by Sunil Kuruvilla
by Morris Panych
and
by George F. Walker
At the Studio Theatre in
Repertory till October 4, 2009
These three plays, that span
three continents and over a century in time, can all be viewed as plays
about limits in life and happiness. Sunil Kuruvilla’s, a radical re-working
of his original version about problems with cultural inheritance and
adaptation, is the least satisfying in terms of structure and depth but it
is strikingly acted by a largely South Asian cast that brings to it a sweet
and tart East Indian flavour. George F. Walker’s is the oldest, most
exercised play of this trio, thrillingly theatrical in its characters and
plot, yet very much from this popular playwright’s younger days, with a
fantastical “take” on revenge melodrama. Morris Panych, an exciting,
unpredictable talent, attempts something more conventional than Walker,
drawing on autobiographical experience, setting his family story in the
Okanagan, but producing far more humane and human effects than Walker does
in his 19th century Italy. All three are worth a visit, and
together they give the small Studio Theatre its most impressive repertory
bill to date.
Rice Boy is a series of episodes and vignettes encircling 12-year-old Tommy (Araya Mengesha), an East Indian boy raised in Canada, who returns to India for a family visit after his mother’s death by drowning. This background story is never filled in, but Kuruvilla’s mind is on other matters. Tommy’s widower-father, his nerves frayed by his cultural displacement in Canada where he suffers social and economic humiliation, is a tough parent. Tommy’s beloved grandfather is mentally confused, and his uncle and aunt’s marriage is under strain, as the aunt cuckolds her husband. However, Tommy acquires new perspectives on life when he befriends the beautiful teenage cripple, Tina, who creates beautiful rice powder designs on the family’s front porch but who must accept an arranged marriage against her will. These floor patterns become an emblem of a human struggle to find design and stillness within the flux of life.
While never quite maintaining a
strong balance between cultures (Canada is radically diminished as a
symbolic foil to India in this version), Rice Boy is an existential
comedy with exotic Indian flourishes. There are hilarious episodes—one of
the best being the one where his father and uncle, drunk on toddy, are quite
oblivious to Tommy’s falling down a well. The play is generally well acted,
with Anita Majumdar providing sensitive tenderness as the crippled Tina,
Deena Aziz and Sanjay Talwar reprising their roles as Aunty and Uncle, and
Raoul Bhaneja mixing his own hurt with cruelty as Tommy’s disaffected
father. The exceptionally good performances come from Sam Moses as the
eccentric grandfather (this role has undergone a gender change from the
first version) and Anand Rajaram in a variety of impressive cameos, the best
being his fish seller (the estranged husband of Asha Vijayasingham’s
spirited Servant Girl) and an umbrella man who is a secret pervert. Jessica
Poirier-Chang’s extremely modest set design is weak on authenticity, and
Guillermo Verdecchia’s direction is unable to disguise the imbalance in the
cultural bifurcation, though I admit that the India of this story is far
more appealing than the sketchy and austere Canada of the Mennonites offered
as example, and, so, deserves most of the stage time. However, there is a
radical imbalance to things because of this.
George F. Walker’s Zastrozzi is also imbalanced, but as this play is a lampoon of a 19th century view of Jacobean revenge tragedy through the eyes of a contemporary playwright with a fondness for mixed modes, the imbalance is disguised by a whole stock of theatrical resources. The script, unchanged since its debut over thirty years ago, plays out (in Jennifer Tarver’s colourfully taut production) with sanguinary verve, as the eponymous protagonist (Rick Roberts in lank wig and angelic white robes) has a sinister twist to his philosophy as the “master criminal of all Europe,” adding all mediocre or pretentious artists to his gallery of targets. With some of its most potent textual effects created by dramatic monologues (often in striking rectangles of light to the accompaniment of stark sound effects), the play accommodates Tarver’s deployment of various expressionistic devices, growing richer visually with each mode, though it never has a streamlined didactic focus. Zastrozzi’s immediate prey is Verezzi, a young artist who had killed Zastrozzi’s mother (this story is suppressed and becomes a dramatic nullity) and who is in love with Julia (whom Zastrozzi also desires), but by the end of the play, there is no human character left alive except for the “master of discipline.” Walker could have had a dark Jacobean tragedy, but his irrepressible cynical twists of wit have a contemporary casualness and coolness, and his characters, except for one striking exception, are too easily divided into moral categories. There is virginal Julia (a fetching Amanda Lisman) and sadomasochistic Matilda, mistress of the bullwhip (a sultry, dangerous Sarah Orenstein). Then there’s thuggish Bernardo (whom Oliver Becker plays perfectly) and conflicted ex-priest Victor, torn between contempt for Verezzi and an almost sacred mission to protect him. John Vickery acts this role with admirable finesse, making the character really the most interesting one on stage because he is a man of several parts. At the opposite pole, temperamentally, is Andrew Shaver’s neurotic Verezzi, half dimwit, half fop, torn between dancing buoyancy of love for Julia and unjustifiably self-proclaimed sainthood. The play does not stand up to sustained scrutiny but it is fine theatre superbly realized in Tarver’s production.
The most poignant piece at the
Studio Theatre is Morris Panych’s The Trespassers. directed by Panych
himself and with a clutch of fine performances. Constructed from Panych’s
tender memory of his own father who died of cancer, it is about our flawed
mortality. Though Ken MacDonald’s non-realistic décor is hardly a thing of
real poetry (broken hockey sticks turned into the trunk and branches of a
peach tree; a slatted
moon
in the sky), Panych’s production has beautiful dreamy mood music, excellent
lighting, and strong acting, except for Robert King’s unyielding police
detective who is quite colourless and Noah Reid’s loud performance as the
emotionally disturbed teenager Lowell who, however, has some psychological
justification for his outbursts, and the young actor relieves the stress and
strain by moments of genuine humour, wry innocence, and sly cunning.
Structurally, the play is surprisingly conventional, even laboured at times,
for it is built by flashbacks blending into action in the present. However,
as a story about love and death and the weaknesses and strengths of
mortality, it is a fine parable, in which the idea of trespass acquires a
wide metaphorical and metaphysical significance.
Taken by his old, atheistic, cancer-riddled grandfather on regular excursions to a neighbouring peach orchard (abandoned by its owners) where they climb trees and steal peaches, Lowell is taught Marxist lessons about property, ownership, and sharing. Trespassing takes on a novel twist, for all of life is eventually seen as a borrowing of time, at the end of which the ultimate trespasser is death. Hardy, the grandfather (beautifully played by Joseph Ziegler whose acting ace is mellowness and deep feeling relieved by witty irony), teaches Lowell to bluff in poker and other things, believing that “bluffing is humankind at its finest,” and adding: “There’s something in between lying and not lying; it’s called the story.” Which is as profound as it sounds once your mind dwells on the connotations of fiction and truth. Hardy also teaches the boy about euthanasia, sex, and booze, and this brings him squarely into a battle with his daughter Cash, who lost her husband to a woman half her height and age, and who is a Christian prude anyway you look at her. Kelli Fox plays her with strong censoriousness, making a foil to Lucy Peacock’s slatternly, booze-laden Roxy, a former stripper and now Hardy’s girlfriend.
The story is really an unhurried and touching sequence of existential lessons that without Panych’s wry wit would probably become quaintly moral. “Why are people so afraid of sadness?” Hardy wonders aloud rhetorically, and goes on to demonstrate the limits of happiness. The business of his actual death is contrived into a police investigation of suspicious circumstances, but the real interesting the burden of the play is not this at all; it is the ineffable burden of love and then of death. There is a moment near the end when the old man is suffering obvious physical pain and Roxy ministers to him, watching him with her own pain registering on her face. It is a wordless moment but a powerful, achingly tender one that sends ripples through the scene as it is played by Ziegler and Peacock. Again, nothing extraordinary about the writing, but, oh, what extraordinary feeling delivered with utter simplicity and truth. The audience becomes trespassers at such a moment, but the voyeurism makes for a stealthy beauty in the human heart. And this, to me, is the real achievement of the play—moments of credible human interaction and private reckonings, the limits of our lives.
photos: David Hou
pic 1: Sam Moses (Grandfather), Anita Majumdar (Tina), and Deena Aziz
(Auntie) in Rice Boy
pic 2 (Rear) Rick Roberts (Zastrozzi);
(Front) Andrew Shaver (Verezzi) in Zastrozzi
pic 3 (L-R): Noah Reid (Lowell), Lucy Peacock (Roxy) and Joseph Ziegler
(Hardy) in The Trespassers
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