Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Kat Sandler
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
February 1-24, 2018
“Bang, bang. Who’s there?”
Are the rash of shootings of unarmed Black people by police officers a proper subject for comedy? If you think not, Kat Sandler’s latest play Bang Bang, commissioned by Factory Theatre, will prove you are right. Though just such an incident lies at the centre of the play, Sandler is able to find comedy in just about everything peripheral to the incident, but not in the incident itself. When dealing with that incident, her play turns deadly serious and suddenly becomes more engaging never to return to the comic mode again. The question the plays leaves you with is why anyone thought police shootings of Black people would be a good subject for comedy in the first place.
The story concerns Black female police rookie Lila (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah) who shot an unarmed 16-year-old Black male, pulled over for running a red light, when he moved after being told not to. Though the young man lived, the incident sparked outrage, Lila lost her job, lost all her friends and suffering from depression has moved back home with her mother Karen (Karen Robinson), a psychiatrist. Even after that people protested outside her mother’s house.
Tim Birnbaum (Jeff Lillico), a young Jewish playwright, inspired by the dramatic potential and the twist in the normal scenario of a White male officer shooting a Black male, has written a play “inspired by true events” that has become a hit. He never visited Lila when he was doing his research for the play, though he did visit the victim. Now he shows up at Lila and Karen’s residence to talk. The incident is four years in the past and Karen doesn’t know what there is to talk about and doesn’t feel that dredging up the past will be good for Lila.
As it happens, Tim has come by not only to warn Lila and Karen that his play is going to be made into a movie but that the star, Jackie Savage (Sébastien Heins), will soon be visiting them to talk with Lila, since the studio decided to change the female Black police officer of Tim’s play into a male Black officer. Much outrage and ridicule of Tim ensues until Lila decides that the group will read Tim’s play out loud to see just how much he has changed her story from what really happened.
What should be clear from the brief synopsis above is that Sandler’s play depends on the coincidence of two unlikely events. First, it is very unlikely that Tim’s play could become a hit without the theatre company for the sake of publicity or a newspaper for the sake of a story bringing forward the link between Tim’s play and the real people behind it. In fact, it is doubtful a theatre company would produce a play based on real events, especially when these events had caused such a stir, without seeking the approval of the people involved in the real story if only to prevent the people from filing a lawsuit.
Second, how is it that Tim knows Jackie is going to visit Lila and Lila and Karen do not know? Tony (Richard Zeppieri), Jackie’s security guard, says that the studio messed up. But that still doesn’t explain why Tim would act as messenger rather than have the studio contact the family. The fact that Jackie’s arrival should come at he same time as Tim’s visit is a major coincidence that pushes the premise for the action into the improbable.
Given that the two women are still suffering from the effects of Lila’s action, it is natural that Sandler should make the three men her major source of humour. Tim is the particular focus. Sandler makes him particularly awkward at explaining why writing a play “inspired by true events” is not the same as appropriating the story from those who lived it. Sandler could have had Tim explain that empathy is an essential human quality (essential even in some non-human species) that allows people to experience the pain of people they do not even know. Empathy and imagination are what allow an audience to feel emotions of characters in a play who are not even real. Is it wrong that the first novel in English to focus on a Black character (Oroonoko, 1688) happens to have been written by a White woman (Aphra Behn)? Yet, Sandler does not bring these arguments up.
Instead, when Lila says to Tim that she thought writers were supposed to write what they knew, Sandler has Tim nonplussed and ask does that mean he should only write about Jewish subjects, like the Holocaust, to which Karen responds, “That’s too old”.
With the arrival of Jackie, the question of whose story is it becomes even more complicated. The studio has changed the female Black police officer in Tim’s play to a male, so how can Lila even claim that the story is hers anymore? Jackie is the only Black character in which Sandler feels permitted to find humour since he is a washed-up Disney child star trying to make a comeback as an adult with the film of Tim’ play.
Jackie’s White ex-policeman bodyguard Tony is also a source of humour much in the way companion servants are in classic comedy since his main preoccupation seems to be food and drink. Yet, Tim’s inability to prove his credentials for political correctness, Jackie’s egocentricity and Tony’s hunger are all peripheral to the central incident of the play.
Significantly, when Sandler finally does focus on that incident as written in Tim’s play with a commentary about what really happened from Lila, all humour drains from the action. There is nothing funny about what really happened or about the poetic license Tim has used in representing it. For an audience familiar with Sandler only as a comic playwright, this section of Bang Bang proves that she could work as well in tragedy if she wished to as much as her favoured genre of comedy.
This section also makes us wonder what the point was of the overly extended comic sections that led up to it. This feeling is confirmed by the fact that Sandler cannot return to her comic mode after showing us what Lila really experienced. Instead, Sandler makes the unfortunate choice of moving into melodrama to end the play and turning Tim into a scapegoat for his misguided attempts at allyship.
If Sandler means the play to open a discussion of the questions she raises, she does not quite achieve that aim. She doesn’t adequately express the two sides of the argument of the appropriation of stories, but, strangely enough, she does allow Tony a long speech explaining the correct police procedure in dealing with suspects who may or may not be armed and what causes policemen to make mistakes. She also allows Tony to explain why female cops have so much more difficult a time in the force than their male counterparts. In terms of providing the audience with information it likely does not already know, Tony’s speeches are the most enlightening in the play.
Otherwise, the important question of “Whose story is it?” is simply rehashed rather than developed. We go through it once with Tim’s arrival. We go through again with Jackie’s. And we go through again during the group reading of Tim’s play.
If Sandler’s play is flawed, the ensemble of actor is not. All six give exceptionally fine performances. The most notable is that of Jeff Lillico as Tim. Lillico is on familiar ground playing an embarrassed character desperately trying to portray himself as “woke” and politically correct and failing miserably. But in the melodramatic conclusion Lillico moves into a amazing realm I’ve never seen him occupy before when he lets loose all shackles and portrays Tim as hysterical, angry, dangerous and pitiful all at once. Lillico has played nice young men for so long it’s a pleasure to see him access an entirely different, more unsettling range of emotions.
As Lila, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah has at least as wide an emotional arc to cover as Lillico. While Sandler leaves Lilia in varying states of anger and disbelief for rather too much of the play, when Lila has to recreate the events that destroyed her career, Roberts-Abdullah wonderfully shows a Lila forcing herself to maintain a surface of rationality that can barely contain the seething emotions that lie beneath.
Sandler’s depiction of the other characters is mostly binary rather than rich or rounded. As Karen, Karen Robinson has little to do but remain in a state of disgust with her guests for almost the entire play. Only in the melodramatic conclusion does Sandler allow her character to display the bravery and sensitivity which one might have hoped a psychiatrist would possess. Similarly, Sébastien Heins’s Jackie comes across as an energetic dude but not so bright a light until the very end where suddenly Sandler allows Jackie to express something resembling a code of ethics we had never seen before. So too with Richard Zeppieri’s Tony, the main clown of the play, whom Sandler permits a moment of deadly seriousness when he describes the stress of being a policeman.
The show plays out on what may be the handsomest, most elaborate set I’ve ever seen at Factory Theatre. Nick Blais has deliberately designed the set so that we see a space between the supports for the side walls of the living room it represents and the side walls of the stage. In these gaps on either side there are chairs where actors can sit when offstage and tables for props. The point, quite obviously, is to force us see Sandler’s play as a play. If Sandler has done this aesthetic reasons, it is to add a metatheatrical layer to what is already a play about a film based on a play about an incident which is itself a fiction based real incidents. If she has done it for sociopolitical reasons it is to make sure the audience always knows it is watching a play and thus to help insulate herself from Tim, her alter ego in the play. Yet, no matter how much she excoriates Tim, both ultimately are White playwrights writing about the Black experience. Irrespective of which set of reasons showing physical set as a set reflects, to emphasize her own play as an artistic construct supports Tim’s argument, even if he makes the point poorly, that all art is an artificial construct whatever its source material may have been.
Even if Bang Bang relies too much on improbability and coincidence to work, it demonstrates that Kat Sandler is willing to move out of punchy, one-liner-ridden comedy of which she is a master into new less comedic territory. Where this will lead her will be exciting to watch. Even if Bang Bang is a transitional work, it is worth seeing not merely for the questions it surveys but for the fierce commitment of its performances.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Jeff Lillico, Karen Robinson and Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah; Karen Robinson, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah, Richard Zeppieri, Jeff Lillico and Sébastien Heins. ©2018 Jospeh Michael.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2018-02-02
Bang Bang