Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Norah Sadava & Amy Nostbakken, directed by Amy Nostbakken
Quote Unquote Theatre presented by Nightwood Theatre,
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
October 22-November 6, 2016;
April 12-22, 2018
“What it means to speak”
In 2015 Mouthpiece by Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken won two Dora Awards – one for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble and one for Outstanding Sound Design/Composition. The work had a short run at the Theatre Centre that year. Now Nightwood Theatre has brought the piece back for a much-deserved second run. While there is nothing wrong with winning two awards, they barely indicate the depth of the work’s questioning or its dazzling theatricality.
The genius of Mouthpiece is that Sadava and Nostbakken take a simple premise and proceed to explore all the implication inherent in that premise. The premise is that Elaine, the mother of the Toronto writer Cassandra, has died and the daughter now finds that she has to deliver the eulogy at her mother’s funeral. This may seem straightforward enough but Cassandra (played by both Sadava and Nostbakken) is at war with herself about whether she should deliver the kind of eulogy her mother would want or whether she should use the occasion to explain what her mother’s influence really was. Doing the former would simply continue her mother’s pre-feminist goal of always aiming to please and to look as act properly according to conventional models of womanhood as reinforced by mass media. Doing the latter would allow Cassandra to expose the malign influence of these models and reveal the reactionary legacy her mother has left a daughter who loved her mother but abhorred her world view.
Two actors play Cassandra to illustrate the unending tug-of-war within the young woman about which path to follow. The more conservative side of Cassandra (usually Sadava) reminds her that the eulogy is about Elaine, not about Cassandra, and should not be used as a personal platform. The more radical side of Cassandra (usually Nostbakken) is aware of this but sees that conforming to convention would be what her mother would do but exactly what she, being true to herself, would not do.
Cassandra’s tasks before having to give the eulogy – choosing what to wear to the funeral, choosing a casket and choosing the flowers – only lead her to further internal battles about how a daughter should represent a mother and, by extension, how one woman should represent another woman or indeed how anyone should choose to represent anyone else. The work is filled with humour as Cassandra tries to justify her procrastination in making all these decisions and as she imagines the most outlandish ways she could fulfil her duties.
Sadava and Nostbakken illustrate Cassandra’s situation through a cappella music ranging from simple humming and basic vocalizations to girl group songs and rock ’n’ roll thrashing. They also use mime and dance to such an extent that the piece defies classification as purely verbal or physical theatre. The duo displays an amazing degree of precision in their choral speaking and singing as well as in their sometimes punishing physical performance.
Cassandra’s plight is interrupted by various phone calls in which concerned friends and relatives express their sympathy for the bereaved young woman. From a folksy elderly aunt to a self-obsessed young woman addicted to upspeak and vocal fry, the imitation of these different voices serves also as an survey of how different women have conformed in terms of speaking to the various models of what women should be.
Mini-lectures about how people speak from a point of view of physiology to the the influence that a mother’s speech may have on her unborn child, emphasize the work’s overriding concern with how any person, especially any woman, has to struggle to find her own voice.
The production uses only two props – a standing microphone to symbolize speaking in public and a bathtub to represent Cassandra’s private world. Andre Do Toit’s imaginative lighting enhances every scene. But most of all Mouthpiece achieves its high degree of theatricality by focussing only on the wide range of movement that Sadava and Nostbakken engage in and the even wider range of sounds they produce from sound effects to classical song to shrieks that seem like experiment into what the outer limits of the human voice may be. It may be only an hour long, but Mouthpiece not only tells a humorous story but formulates essential questions about the struggle any individual has to find a means of authentic self-expression amidst the plethora of pre-existing models of expression. Mouthpiece is a gift to lovers of boundary-breaking theatre.
(May be combined with Quiver as a double bill.)
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken. ©2016 Joel Clifton.
For tickets, visit http://buddiesinbadtimes.com.
2016-10-24
Mouthpiece