I didn’t like it, but I’m glad I went. Playwright James Gordon King and the rest of the artistic team on Movements No. 1&2are so talented and ambitious that there was something lovely about watching this piece, even though the script didn’t work for me.
In this hour-long one-act, King introduces us to Olivia and her partner Jeremy. Olivia wants to do something, to risk everything, to start a movement. Jeremy throws himself behind the woman he loves. But, when he suggests that they draw up some kind of message and convey it to the public, Olivia balks: she doesn’t want to sully the movement with specifics. When Jeremy argues that a message is a basic requirement for a movement, Olivia cautions, “Please be careful with that tone, okay?”
Olivia wants the movement to be about personal truth—mostly hers. When she tries to convey her truth in a speech, she finds that all she can do is stare compassionately into the eyes of audience members as her tears well up and spill.
This could be the set-up for a fabulous satire. In so many political arenas these days, personal truth trumps sense—and I use the verb trump advisedly. But it’s not just Donald Trump and his supporters who mistake feelings for coherent analysis. The left is also hobbled by self-righteous emotionalism. I know a number of supposedly liberal Americans, for instance, who will refuse to vote for Clinton; they will maintain their sense of superiority even if doing so helps to enable a Trump presidency.
Culturally, we’re living in the age of triggers. When a vandal burned the Pride flag at UBC this spring, the campus queer group canceled a planned march and organized peer counseling sessions. In a more pragmatic political time, efforts to mount a successful march would have doubled.
So King’s premise is interesting and the satirical field is rich, but the playwright hamstrings himself. Because Olivia and Jeremy almost never raise specific issues, their conversation remains abstract and unnuanced. And because Olivia’s position is so obviously untenable—a movement really does need a focus—it gets boring.
Besides its political ruminations, the play has a metatheatrical thing going on. The dialectic between reason and emotion is the stuff of the stage, and King plays with the audience’s immediate experience. Olivia gives folks who aren’t committed to staying an opportunity to leave, for instance, and there’s a lot of direct address. But the balance of the evening is overwhelmingly heady, as opposed to visceral.
That said, under Marie Farsi’s direction, the design elements are stylin’. Lukas Engelhardt grounds his all-white set with a dirt floor that extends into the audience. Despite the tiny performance space, Jonathan Kim’s lighting is thrillingly dramatic. And Paul Paroczai’s sound design is a feast of sampled sounds and unexpected punctuations.
The cast is terrific. Naomi Vogt brings such quiet authority to Olivia that it’s impossible to dismiss the character, even when you really want to. And Nathan Barrett endows Jeremy with childlike innocence. Nadeem Phillip plays a third character, Douglas. Douglas is a trickster figure and a bit of a cliché: he’s wearing a suit, so it’s no surprise when he sows dissent. Nonetheless, Phillip’s sloe-eyed understatement makes Douglas dangerously appealing.
And that’s why it was a pleasure to see this show on a warm summer evening. For me, Movements No. 1&2 is an experiment that doesn’t work. But, in its ambition, there is promise. And there is so much talent on this team—writer, director, designers, actors—that it was pouring out of the found performance space on East Georgia and flowing down the street.
MOVEMENTS NO. 1& 2 By James Gordon King. Directed by Marie Farsi. A Babelle Theatre production at 1326 East Georgia Street on Wednesday, July 6. Continues on Wednesday through Saturday until July 16.
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