Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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by Greg MacArthur, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Necessary Angel, Artscape Sandbox, 301 Adelaide St. West, Toronto
March 16-April 2, 2017
Graham: “We are bigger than the city”
With A City, now receiving its world premiere in an elegant, minimalist and non-realist production from Necessary Angel, Montreal-based playwright Greg MacDonald has written a 65-minute piece that challenges conventional notions of what a play is. Unlike Sarah Kane’s most experimental play 4.48 Psychosis (2000), MacDonald’s play does have characters and does have a story to tell. But his four characters who also act as narrators dispute and digress from the story more than simply telling it. It’s takes a while, but eventually we realize that the story the four are actually telling us is different from the story they think they are telling us. MacArthur in effect hands us shards of four people’s experiences and gives us the task of assembling them on our own to make sense of them. Since MacArthur’s theme is no less than the nature of the soul, the involvement he asks of us is both stimulating and illuminating.
The first thing we learn from one of the narrators is that what we about to see is true. It is. The basis for MacArthur’s play is the time he spent in Montreal the early 2000s as part of a theatre company called the Sidemart Theatrical Grocery. The names of the four characters come from the names of the real performers of that company – Andrew (Justin Goodhand, who suggests a secret, never revealed side to his character), Gemma (Amy Keating, playing the most impassioned, most sympathetic of the four), Graham (David Patrick Flemming, who tends to swallow key phrases, playing an ill-defined, unaccountably angry character) and Paddy (Cole J. Alvis, who plays the least perturbed but perhaps the most profoundly moved of the group). One of the the company members dies at age 31 from unknown causes. The play is an attempt to convey the impact of that death on the company as embodied by the four named actors.
The real name of the actor who died is not given because the group feels it would be an invasion of privacy. Therefore, they have substituted for it the name “Shia Leboeuf”, the name of a real, living actor born in 1986, who will be 31 this June. The name chosen is redolent with irony because the photographer “Shia Leboeuf” venerated by the four actors is completely unlike the grade C American movie actor and would-be performance artist. Or, if their “Shia” is not different, it casts a deeply comic light on the charismatic, near mystical influence that they all attribute to him.
The basic facts of the story, which come out in non-chronological order, are that the four attended a performance by the already renowned Shia, who told them that he needed a company of actors to pose for giant-sized photographs of a series of tableaux vivants depicting turning points in history including the American Civil War and the Death of Punk. The group agree, Shia completes his epic endeavour, wins acclaim and becomes the groups’s intimate friend and flatmate.
Seven months prior to the performance we are watching, Shia attended a huge Halloween party that the group were holding in their flat. He came as King Tut, wearing a copy of Tut’s death mask, his body covered in gold paint, but he left at some point, when exactly no one can remember. The next morning, Andrew learns that a jogger has reported seeing a dead body covered in gold paint in the park nearby. The group is asked to identify the body and it is Shia. In January the next year there is a memorial service for Shia and a retrospective of his work. By then it seems that the four are no longer living together. and they are moved to see themselves all together again in the photographs Shia had taken. The play we are now watching is their attempt to commemorate his life.
MacArthur presents the play as if what we see is the group’s work performed in full awareness of an audience with which it occasionally interacts. Clearly, there are scripted parts of the group’s recreations of scenes from the past. But there are also scenes that are presented as if they are glitches or improvisations that occur in the group’s presentation. Fairly early, the group, especially Gemma, who functions as the chief narrator, comes very close to describing how they all felt on the day that they discovered Shia was dead. Just as they approach that moment, Graham and Gemma get into an argument about why the window was left open that night, thus allowing Graham’s cat to escape, never to be found.
Throughout the play recreations of scenes meant to lead to revelations of emotion devolve into petty, seemingly unscripted disputes. The actors are unamplified but there is a microphone on hand and when the discussion seems to have shifted too far off topic, one of the four takes the mic to state a fact about the events to bring the rest on course again. The inherent irony of MacArthur’s play is that both the scripted and unscripted parts of the play are, of course, scripted.
Despite the constant dissolution of the group’s narrative, it becomes clear that Shia not only inspired the whole group as a group but produced a life-altering moment for each of them individually. Gemma saw Shia dramatically throw himself on top of the case displaying King Tut’s sarcophagus as a type of “artistic intervention”. Shia helped Graham get through the process of having an MRI. Shia led Paddy to the hidden church where Paddy subsequently recorded his best music. Shia led Andrew about on a leash while Andrew wore his makeup as an alien from a movie he was filming.
A City is the kind of play where the audience has to learn how the play works as it proceeds. We eventually realize that the group’s evasions and digressions from the most intimate aspects of their knowledge of Shia derive from their unwillingness, or more likely their inability, to express the depth of the emotions he inspired. Andrew’s excursion leads to what would seem to be a description of more intimate relations with Shia, but Andrew stops himself short before revealing any more of his story.
Three keys to understanding the play come from Gemma’s remarks at the very beginning, before the middle and at the very end. At the beginning after Gemma has said that everything in the play is true, she begins an account of the scientific examination of near-death experiences and how similar the reports of those experiences are. Most scientists view the experiences as products of chemical changes in the brain. Some, however, the ones she favours, view them as proof of a human soul.
Near the middle Gemma relates what the 2014 Montreal exhibit of the artefacts of Tutankhamun was like. While the golden death mask was the most impressive, a replica of which Shia wore to the Halloween party, the other miscellaneous objects gave a picture of what life of the dead 18-year-old was like in the 14th century bc.
At the end Gemma speaks of the shock that approaching death causes to the brain. Never having encountered death before, the brain wildly tries to save as much information as it can, trivial or not, of the life of the person it has inhabited.
Taking these three remarks together, we can see that MacArthur has provided us with many ways of interpreting the the jumble of information that the four actors present about Shia. In some ways he was like the soul of their group, the spirit that animated them, and his departure has left them forlorn, separated and aimless. On the other hand, they are also the repository of memories of Shia and everything associated with him, trivial or not, and everything they recall helps to rebuild the memory of the person they lost. Just as Shia’s epic photography series immortalized the group, so this performance that the group has created in honour of Shia has immortalized him. Though Shia is often identified with the city, we see that Graham is right is his remark about the remnant of their group: “We are bigger than the city”.
Thus, in little more than an hour, MacArthur has written a work that evokes the themes of art, mortality and immortality and their relation to a life cut short, its artefacts and the soul. Bowing in no way to theatrical conventions, MacArthur’s play can be frustrating at times in its apparent aimlessness. Simply stay with it, though, contemplate Gemma’s words at the end and, under Jennifer Tarver’s incisive, insightful direction, the reason for the play’s manner of presentation will come sharply and movingly into focus. As a play that pushes the boundaries of what theatre can be, it is a play no true lover of theatre should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Cole J. Alvis, Justin Goodhand, Amy Keating and David Patrick Flemming, ©2017 Dahlia Katz; Justin Goodhand, Amy Keating, David Patrick Flemming and Cole J. Alvis, ©2017 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.necessaryangel.com.
2017-03-18
A City