions such as its Mr. Marmalade in 2012 or with productions that use theatre in new ways such as its Terminus also in 2012.  With Rosamund Small’s latest play Vitals concerning the life of EMS workers, OtM encounters a text whose subject matter can, in no literal or practical way, be rendered by a specific site.  Although setting the action in and around a single house in the Roncesvalles area gave the work a sense of claustrophobia, the performance of Katherine Cullen is so powerful it would have been as effective in a conventional theatre as in the various rooms of a house.

OtM begins your immersion into the world of EMS workers when you check in at a booth at 149 Roncesvalles Avenue and learn the location of the venue.  Audience liaison Sébastien Heins hands you a clip-on radio receiver, headphones and latex gloves and charges you as a first responder to head directly for the location of a house indicated on a map.  The moment you put the headphones on you hear the repeated call for responders to aid with a situation at the venue. 

The notion of urgency that Heins so well imparts is naturally undercut by the fact that you have to walk to the site of the emergency.  It is further undercut once you arrive and see the 25 or so other “first responders” standing about waiting for the “emergency” to begin.  As it happens the action doesn’t begin with an emergency at all.  Rather, Cullen as Anna steps out of the house to tell the audience about factors that can impede EMS workers from arriving at their target in time.

Small’s play, based on a series of interviews with real EMS workers, reveals the frustrations and rewards EMS workers experience in doing their jobs.  One frustration, revealed in Anna’s first speech, is that EMS workers, even if they are on an assignment with sirens blaring, are required to pull over to assist anyone who hails them.  It’s shocking to learn that some people hail them for trivial purposes.  Their teeth hurt after visiting the dentist or their arm is broken and they want a painkiller and the EMS workers have to stop even when they are on their way to deal with a reported subway jumper.

This introduction sets up the structure Small gives the play that alternates between the stories of increasingly distressing calls, calls with a positive outcome, calls that misuse Emergency Services and stories of how these calls affect Anna’s state of mind.  Each call elicits a flow of adrenaline as Anna with her coworkers plan what to do as they travel to the scene.  Arrival may show that things are just as they expected, nothing at all or unimaginably worse.  Merely hearing these stories, we feel the change between an increase and decrease of tension, or, as in the last case, an increase followed by a further increase.  It is easy to see a job that requires such a vacillation between extreme moods could easily cause someone to break. 

Anna gives us the example of two coworkers – Amir, whom she likes to work with and Henry, who she hates.  Amir, who worked as a medic in Afghanistan, keeps his state of mind elastic and ready for anything.  Henry, however, immediately has to take control even though often the job involves situations out of their control. 

When we are first allowed to enter the house, we expect it will be decorated as an emergency scene.  It is not.  Designer Anahita Dehbonehie gives each room a look that suggests disruption from the normal in different ways.  There are trees growing in the kitchen and a goldfish bowl in the dishwasher.  The upstairs bathroom you might think would be covered in blood, but the tub is full with suicide notes floating in it that one of the silent “First-Responder” assistants fishes out for you to read.  One room has pennies strewn all over the floor.  Another has low lights and yoga mats.  Downstairs the living room is strung with excerpts of the script.  Only the dining room is kitted out as a recognizable location, the EMS despatch room. 

Overall, there is no real point in using the venue.  We are gestured through it by the silent assistants, but, except for the dispatch room, what we see has little to do directly with what we hear from Anna in person or over the headsets.  Retrospectively we see that kitchen forest, the penny-covered floor and the yoga room all relate to incidents that Anna has told us, though we don’t necessarily see them when she tells us about the incident.

A scene that does not work is when we witness from the back balcony of the house the pantomime of an EMS worker trying and failing to talk a suicidal man (Jesse Watts) from jumping in the subway.  Here the subway platform is represented by the roof of the garage in back.  Having accustomed ourselves to the house standing in for every dwelling Anna has had to enter, this scene breaks the pattern and it’s hard to view it as anything other than a man jumping off a garage.

Yet, some effective use is made of the house.  Besides the despatch room, which might as well be a theatrical set, the house as a location is important when Anna’s words refer to its a “her” house and she walks through us to the front window to tell the story of a man living on her own street whose suicide she was called to prevent.  The awkwardness of passing his house every day afterward is made palpable by our being in the neighbourhood ourselves.  Another excellent use of the site is when we are led to an attic bedroom covered in a spiral pattern with the chairs set in a spiral formation.  Here Anna relates the worst call she ever received and signifies this by unzipping a plastic divider and looking into the closed-off space.  We see nothing but her reaction but it conjures up more horror than her words express. 

Shortly after this incident Anna has a breakdown and finds she can’t perform her job as well as she should.  We, of course, have been wondering how anyone manages to perform such a stressful job at all.  If we did not already have a high opinion of EMS personnel, the show brings home the multiple sources of pressure on assignment and within the organization that would test anyone’s ability to cope.          

  

Small has accomplished the difficult task of giving shape to a series of interviews by raising questions in the first half the play that receive surprising responses in the second half.  I appreciate the work done to turn an ordinary house into what I assume is a cognate for Anna’s memories, but since the play’s success lies so much with Cullen, the play could work just as well – and be more inclusive of people with difficulty in standing or negotiating stairs – if staged in a small theatre with projections as a background.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Katherine Cullen as Anna; Katherine Cullen as Anna. ©2014 Michael Barlas. 

For tickets, visit www.outsidethemarch.ca.