Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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written and directed by Andrew Faiz
The Junes Company, Red Sandcastle Theatre, Toronto
September 18-October 4, 2014
Chanel: “The Kama Sutra is a collection of prayers delivered through the body”
Andrew Faiz’s new play Aromas provides an unusual glimpse into the world of executive level escorts, yet that is not its ultimate goal. Aromas is also about the meaning of sex, identity, fate and choice. If that seems rather much for an hour-long solo show to take on, it is and the play’s greater themes are more often repeated than developed. The show, however, provides an ideal role for Andy Fraser, whose brings out all the nuances of her enigmatic character.
The play begins with Chanel (Fraser) in her apartment taking requests for appointments from prospective clients. In between phone calls, Chanel tells us about her life and how she achieved the status she now enjoys. Her story is told in fragments as she gets dressed to suit each client and, just before she leaves for work, announces “Showtime” before a blackout. Putting together the pieces we receive in non-chronological order, we learn that before she became “Chanel”, she had been Katalin, a Canadian ice dancer touring the world for eight years in a production of Swan Lake where her principal role is that of Odile, the black swan.
When Katalin’s mother first took her to see Swan Lake, Katalin wanted to do nothing else but appear in that ballet. Appearing in it in a vulgar ice-dance version was the closest she could come to achieving that dream, much as it ran against the old-world cultural values of her mother. At the time she saw the ballet, her jaw had been wired shut after Angela, a girl at school, had punched her so hard it broke her jaw. An ironic twist of fate occurs when later Katalin is filmed dancing at a club in Dubai with her fellow ice-dancers and that clip appears in a documentary about nightlife in Dubai that Angela sees on television. Katalin finds out that seeing that clip forced Angela, now a single mother living in a basement apartment in her mother’s house, to reflect on how far her life and Katalin’s had diverged since high school.
Aromas has no plot. It is also unclear whether Chanel is addressing us the audience or some unseen, unspeaking person in her apartment. The latter seems more likely since she interrupts her speeches to answer her phone. But then Faiz abandons the phone calls leading to the costume change and “Showtime” halfway through the play and about five times beyond when the gimmick has lost interest. Since Faiz makes Swan Lake so important, one might think he would use the built-in Odette/Odile, white swan/black swan metaphor it provides, but he seems unwilling to apply it since he doesn’t want to type either side of Katalin/Chanel as “good” or “evil”.
What keeps us watching is mainly to find out how Katalin the ice-dancer became Chanel the top-of-the-line escort. The problem is that we don’t really find out the answer. After generally celebrating her life as an ice-dancer and the family of artists she joined, Faiz has Katalin mention too briefly that the routine of performing the same show and living in anonymous hotel rooms became boring. Katalin allowed a Japanese fan to take her as his companion on a trip to Vietnam, but whether this event is what gave her the idea to become an escort is not clear. In general, we know far too little about Katalin to make us understand why she would make such a controversial career choice.
Faiz is much better at helping us understand Chanel, the persona Katalin created. Chanel’s catch phrase is “Sex is never just about sex”. For Chanel, sex is about faith and her job as a sex worker is akin to that of healer, priest and therapist. She allows men to give up their identities as husband, father, brother or son and simply be human. The most moving part of the play is Chanel’s description of how she was hired by the mother of Charles, an adult son ravaged by muscular dystrophy, to allow him to experience sex.
Angela learns of this but why Chanel would ever speak to her former attacker, much less tell her about this is far from clear. Nevertheless, Angela tells Chanel that helping Charles is something that Katalin would do, not Chanel. This only confuses matters since we don’t know enough about Katalin to judge what Angela is saying.
If Aromas were less descriptive and more dramatic, we would come to see a disparity between the cool professionalism that Chanel projects and the agonizing doubts that underlie that façade. That does not happen mostly because Faiz does not want to undercut Chanel’s life as a sex worker with conventional moralizing. Yet, the result is that we don’t experience any tension within the character. Chanel concludes that different choices have different prices, and we have to assume that loss of identity is the price she has paid for her success.
Andy Fraser embodies Chanel/Katalin so perfectly it is difficult to imagine anyone else in the role. She has the ideal worldly-wise demeanour and just the right deadpan delivery of some of Chanel’s more humorous anecdotes. The matter-of-fact way she discusses sex is intentionally similar to the way she discusses clothing. People may think her job is exciting or disgusting, but to Chanel it is simply a job like any other and one she is proud to do well. While Katalin may remain a mystery, Faiz’s natural way with language and Fraser’s equally natural performance make us feel that we have not been watching an actor as much as hearing the life story of a real person.
Brandon Kleiman has created a clever design for the tiny stage at the storefront Red Sandcastle Theatre. Behind minimal furniture and a garment rack with all of Chanel’s outfits, he has made a backdrop of hotel keys hanging above their corresponding room numbers. This image helps link the two halves of Katalin/Chanel’s life – the touring through hotels with the escort calls to hotels. Ed Rosing achieves a greater range of lighting effects from the Red Sandcastle grid than I’ve ever seen there before.
Andy Fraser’s performance is a pleasure as are Faiz’s judgement-free discussions of sex and prostitution. When the play veers into discussions of identity and fate, we feel the structure Faiz has created can’t really support their weight. What Faiz does best is conjure up the modern feeling of placelessness, where endless travel becomes meaningless movement and globalization has made everywhere look equally alike and empty until something like sex, or faith, provides a moment of reality.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Detail of poster for Aromas; Andy Fraser. ©2014 Tim Leyes.
For tickets, visit http://aromastheplay.com.
2014-09-19
Aromas