What’s love got to do with it…
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
and nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free
Kris Kristofferson
What’s love but a second hand emotion.
Graham
Lyle and Terry Britten
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Charles
Dickens
The West is the spectator, the judge and the jury,
of
every facet of Oriental behaviour.
Edward Said
There are so many clichés and
insightful perceptions available regarding the nature of love, freedom, and
cross-cultural chaos it is difficult to choose the most effective ones. Three
current Toronto productions flirt wildly with clichéd romantic mayhem, sexual
behaviour, and issues surrounding social and carnal liberation and they all
come up with bewildering yet vastly entertaining non-solutions to a problem we
seem to be a little obsessive about here in the west. Love - what do we do
about it? From Kris Kristofferson’s iconic claim about the empty nature of
certain forms of romantic escapism to Tina Turner’s provocative question
regarding what love has to do with anything at all, Soulpepper and Buddies In
Bad Times have some sexually appetizing and politically charged recipes for
audiences to savour.
ARIGATO, TOKYO
Daniel MacIvor’s Arigato, Tokyo
attempts to unpack cross-cultural cliché’s about Japan and delves into the
timeworn abyss of the Madame Butterfly narrative. A stellar cast takes
spectators on a sexy journey through a Canadian writer’s foray into global
tourism with a lot of sex and drugs to bolster his decidedly self-professed
self-obsessed ego. David Storch plays the largely unsympathetic literary icon
with an impeccably brash bravado that can be difficult to watch when he moves
into the most unflattering kinds of Western mimicry regarding vocal
inflection and the ways in which arrogance and xenophobia can mark even the
most intelligent voices. MacIvor has flirted with a vague form of queerness and
homosociality for a very long time and always has insightful, entertaining, and
provocative things to say. Brendan Healey’s direction is spare, concise, and
powerful. Cara Gee, Michael Dufays, and Tyson James all give beautiful,
standout performances as they surround the central character with forms of
‘Orientalism’[1] that
represent (as characters constructed by a queer’ish white pen) sharp
critiques of the ways in which cultural stereotypes continue to wreak havoc
among the romantically inclined.
There are beautiful bodies
everywhere in Arigato, Tokyo. Sumptuous nostalgic, frequently lip synced music
provides a strong 'nostalgia for the present' as inter-cultural sounds and images
provide melodic dramatic tension within and between scenes. At the end of the
play and the end of the day, however, one wonders whether the playwrights
flirtation with social and sexual triangles might have gone a little further
than the heart wrenching finale, rather than perhaps subtly re-instating
particular notions around the ways in which men often fight for the object of
their desire and then leave that object dangling like a lotus blossom about to
fall. MacIvor did this with great success in Never Swim Alone, and tests his
hand once again in his latest homo-socially minded offering. All of these
cross-cultural, inter-sexual concerns are, of course, up to individual
audience members to consider. I for one was a little frustrated, immensely
titillated, and predictably bewildered.
Ultimately this is a must see production of a new Canadian play that tries to explicate the sensational ways in which we can lapse into forms of clichéd talk and physical objectification around the exoticized othered body.
TRUE WEST
True West takes an even more
male-centered triangle fraught with sibling rivalry and demonstrates the
conundrums at play in mid to late twentieth century consciousness when a wayward cowboy
and his Hollywood screenwriting brother lock horns in their mother’s pristine
California kitchen. Stuart Hughes never fails to amaze as he delivers a kind of
vigorouos comic masculinity that Mike Ross matches for the most part, yet
falters near the end for the pivotal explosion of Shepard’esque dysfunction.
His violence is a little too milky and his angst a touch sitcom-ish. Patricia
Hamilton as the mother of these two flagrant heterosexuals creates a
delightful form of internalized iciness, yet errs on the side of detached
control when a more smouldering reflection of her two son’s half -crazed
personas might have served her well. Ken Mcdonald’s set, although effective at
the outset through its impeccable attention to detail, is a bit too crisp and
lighthearted for the one hundred degree heat of a summer confrontation that the
characters speak of and escape from as they move in and out of the comfort of a
suburban kitchen. Moments of Neil Simon meets Sam Shepard rear their unlikely
heads as violence erupts in very cheery passive surroundings. The contrast of
human emotion and object emotion (set and character) don’t quite gel periodically. And the plants
never really look all that dead, just a bit wilted. A kind of earthy, vibrant
Tex Mex ambience might have served the finale better and given the powerful and evocative lighting a more suitable world to inhabit as music, shadows and
Graeme Thomson’s fabulous lighting effects give the ends of scenes a wonderful
parodic tone well suited to this production of Sam Shepard’s iconic 1980 play.
LA RONDE
Jason Sherman’s clever fast-paced
contemporary Toronto adaptation of La Ronde had Stuart Hughes and Mike Ross at
odds again in the evening installment of Soulpepper’s well rounded repertory
fare. Comic clichés filtered in and out of a script that gives Rosedale a
disturbing and intriguing global connection to brutality and sexual collapse.
Near full frontal nudity is always a delight, and Ross and Hughes do not
disappoint. Hughes is able to represent a smouldering sexual energy while Ross
delivers a much more measured buttoned down angst and lustful connection to the
women they attempt to hookup with. Standout performances by Maev Beatty, Grace
Lynn Kung, and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee grace the stage with diverse levels of
corporeal sensuality. Nancy Palk’s direction begins with very sharp, controlled
blocking and pacing that quickly seduces the audience into La Ronde’s maze of
interconnected narratives, but could have utilized a somewhat more raunchy tone
for the sex scenes. Similar to the same-sex connections in Arigato, Tokyo, Palk
and her cast have not achieved the kind of wild carnally crazed energy one
might have hoped for. Brendan Healy’s same sex kisses in Arigato, Tokyo also
lack the form of manic groping head twisting movements any of us familiar with
the real life enactment of sexual frenzy might be interested in seeing depicted
in plays about these timeworn, relentless energies.
Ultimately, three plays spanning
decades of theatrical history flirt wildly with some of our favorite guilt
laden pastimes and deliver entertaining products that are well worth the price
of admission. But they just don’t go far enough into the wild and wooly psyches
that inhabit the scripts, suggesting, beyond the shadow of a stereotypical
doubt, that even now, in 2013, alluring butterflies of all kinds are definitely
not free.
ARIGATO, TOKYO RUNS UNTIL APRIL 14 AT BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES THEATRE
LA RONDE AND TRUE WEST - SPRING SEASON AT SOULPEPPER
LA RONDE AND TRUE WEST - SPRING SEASON AT SOULPEPPER
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