Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✩✩
by Anna Chatterton, directed by Andrea Donaldson
Nightwood Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
October 22-November 6, 2016
“Trapped in tech”
Nightwood Theatre is currently presenting the Toronto premiere of Anna Chatterton’s play Quiver. Chatterton wrote the play in 2011 as her Master’s Thesis in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph with Judith Thompson as her supervisor. The play tells the captivating story of the disintegration of a family as a seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl, her 16-year-old sister and their free-spirited mother. While the story itself is full of drama, the presentation itself is almost completely untheatrical. This result is quite unexpected coming from a performer who has been associated with such highly theatrical works as the plays Clean Irene & Dirty Maxine (2003) and Breakfast (2008) and operas like Swoon (2006) and The Rocking Horse Winner (2016).
The prime reason for the show’s lack of theatricality is that Chatterton has committed herself to controlling the aural environment of the play by means of a laptop and a vocal processor. This has two negative effects. First, by using a vocal processor to change her voice to fit the three major characters and the minor ones, Chatterton leaves to technology one of the skills people most enjoy in multi-character solo shows, namely the experience of seeing actors transform themselves through acting alone into multiple characters. Rod Beattie is renowned for playing as many as twenty different characters in the Wingfield plays changing from one to the other simply by a shift in voice, gesture and posture. In Mouthpiece itself, running in tandem with Quiver, Norah Saldava and Amy Nostbakken take this process to the extreme in playing many characters or different sides of the same character. To watch an actor transform herself all on her own is infinitely more exciting than watching someone press buttons on a laptop.
The second effect of Chatterton’s using tech to control the aural environment is that it shackles her to a single spot on the stage. With her right hand on the laptop, her left on the script and her mouth hidden behind the mic, Chatterton’s concept forces her to remain nearly immobile throughout the entire show. The one scene when she takes the mic off its stand and goes to sit on the stage feels liberating and we hope that having set up her devises she will be freer to roam the stage. Unfortunately, this scene is an anomaly and Chatterton returns to the immobility of the presentational prison she has created for herself.
The effect of Chatterton’s choice of presentation is less like live theatre than watching the taping of a radio show. In an attempt to lend theatrical life to Chatterton’s static presentation, lighting designer Andre Do Toit employs an impressively wide range of effects to make it appear as if something is actually happening on stage.
The principal virtue of Quiver is the story itself. We meet 14-year-old Maddie, who is dismayed at the actions of her sister and mother. The girls’ father had walked out several years ago and the mother, Sheila, has had various boyfriends since then. She has just broken up with her latest boyfriend Daniel, but to her and Maddie’s surprise he has begun dating Maddie’s 16-year-old sister Beatrice, who defiantly defends the relationship. Sheila is so upset by the discovery that she moves in with her former boyfriend Armando leaving Maddie all alone in the house and having to fend for herself. What helps give Maddie the will to carry on is her love of the comic book heroine Arrowette (obviously, a female version of DC’s Arrow or Marvel’s Hawkeye). That and her desire to join the army like Ted, a male friend at school, help her to gain strength in the face of her family’s dissolution.
Chatterton tells her story by shifting among the three women as narrators who reveal their own flawed characters by how they present the events. Chatterton’s characterization of Maddie is charming. She is a brave young teen caught between childhood and womanhood and looking for some way to bring her family together despite the seeming hopelessness of the task. Chatterton also captures the brittleness of Bea’s adolescent rebellion against her mother as well as Bea’s growing disillusionment with Daniel. The most humorous character, however, is Sheila, whose laissez-faire lifestyle doesn’t fit well with her duties as a mother. Chatterton takes a charitable rather than condemnatory view of both Bea and Sheila, regarding them as fallible human beings, who may eventually come to realize their own failings.
If only Chatterton would ditch the whole tech side of the production, this could be a wonderfully engaging show. Chatterton should simply allow the stage manager to do all the sound effects and let herself impersonate her three main characters unaided. Then there will be no electronic barrier between the play and the audience which will allow the actor infinitely greater freedom of movement and expression and thereby give the play greater impact. As it is watching the play borders on tedium. Let’s hope Chatterton frees herself just like her sensitive character Maddie does.
(May be combined with Mouthpiece as a double bill.)
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Anna Chatterton. ©2016 John Lauener.
For tickets, visit http://buddiesinbadtimes.com.
2016-10-24
Quiver