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by Michael Spence, directed by Jacquie P.A. Thomas

Theatre Gargantua, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

November 3-18, 2017

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragmente 1869-74.

Theatre Gargantua is celebrating its 25th anniversary season with the production of Reflector, the culmination of the company’s twelfth cycle of work.  Conceived and directed by Jacquie P.A. Thomas and written by Michael Spence, Reflector aims to explore “an evolution in human communication – the use of modern technology to share images instantly and globally”.  If that goal seems rather too general for an 80-minute-long play, so it proves to be.  The work features frequently dazzling visual interludes but its story is unfocussed and two of its three plot-lines are unresolved.

The central story of Reflector focusses on the award-winning photographer Declan (Michael Spence), who is suffering from visual agnosia because of a particular photo he took that became a worldwide phenomenon.  He is seeing Dr. Haddad (Abraham Asto), a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, to help him recover is ability to recognize objects.  Declan’s agnosia is not due to an injury but is a psychological reaction Haddad likens to PTSD.   

The play also introduces us to two of Haddad’s other patients – Roula (Michelle Polak) and Kelly (Louisa Zhu) – before we realize that they, too, are Haddad’s patients.  Roula suffers from a rare condition condition called hyperthymesia which allows her to remember in minute detail everything that ever happened to her from age 14 onwards.  (Roula seems to be based on the first documented hyperthymestic known as AP identified in 2006.)  Kelly is a teen star vlogger who posts thousands of selfies on her website documenting everything she does.  Very late in the show we learn she is seeing Haddad at her parents’ request to examine whether living her life online has deprived her of social skills and to learn why Kelly allowed her website to go dark for three weeks. 

As Spence rotates among these three stories, the team of four chants and engages in athletically choreographed interludes while nine screens of varying sizes, part of Spence and Laird Macdonald’s set design, show rapid-fire projections designed by Macdonald of virtually all the most famous photographs of the past 70 years.  These include Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution” from 1968, Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” of a naked Vietnamese gun running in terror in 1972, Steve McCurry’s 1984 “Afghan Girl”, Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the 2015 photo by Nilüfer Demir of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach that brought world attention to the Syrian refugee crisis.  It is that last photo and its effect in changing world opinion that Thomas and Spence had in mind when they created Reflector. 

The question raised by the Declan plot is the morality of the photojournalist who to get a good photo allows something horrendous to occur in front of him.  In Declan’s case his fictitious photo is of an eight-year-old girl being shot and killed.  Rather than intervene to prevent the death, he did nothing but get a great photo.  He is now plagued with a paralyzing guilt despite his fame.

The other three characters of the play have also seen the photo and been affected by it, but that is really all that links them.  Declan wants to forget, Roula is unable to forget, Kelly wants no one to forget her and thinks she has given herself virtual immortality.  The stories, each interesting in themselves, do not mesh well.  Kelly’s story in particular feels like it belongs to an entirely different play.  Spence has Declan go through much handwringing but ultimately gives him a rather too easily won resolution.  Surprisingly, Roula’s and Kelly’s stories seem to be completely forgotten by the end of the show and are left hanging.

Reflector wants to say something about how it is revolutionary for an image to take on special significance and have worldwide exposure via the internet.  But why this should happen and what is unique about that one photo of billions taken are never explored.  Despite the prowess all four actors show in acting, singing and dancing, one leaves Reflector feeling that interesting issues have been alluded to but not woven into a satisfactory theatrical experience.  Though Reflector is visually dazzling, Theatre Gargantua has done better in the past in integrating storytelling with multimedia.  Let’s hope it does so again in its next 25 years.

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Abraham Asto, Louisa Zhu, Michelle Polak and Michael Spence; Abraham Asto and Michael Spence. ©2017 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.artsboxoffice.ca.