'BUNNY' - AT TARRAGON THEATRE UNTIL APRIL 1ST

BUNNY

"I WILL NOT SERVE THAT IN WHICH I NO LONGER BELIEVE, WHETHER IT CALLS ITSELF MY HOME, MY FATHERLAND, OR MY CHURCH: AND I WILL TRY TO EXPRESS MYSELF IN SOME MODE OF LIFE OR ART AS FREELY AS I CAN AND AS WHOLLY AS I CAN, USING FOR MY DEFENSE THE ONLY ARMS I ALLOW MYSELF TO USE - SILENCE, EXILE, AND CUNNING." 

JAMES JOYCE, 

FROM HANNAH MOSCOVITCH'S 
PLAYWRIGHT'S NOTE FOR BUNNY

Bunny is a troubled love letter written for the past and present, bringing two  seemingly disparate timelines together in a single character. From the Brontes to Jane Austen - a flow from Victorian sexuality to current struggles to emancipate marginalized sex/gender roles from ongoing double standards. The script breathes new life into conflicted choices infused with emotional chaos, provocative affirmations, and profound friendships that question the nature of conventional romantic and sexual boundaries. 

A pitch perfect cast, directed by Sarah Barton Stanley to exhibit emotional and sexual vigour,  allows even smaller roles to resonate with jigsaw like significance as the full import of this sexualized dramedy gradually unfolds over the course of ninety powerful minutes. And the comedy found in this script becomes a delicate and skilful blend of superb writing and a powerful range of emotion and vocal variance by the title character.

L-R - MAEV BEATTY WITH MATTHEW EDISON AS CAROL

Maev Beatty's immense skill for bringing incredible nuance and charismatic charm to any given character makes Hannah Moscovitch’s title role into the complex and self interrogating individual that an exquisitely bold and beautiful text demands. Structurally the ninety minute piece strikes a balance between expressionistic and impressionistic tones as Bunny's audience-direct monologues move seamlessly in and out of ensemble interaction, leaving just enough to the imagination yet provocatively suggesting both the best and the worst of outcomes.

Matthew Edison's Carol is delivered with a simply stated, suave and casual demeanour in the form of a privileged loving husband and brother. Mixing charm, intellect, and vivacious elegance Rachel Cairn’s portrays Carol;s sister Maggie with the style and grace needed for a pivotal supporting role. 

LEFT - RACHEL CAIRNS AS MAGGIE WITH MAEV BEATTY AS SORREL

Gabriella Albino’s youthful and genuinely played Lola (Maggie's daughter) creates a generational connection to all of the roles with potent energy and discomfiting poise. Jesse Lavercombe’s Angel, a kind of distorted contemporary link to Thomas Hardy's Angel Clare, responding to a maturing and ever changing Tess, matches Lola’s boundless presence with a brand of male charisma that is at once charming and unsettling. 

L-R JESSE LAVERCOMBE AS ANGEL, GABRIELLA ALBINO AS LOLA

Cyrus Lane’s hesitant yet exuberant manner as the lusty, regretful professor furthers the complexity of current conflicts regarding student/teacher rapport with a finely tuned sense of the complex nature of boundaries and personal/individual responsibility.

L-R MAEV BEATTY WITH CYRUS LANE AS THE PROFESSOR

Tony Ofori’s Justin - at once heartbreaking/at once playful - in a relatively small opening role, sets the stage for the romantic relay race to come, and rounds out an ensemble cast that possesses a superb sense of a community of characters creating collective narratives that mesh and intersect over the course of a play and a lifetime.

L-R- TONY OFORI AS JUSTIN, WITH MAEV BEATTY

Michael Gianfrancesco’s set, a simple circle with an unlikely grassy sea - yet decidedly faux lawn-like demeanour bespeaking the recurring symbolic ‘green’ of human and pastoral nature - acts as an inside/outside environment playing with the symbolic circumference of interwoven lives. The unique elegance of the space stands in for all of the sites of play and remorse the narrative embraces, lending an almost Beckett like, slightly surreal, monumentally minimalist elegance to the playing space. Unlike the preferred, euphuistic excess of this reviewers play with words and language. 

Gianfancesco's simple and effective costumes subtly compliment the set as they suggest time changes with the aid (in the case of Sorrel) of a nostalgic stole and various shoe styles. aided by clever direction that has the male members dressing Sorrel like she is an object of their affection - a doll - when in fact her escalating agency belies this 'dressing' choice in a powerful and complicated way,

Stanley's direction of this daringly crafted script uses a hand full of small significant gestures throughout, reminding viewers of past moments and related sequences of dialogue and action. Memories retold and rejuvenated by a simple nod or smile from the background - all composing bittersweet physical nuance in the face of life's exhilarating tragicomic parade of carnal action, emotional pleasure, and conflicted  denouement. 

And there’s a canoe and a jovial Canadian reference that brings it all home to roost within the wealthy, manicured wilderness of cottage country - as a kind of indirect connection to Austen’s infamous lake country and the beloved ‘men to mountains’ comparison/analogy from Pride & Prejudice.

It all comes together in a gorgeous and spare woman-to-woman affirmation that simultaneously supports and complicates current #metoo sentiments that provide essential, painful, and complex modes of personal and professional survival. 

Moving through a historical continuum that has both oppressed and unshackled sexual behaviour and gender in various marginalized bodies, Bunny affirms sexuality as a mutable adult playground, mixing vitality with potential consent and apprehension that must be carefully re-negotiated with each new act and opportunity. 

Ultimately, Bunny exposes, through linearity that flirts with past events, the arduous often fretful experience of navigating human boundaries over the course of a single lifetime. As noted so eloquently in an online epigraph, through the words of Emily Bronte - “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.” 

http://www.tarragontheatre.com/show/bunny/

Bunny runs at Tarragon Theatre 

until April 1st