Ars Poetica

At Bain St-Michel, 5300 St-Dominique, Montreal, from January 17-February 12, 2012.

Infinite Theatre Production

An Anglo Montreal Theatre company when it chooses to explore the local Anglo Arts Angst (AAA!) scene in a spectacular manner, and for a month long run, is possibly exposing itself to a live post-mortem, which is not a particularly pleasurable encounter for the theatre company concerned.  A vitriolic dissection demolishes young actors and the experienced alike, especially when enormous efforts have gone into the production.  On the other hand, a careful and benign story line reportage followed by a few casual praises does not up the art, either.  The etymology of Ars suggests a historic commitment to high art.

A courageous act, no doubt, on the part of the company to encourage a local story by a local writer. But the Anglo community being what it is—growing in presence, vociferous, envious, cautious, (but rarely experimental), sees things in a variety of ways which is often colored by personal exigencies, animosity, competitivity, defensiveness and not always in the fantastic and expansive realm that theatre as an art form offers to those who are simply interested in being in the audience.  In other cities in North America (and there is no need to specify Brooklyn or Manhattan as the examples) the theatre critic maybe entirely anonymous; just as a food critic in Montreal restaurants is often not recognizable (since the days of the late Rochester and Chandwani). The point is that we know each other and must continue to know each other as we are a small community. Therefore needless to say, the pressure on the critic and the well-wisher, here, is extremely significant. But, the critical view of the audience cannot be numbed!

Having said that, one must state the obvious. This was a great production, very well technically cued up, excellently blocked, considering the complex geometry of the set, but essentially culled out of a dead-beat script; chock full of clichéd, banal and stereotypical character incarcerations. From beginning to end, stereotyping dominated. From the sleazebag lawyer Hugh portrayed adeptly by Howard Rosenstein, to the elfish student intern (the daughter Naomi) conniving to move to NYU, (the supposed Valhalla of creative writing)– miscast but valiantly acted by Elana Dunkelman. Then came the archetypal and hugely avoidable Canada Council Program Officer whose Quebec-isms are an archaic instigation and throwback to the racist Anglos who departed down the 401 highway to Ontario and elsewhere in the seventies. All this leaves the play wanting in intelligence.  Wanting in contemporariness, wanting in a dateline that defines its periodicity.  In a post-Bush, Harper world– Montreal’s contemporariness goes beyond a few casual mentions of Concordia, McGill and Cote Vertu. The act of defining it as a “serious farce” (Guy Sprung to Pat Donnelly in the Gazette), does not get the script off the hook.  It remains muggy, earthbound, and non-ethereal—- the etymology of the title would suggest otherwise—while the sets are telescoping skywards in a spectacular manner.

George, the Publisher (Noël Burton ), who has inculcated in his staff the allegorical ability to enter and exit complex financial and social circumstances through the fire escape,  is outstanding as an actor who takes his character beyond its spine; words and grunts tumble out of his mouth in near spontaneity as he lives the character on stage.  Now here perhaps is the redeeming creation of the writer Holden, who must have an insight on the lives of well-known Montreal poets. There must have been a deeper understanding  here of the connections between popping a bottle of bubbly early in the AM, flying off to Cancun with grant money and liaising dangerously in one’s office.

Guy Sprung, Artistic Director of Infinite Theatre and Director of the play, is extremely resourceful, cycling his way around corporate Montreal tirelessly, networking, making the right connections, raising substantial sums of money to keep alive a significant Montreal institution( and injecting lascivious characters often in his productions along the way). This play however was surprisingly contained.  No subtext, no suggestions, no post-orgasmic exhalations. Everything peters out at the end and a cinderellaesque compromise is achieved.   Sprung’s ability however to deploy the right resources towards an excellent utilization of the old, cold bath house repeatedly for theatre, is commendable. When one enters, one is reminded of the new Acropolis Museum at Parthenon, large cubic shapes and windows to another world, slanted at expansive angles with gobos and projectors streaming the words of well-known Montreal Poets. The sets were done very imaginatively by Veronica Classen.

All in all a production worth going to, but marred by the writing.

Lipsynch by Robert Lepage

Quebec’s Robert Lepage and his company, Ex Machina, collaborated with Theatre Sans Frontieres to bring  Lipsynch, to The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival (Oct 3-11). It would be an understatement to state that this production transported its audience, with breathtaking images, into the magical realm of nine intertwined lives through the window of his vertical space of theatre and opera in a marathon, nine-hour production. 

 Lepage began his exploration of the human voice by literally flying us into his universe. On his magic carpet Lufthansa airplane, from Frankfurt to Montreal, are Ada, an opera singer, (Rebecca Blankenship) rehearsing in first class while a crying baby is in coach, held in the arms of her deceased mother, a Nicaraguan prostitute named Lupe (Nuria Garcia).  Lepage uses a surgeon’s scalpel to juxtapose these two lives and all that follow.  One is left with the visual metaphor of the plane as a birth canal.

 We are introduced to a number of intersecting lives: Marie (Frederike Bedard), who while attempting to understand what her deceased father had to say on old 8mm films, hires a lip-reader to assist her; Thomas (Hans Piesbergen), the German neurologist, whose fascination with the human brain destroys and leaves a female patient speechless; a sex worker (Sara Kemp) who struggles with issues of incest; Ada, who makes the decision to adopt Lupe’s baby whom she names Jeremy (Rick Miller), whose journey is to make a film, loosely based on his biological mother’s life.

My first introduction to Robert Lepage’s visionary work was the Metropolitan Opera’s production of La Damnation de Faust, currently in repertoire at the Met.  His inventive use of technology, without sacrificing the artistic integrity of the opera, enthralled me.  It should be noted that Mr. Lepage has been commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2012 Wagnerian Ring Cycle, to be conducted by Music Director, James Levine.  So anticipated is this Ring Cycle that audiences are urged to become Diamond Ring ($25,000) and Golden Ring ($10,000) pre-subscribers to secure priority seating.

In Lipsynch, his set pieces, which break apart and reconfigure from an airplane in to the London tube, for example, are not a distraction to the story line, instead they engage and focus our attention.

Lipsynch is layered with multiple languages.  As an audience member, if we do not understand German or French, we must make the decision to focus our attention somewhere between the subtitles and the actors. But if we do not speak Spanish, as there are no subtitles here, does the physicality and emotionality of the actors justifies this?  Or does he want to scramble our brains and challenge us?  

 Remembering and forgetting -some haunting images: an elongated goodbye between Ada and Jeremy as the train pulls out of the station.  The last act, when Lupe is reduced to a sexual commodity and wraps her hands around her transparently exposed breasts.   And then there is Lupe’s lifeless body cradled in Jeremy’s arms.

One of the central themes of Lipsynch revolves around the sex industry and those who are exploited by being seduced with false promises only for the profit of sex traffickers: Lupe’s story is sadly commonplace.  Currently on view in New York, is JOURNEY, an experiential installation designed by well known artists such as Anish Kapoor, Emma Thompson, who worked with and assisted Elena in retelling her story in the Resurrection room, and Sam Roddick, who designed a shockingly filthy (and smelly) room with a pulsating bed and a mirror that is inscribed in lipstick with the words, Help Me.  The central figure is Elena, a Moldavian woman, who was tricked and sold for 500 British pounds, to a sex ring in London.  Her story and that of Victoria, Tina, Isabella, Yolanda, Saphire and Ola is recorded and honored with painful first-hand descriptions of humiliation, sexual brutality and submission.  It is important to note, and this ties directly into the multiplicity of language in Lipsynch, that half of these women spoke poor or very little English.  How are they to speak and who will listen?

Ex Machina engages its actors through the improvisational process of building a theatre piece, stuck by stuck, from clinical research to personal stories, in powerful workshops that are reminiscent of the late choreographic genius of Pina Bausch, as well as other theatre luminaries such as Anne Bogart, Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Andrei Serban, Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook.  As a creative tool, this process is a force that both stimulates and gives authenticity to each sequence, actor and Act.

Robert Lepage defined it best, “I often compare our evolving artistic process to the image of a tree.  The audience only sees the trunk, bark, branches, and leaves.  But the artist should be preoccupied by the growth happening underground, in that unseen network of roots digging erratically yet so expertly that it can hold, sustain and nurture the whole tree…we often confuse voice, speech, and language, but those are indeed three very distinct and totally different things.  Lipsynch is about the signification of all three and their interaction in modern human expression.” 

 I am looking forward to 2012 and being in the audience for the Met’s Ring Cycle.  The only question is, can I afford it?

Christine Khalifa and Abdel Ghafour Elaazir

There is no denying that Truth and Treason is politically compelling. The shooting of a ten year old Iraqi-Canadian girl at the start of the play is an echo of the horrible recent bombing of the two oil tankers in Afghanistan. The set design is perfect for the content and the direction of the ten compelling performers is very good. It is also very important to reconfirm outrage at the making of war for profit and to be horrified by the on-going corruption that is the war in Iraq. The play is a very cinematic work; moving rapidly from short scene to short scene to movement and then more very short scenes.

I am one of the converted. I read the international news and keep my outrage fresh Therein lies the problem. Unlike Rahul Varma’s Bhopal, this play had no emotional focus. It was really impossible to identify with or even sympathies with any of the characters. I understand that we are accomplices in this and any war fought in our name.

Yet theatre has its own internal rules. There could have been a great emotional moment when Ahmed the Iraqi finally decides to go to Canada, after a great deal of begging on the part of his wife and the U.N. soldier. After his monumental announcement, the others in this scene just walk off and it never gets the emotional punch it merits, or rather, the emotional catharsis for which the audience was holding its collective breath.

There was an opportunity for some kind of feeling in the scene between husband and wife, after all he had been imprisoned for eighteen months and they had just lost a child. It was very hard to buy a love story between the uber- capitalist organizer of a conference of international investors and the relatively sympathetic American captain who actually made some effort to save the child. We were expected to buy a complex relationship without any foundation. The captain is the one character in the play who has integrity and honour, yet his part was so underdeveloped that Alex Ivanovici, whom I usually love in performance had only two notes, intense and quiet or loud and over the top. David Francis, one of our best actors, an actual national treasure, played the Commander in a virtual monotone. His character was written more as a caricature than a persona. Sarah Garton Stanley was more varied in her role as a reporter, but she should have known as a director herself that the script was underdeveloped.

Christine Aubin Khalifah, showed promise but was not given a chance to act. The idea of a lost child is enough to make most people emote. Her performance was so reserved; one did not feel for her at all. Abdeighafour Eleaaziz was not only too understated, he was sometimes barely comprehensible. Ivan Smith was performing in presentational mode as the sheik and the Prime Minister, while the other actors were seemingly in a method acting representational style. I would like to see Warona Setshwaelo perform in something more manageable. She has a terrific presence and is always interesting to watch. Her dialogue seemed awfully repetitive and her persona one- dimensional.

It was apparent in the performance that some of the actors were struggling with their lines. In the program there was an accent consultant, well, in pronunciation accent is not nearly as important as tone rhythm and stress.

Brecht wrote about the alienation technique, but no one is unmoved by Mother Courage and her fate. The scenes in Truth and Treason are so short, that they become very similar and it is harder and harder to follow the story. There were many scenes which merited longer beats. Very often the tone of the sentences was so flat that one was guessing at the meaning. It requires a particular ear to understand the import of certain dialogue, especially when the dialogue is minimal.

There is a great play here; I believe that Rahul has a plot that can work and a number of fascinating sub-plots. What he needs is a lot more dramaturgy. It is difficult enough to arouse an audience that is not yet converted to a point of view as sharp and important as Rahul’s; exposition and exhortation are not enough to accomplish this. Instead of giving us a huge beautiful canvass, one felt that here was graffiti being sprayed on and erased as we watched. I only hope that this play gets the next draft that it so clearly deserves and that it will be re-mounted soon.