(Photo of Yasmin D’Oshun by Mark Halliday)
What can I tell you about Fairview? Since Jackie Sibblies Drury’s script is about the distorting power of the white gaze and the nightmarish inescapability of white opinion — and since I’m a white guy — I’m going to opt for not telling you much.
The play’s central characters are all members of the Frasier family. They’re Black. When we meet them, they’re preparing for Grandma Frasier’s birthday dinner and they seem to be in a kind of sitcom reality — harried mom, gormless dad, plucky teenage daughter, smart-talking aunt — but there are glitches in the matrix: the stereo acts up.
And, when culinary disaster strikes, Drury starts rolling out a series of strategies, modes of storytelling that get increasingly surreal, complex, and challenging. These layers are often funny and always immersive. Theatre bends reality and Drury finds astonishingly original ways to do the bending. Theatre is also personal. Race is personal. And Drury takes full advantage of this viscerality, too.
In my experience, Fairview is almost uniquely disorienting — and reorienting. And I’m moved by its generosity.
That’s pretty much it from me. Much of the power of Drury’s storytelling is generated by its surprises; I encourage you to discover them for yourselves. This production is sure to be one of the shows of the season, if not the show of the season.
It’s well performed and beautifully designed. Go see it.
FAIRVIEW By Jackie Sibblies Drury. Co-directed by Kwaku Okyere and Mindy Parfitt. On Friday, September 29. A Search Party production in partnership with b current Performing Arts in The Cultch’s Historic Theatre until October 8. Tickets
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Some of the dance works well in Generic Male. Much of the other material doesn’t. The two-hander starts off weakly. There’s some audience involvement, only some of which makes sense, followed a bit later by an extended scripted section in which the two performers, Darren Stevenson and Ashley Jones, argue about the placement of chairs. Generic Male explores men’s place in the patriarchy, and this section is about territoriality and conversational dominance, but its approach is obvious and it goes on too long. This show didn’t engage me until several minutes in, when Stevenson launched into a dance that expresses his reaction (or his character’s reaction) to his son’s decision to join the army and go into special ops. Often employing mime, the choreography includes a lovely transition between images of an innocent boy throwing a baseball and an emotionally intense soldier throwing a grenade. This piece ends melodramatically with the soldier’s death — although I understand this as an expression of fear, I still find it melodramatic — but Stevenson’s grace and athleticism are impressive throughout. And the death is followed by the most rewarding choreography of the evening: the two men embrace then, still hugging, spin in circles, lifting one another’s feet off the floor. A bit in which Jones challenges Stevenson to get naked feels superfluous. The text of an awkward father/son conversation about sexual consent feels rotely illustrative rather than exploratory; the ahleticism of the partnering is more rewarding. For me, Generic Male is hit-and-miss, but I enjoyed the sensuality and lyricism of the hits.
I was hoping for an audacious and insightful show about death. What I got was a glib and offensive show about death. In Let’s Talk About Your Death, writer/performer David Johnston plays two characters: Barry, who is the floor manager at the taping of a TV show about mortality, and Dr. Elliot Morris, the exuberant host. We’re in the near future, and a machine has been invented that can scan your hand and tell you with absolute certainty how you will expire. Everybody in the audience gets a little card that reveals how they’ll kick it, and Morris interviews a couple of folks about how they feel about the manner of their demise. From the get-go, the texture of this piece is annoying: Barry keeps trying to hype the audience into hysteria, and Dr. Morris’s over-the-top energy is grating because that’s all there is to it, there’s no fresh spin or original parody. The performance I attended completely hit the skids with the first interview. Morris questioned an audience member I’ll call W and found out that her mother had died 30 years ago of pneumonia. She died alone. Morris/Johnston made no perceivable attempt to compassionately embrace W’s vulnerability. Instead, he kept trying to crack jokes. There’s a section near the end that’s about suicide, but it has no narrative context, no story around it, so the supposed insight that emerges — basically “Embrace the moment” — has zero resonance. As my partner said on the way out, “There’s no truth to it.”
A lucky mistake: I booked tickets to Larry, Candice Roberts’s solo clown show, thinking, for no good reason, that it was going to be a different Larry than I’d seen her do four years ago, even though it has the same title. Okay, okay, I’m a dope. It’s the same show, but I’m glad I get to tell you about it again because, of the thousands of productions I’ve seen, this one is an all-time fave. Roberts’s clown character Larry is a hoser dude who’s doing his best to get more woke because a potential date turned him down for being insufficiently sensitive, artistic, and empathetic. Roberts’s work is both loosely spontaneous and incredibly well-honed. She induces hysteria by piling on absurdities. Larry describes his would-be date as “prettier than sunlight … on a waterfall … full of kittens.” It doesn’t stop there. And a fantastic bit in which Larry describes being drunk using every slang word ever invented for the condition (pooched, soused) plus some insane originals (Hasselhoffed) had a guy behind me wheeze-laughing, gone, out of control. And … and … when Larry digs deep into the supposed gender binary — I won’t tell you how any of this happens — it’s so moving and substantial that it brought tears to my eyes. Long live Larry! If you want to get tickets to this one, book ‘em right now because they’re going to disappear.
For about the first third of Crying in Public, which is a uniquely humble, autobiographical stand-up routine, I was so into it. Writer/performer Gina Harms’s stage persona is a self-effacing, small-town nerd girl. Harms confesses that, growing up, she wasn’t really clear that a lot of movies are fiction. She would watch Transformers, she confesses, and think, “Oh, I guess that’s what living in a city’s like.” And she reads from her (actual) teenage diary, in which one of her goals is to “have random sex with a guy who never calls me again.” Then Harms launches into the heart of her story, which is about traveling to Thailand and falling hard for an Australian guy named Nick with whom she hooks up. But Harms lets us know from the get-go that falling for Nick and moving to Australia to be with him were both very bad ideas. By giving away the ending, Harms deflates her story’s narrative tension before she’s even set it up, so the bottom starts to fall out of Crying in Public. Even with that misstep, the show might have sustained itself better if her comedic insights were sharper, but the storytelling devolves into “And then this happened.” With some restructuring, Crying in Public could be stronger, which would be great because Harms’s persona, her angle of approach, is very engaging.
Maybe I’m jaded or maybe, at this point in my long gay life, I just don’t personally need Jack Goes to Therapy. That’s no knock on the material itself of course. And to be clear: I admire the skill that’s on display. In this solo comedy, writer/performer Zac Williams plays Jack, a kindergarten teacher whose boyfriend left him for another guy just before Jack was about to propose to him. When we meet Jack, it’s three months after the dumping: he’s still longing for his ex and throwing himself into a compulsive quest for new romance. As his story unfolds, he ends up in a therapist’s office wondering how to escape his spiral. Some of the comedy arises from the absurdity of Jack’s compulsion. When he goes for an STI check-up and the taped voice of a nurse says, “I don’t think you have any reason to be concerned,” Jack replies, “Why? Do you think they’ll break up?” And, at the performance I attended, a lot of the laughs coming from the audience were responses to the frank acknowledgement of the realities of some men’s approach to gay sex: the promiscuity, the dick pics. Within all the colours of identity, lots of us love frank sex talk, of course, and, I may be wrong, but my sense was that, the laughter of some of the younger homos in the audience was enhanced by the joy of longed-for representation. That’s all great, but I’ve been out for 54 years and Jack Goes to Therapy didn’t serve any of these purposes for me, so I found a lot of the show’s thematic content familiar and kind of boring. That’s probably why I personally had more fun with the voices of Jack’s kindergarten students: “Jason put a crayon down his pants and he’s not wearing any underwear!” I got frustrated with Jack’s closetedness: although he’s a twenty-nine-year-old urban homo, when we meet him, he’s not out to his coworkers or his roommate’s sublet. That does set up the best pay-off in the script, however: when Jack finally embraces his vulnerability, he receives the gift of the vulnerability of others — and it’s moving. Throughout, Williams — impressively — keeps things bubbling at the pace of a brisk brook. Jack didn’t hook me, but most of the audience gave it a standing ovation.
In The Judge’s Daughter, playwright Mairy Beam delivers an unapologetic message in favour of climate activism. Politically, I’m with her, as were most people in the audience at the performance I attended. There are great advantages to this brand of agitation and propaganda — and there’s a danger. In Beam’s script, Erin, who’s 30, is caught between her love for her mom, Kelly, who’s a conservative judge in BC’s Supreme Court, and her boyfriend, Amir, who supports climate activism. Kelly is one of the judges hearing Trans Mountain Pipeline cases, and their family gathering in Whistler hits a crisis when they hear that Janice Thompson, a frail Indigenous elder, whom Kelly sentenced to an unusually long stay in jail, has died while in custody. The danger I mentioned is stereotyping folks on the other side of the playwright’s argument — and Kelly is the obvious villain of this piece: she’s not just unsympathetic to political protest, she’s also a meddling mom. And the climax of the play is, frankly, a kind of kangaroo court, in which the audience is invited to judge Kelly for her actions. STILL, the play is smart enough to give Kelly some reasonable arguments, so there’s enough thematic tension to keep things interesting. And the characters’ relationships have sufficient nuance to keep that level bubbling. Overall, my response to this piece was invigoration. It’s great that The Judge’s Daughter is taking the climate emergency as seriously as it needs to be taken. It’s great that it champions climate action, including civil disobedience, as strongly as it does. And it’s great to experience all of the script’s energizing rage in an assembly of passionate, (mostly) frustrated people who recognize the mess we’re in and want to do something about it.
In Joanna Rannelli’s autobiographical solo show, she shares her deepest, darkest secrets, but a lot of them aren’t that deep or dark, so Private Parts gets off to a slow start. And, because she shares so many secrets, the weightier material, which does show up eventually, is undermined, because she hasn’t left enough room to develop it. Rannelli’s stories are low on metaphor, including theatrical metaphor. (There’s no overarching convention to contain them.) Still, she is a charming performer and I have no doubt that her life challenges will speak to many people. Largely because of her presence, I was reasonably engaged by this show, but I feel it would be stronger if it were more focused and theatrical.
