Social Studies by Trish Cooper, presented by Prairie Theatre Exchange, November 21, 2013
Reviewed by Chandra Mayor
Prairie Theatre Exchange’s newest production, by Winnipeg playwright Trish Cooper, is the story of one typically unique and dysfunctional River Heights family, a family comprised of both blood and choice. It’s about culture shock and culture clashes for which no one is prepared. It’s also a story of the search for redemption, individually and within the communities of families and nations. Sometimes these searches are conducted with reluctance and ill-grace, sometimes with exuberance underpinned with naive optimism or desperation, and sometimes redemption is just too tall an order, but this is a play that affirms that the search matters – and furthermore, that it’s hilarious and heart-breaking all at once.
Everything about this play works, from the script to the set to the performances; only a production this clean and taut can possibly allow us to experience such a mess of familial and socio-political collisions, and to find that our experience of watching others offers us the recognition of ourselves, who we are in our darker and brighter moments, and who we might become.
Richie Diggs as Deng; photo by Bruce Monk
The play’s action begins when Jackie (Alix Sobler) bursts into her mother’s home, tearfully clutching a bag and a painting, and announces to her younger teenage sister Sarah (Jenna Hill) that her marriage is over and that she is moving back into her old room. Sarah has to tell Jackie that her room is no longer available because their mom has given it to Deng.
“What is a deng?” asks an incredulous (and unimpressed) Jackie.
Deng is not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ as confirmed a few moments later by mom Valerie (Marina Stephenson Kerr). Deeply moved and affected by the horrific experiences of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Valerie (a woman particularly vulnerable to opportunities for empathetic expressions) has invited a twenty-one-year-old Sudanese refugee named Deng (Richie Diggs) to move into the family home. Permanently. But Jackie’s welcome to the sofa in the family room (as long as she vacuums and puts away the couch bedding before Valerie’s Activist Book Club meeting).
Structurally, the play is held together by Sarah’s PowerPoint Social Studies presentation on the Lost Boys of Sudan. The action periodically stops while Sarah presents her project in installments. The audience becomes her classmates, and images are projected onto the set. The living room disappears beneath larger-than-life images of Sudanese children, photographed while walking for months to Ethiopia, victims of abhorrent violence and deprivation, and crowded into refugee camps.
Hill is wonderful as the teenage Sarah, embodying the vulnerability and awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old girl. She explains to her classmates (us) what happened to the children of Sudan, and how unfathomably difficult (and sometimes impossible) it is to negotiate the bureaucracy and culture-shock of the refugee and immigrant experiences. Her pitch-perfect youthful earnestness and vernacular over-rides didacticism, and allows the audience to understand the broader context of the characters without feeling ignorant. It also gives us a way to understand the things that Deng himself can’t (or won’t) say.
Despite the serious socio-political context, this is also a seriously funny comedy. As the characters struggle to negotiate familial and cultural interactions, the four actors (under the excellent direction of Robert Metcalfe and Debbie Patterson) throw themselves whole-heartedly into their performances, and I lost track of how many times I laughed.
The best comedic moments happen between Stephenson Kerr and Sobler (both of whom were involved in the play’s earliest workshops). Valerie is that Guatemalan-wrap-pants-wearing, conscious-energy-transferring, unfailingly energetic hippie mom; an instantly recognizable character, you knew that mom, you had that mom, or God help you, you might be that mom, and Stephenson Kerr plays her right to the edge of flakiness without once sacrificing her depth or believability. She grabs her maracas to perform a kind of spiritual exorcism of Jackie’s negativity, substitutes “Namaste” for “Amen” in her version of the Doxology (followed by a Cree prayer), and exhorts her daughters to “be present” with her.
Instead of a mere caricature of the well-meaning but misguided white middle class western woman, Stephenson Kerr’s performance of Cooper’s dialogue ensures that we know that while Valerie is occasionally misguided, she is also a woman of immense determination and fortitude, exasperated by and passionate about all of her children (whatever their age or provenance), and unafraid to throw her whole body into a shouting match.
Alix Sobler’s Jackie is Valerie’s perfect foil, equally stubborn and loud. She is a grown woman operating with the entitlement and utter self-absorption of a thirteen year old, and Sobler channels the dramatic intensity of Cher as Jackie languishes in self-pity and sweatpants, deeply, bitterly, and vocally resenting Deng’s presence in her family. In the hands of a less-talented performer, Jackie might be nothing more than mean-spirited and spoiled, but Sobler finds the kernels of authenticity within this character and makes us recognize and even occasionally empathize with her. We’ve all had Jackie moments, but we didn’t all have a genocide survivor living in our childhood bedroom at the same time. Jackie doesn’t welcome this exercise in perspective-building with good grace, but Sobler makes her hilarious to watch.
Winnipegger Richie Diggs is deeply compelling as Deng, and his comedic timing is excellent. At the beginning of the play he is determined to be happy, oblivious of Jackie’s resentment, entirely embracing of his Canadian mother and sisters, and driven to succeed. Diggs also conveys his increasing fear and confusion with subtlety and power, and breaks our hearts by the end. Sarah is the family peace-maker, and despite some stereotypical teenage scenes, Hill portrays her with such sensitivity and openness that she transcends the pitfalls of cliché.
The play takes place entirely within the family home: kitchen, family room, and Deng’s bedroom. With incredible attention to particulars, Carole Klemm has created a set that looks and feels like thousands of other comfortably shabby North American homes, and yet is filled with exactly the right details for this family, from the mismatched furniture to the faded Tibetan prayer flags to the knickknacks crowded on top of the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen backs onto a barely-glimpsed mudroom, and the stairs lead up to the wall-papered hallway that implies other bedrooms. There are no set changes in this production, but these door- and stairways to unseen spaces make the stage feel alive; they remind us that there are always other spaces and other stories, and that there is a fluidity and permeability between these characters and their other worlds, and between the real stage and the real worlds around it.
The world is always intruding on this family: memories, old patterns, desperate friends, exhausting financial demands, ex-husbands, and even the television (and its alarming depictions of gay marriage) both build and sabotage the fragile bonds they create with each other. At the same time, each character is determined to make a way for themselves out in the broader worlds of work and friends, ethics and responsibilities, and struggles to figure out how to venture out and return intact. There are forces in the world greater than family (however that family is constructed). Even as Valerie is instructing Deng in The Captain and Tennille’s profound proclamation that “love will keep us together,” and even as they all learn to see each other with greater truth, clarity, and genuine care, the real world carves, in all of us, depths of love and harm that are too entrenched and complex to harmoniously resolve in a three minute pop song (or even a two hour play). Cooper doesn’t succumb to the temptation to tie a saccharine or comedic bow onto the play’s finale, and it is this which elevates the production from theatre that entertains to theatre that transforms.
Mary Pipher writes that “relationships matter. Mutual trust and respect facilitates the growth of souls. Both endeavors require openness to ideas and a willingness to reconsider and expand one’s point of view. Relationships create the environments that allow humans to extend their circles of caring.” Generally, these characters make a clumsy (although very funny) muddle of ideals like mutual trust, respect, openness, and learning. Really, most of us do. We recognize ourselves in this play precisely in those moments of gracelessness in the search for love and redemption, and it is that which opens the door of possibility to slightly newer, slightly better relationships with ourselves and each other— with or without a happy ending, but certainly with laughter and the beautiful shock of real connection.
Social Studies presented by Prairie Theatre Exchange. Performances November 22 – December 8, 2013, 3rd floor Portage Place, 393 Portage Ave., Winnipeg MB.
Laughter and the Beautiful Shock of Real Connection
Columns
Social Studies by Trish Cooper, presented by Prairie Theatre Exchange, November 21, 2013
Reviewed by Chandra Mayor
Prairie Theatre Exchange’s newest production, by Winnipeg playwright Trish Cooper, is the story of one typically unique and dysfunctional River Heights family, a family comprised of both blood and choice. It’s about culture shock and culture clashes for which no one is prepared. It’s also a story of the search for redemption, individually and within the communities of families and nations. Sometimes these searches are conducted with reluctance and ill-grace, sometimes with exuberance underpinned with naive optimism or desperation, and sometimes redemption is just too tall an order, but this is a play that affirms that the search matters – and furthermore, that it’s hilarious and heart-breaking all at once.
Everything about this play works, from the script to the set to the performances; only a production this clean and taut can possibly allow us to experience such a mess of familial and socio-political collisions, and to find that our experience of watching others offers us the recognition of ourselves, who we are in our darker and brighter moments, and who we might become.
Richie Diggs as Deng; photo by Bruce Monk
The play’s action begins when Jackie (Alix Sobler) bursts into her mother’s home, tearfully clutching a bag and a painting, and announces to her younger teenage sister Sarah (Jenna Hill) that her marriage is over and that she is moving back into her old room. Sarah has to tell Jackie that her room is no longer available because their mom has given it to Deng.
“What is a deng?” asks an incredulous (and unimpressed) Jackie.
Deng is not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ as confirmed a few moments later by mom Valerie (Marina Stephenson Kerr). Deeply moved and affected by the horrific experiences of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Valerie (a woman particularly vulnerable to opportunities for empathetic expressions) has invited a twenty-one-year-old Sudanese refugee named Deng (Richie Diggs) to move into the family home. Permanently. But Jackie’s welcome to the sofa in the family room (as long as she vacuums and puts away the couch bedding before Valerie’s Activist Book Club meeting).
Structurally, the play is held together by Sarah’s PowerPoint Social Studies presentation on the Lost Boys of Sudan. The action periodically stops while Sarah presents her project in installments. The audience becomes her classmates, and images are projected onto the set. The living room disappears beneath larger-than-life images of Sudanese children, photographed while walking for months to Ethiopia, victims of abhorrent violence and deprivation, and crowded into refugee camps.
Hill is wonderful as the teenage Sarah, embodying the vulnerability and awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old girl. She explains to her classmates (us) what happened to the children of Sudan, and how unfathomably difficult (and sometimes impossible) it is to negotiate the bureaucracy and culture-shock of the refugee and immigrant experiences. Her pitch-perfect youthful earnestness and vernacular over-rides didacticism, and allows the audience to understand the broader context of the characters without feeling ignorant. It also gives us a way to understand the things that Deng himself can’t (or won’t) say.
Despite the serious socio-political context, this is also a seriously funny comedy. As the characters struggle to negotiate familial and cultural interactions, the four actors (under the excellent direction of Robert Metcalfe and Debbie Patterson) throw themselves whole-heartedly into their performances, and I lost track of how many times I laughed.
The best comedic moments happen between Stephenson Kerr and Sobler (both of whom were involved in the play’s earliest workshops). Valerie is that Guatemalan-wrap-pants-wearing, conscious-energy-transferring, unfailingly energetic hippie mom; an instantly recognizable character, you knew that mom, you had that mom, or God help you, you might be that mom, and Stephenson Kerr plays her right to the edge of flakiness without once sacrificing her depth or believability. She grabs her maracas to perform a kind of spiritual exorcism of Jackie’s negativity, substitutes “Namaste” for “Amen” in her version of the Doxology (followed by a Cree prayer), and exhorts her daughters to “be present” with her.
Instead of a mere caricature of the well-meaning but misguided white middle class western woman, Stephenson Kerr’s performance of Cooper’s dialogue ensures that we know that while Valerie is occasionally misguided, she is also a woman of immense determination and fortitude, exasperated by and passionate about all of her children (whatever their age or provenance), and unafraid to throw her whole body into a shouting match.
Alix Sobler’s Jackie is Valerie’s perfect foil, equally stubborn and loud. She is a grown woman operating with the entitlement and utter self-absorption of a thirteen year old, and Sobler channels the dramatic intensity of Cher as Jackie languishes in self-pity and sweatpants, deeply, bitterly, and vocally resenting Deng’s presence in her family. In the hands of a less-talented performer, Jackie might be nothing more than mean-spirited and spoiled, but Sobler finds the kernels of authenticity within this character and makes us recognize and even occasionally empathize with her. We’ve all had Jackie moments, but we didn’t all have a genocide survivor living in our childhood bedroom at the same time. Jackie doesn’t welcome this exercise in perspective-building with good grace, but Sobler makes her hilarious to watch.
Winnipegger Richie Diggs is deeply compelling as Deng, and his comedic timing is excellent. At the beginning of the play he is determined to be happy, oblivious of Jackie’s resentment, entirely embracing of his Canadian mother and sisters, and driven to succeed. Diggs also conveys his increasing fear and confusion with subtlety and power, and breaks our hearts by the end. Sarah is the family peace-maker, and despite some stereotypical teenage scenes, Hill portrays her with such sensitivity and openness that she transcends the pitfalls of cliché.
The play takes place entirely within the family home: kitchen, family room, and Deng’s bedroom. With incredible attention to particulars, Carole Klemm has created a set that looks and feels like thousands of other comfortably shabby North American homes, and yet is filled with exactly the right details for this family, from the mismatched furniture to the faded Tibetan prayer flags to the knickknacks crowded on top of the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen backs onto a barely-glimpsed mudroom, and the stairs lead up to the wall-papered hallway that implies other bedrooms. There are no set changes in this production, but these door- and stairways to unseen spaces make the stage feel alive; they remind us that there are always other spaces and other stories, and that there is a fluidity and permeability between these characters and their other worlds, and between the real stage and the real worlds around it.
The world is always intruding on this family: memories, old patterns, desperate friends, exhausting financial demands, ex-husbands, and even the television (and its alarming depictions of gay marriage) both build and sabotage the fragile bonds they create with each other. At the same time, each character is determined to make a way for themselves out in the broader worlds of work and friends, ethics and responsibilities, and struggles to figure out how to venture out and return intact. There are forces in the world greater than family (however that family is constructed). Even as Valerie is instructing Deng in The Captain and Tennille’s profound proclamation that “love will keep us together,” and even as they all learn to see each other with greater truth, clarity, and genuine care, the real world carves, in all of us, depths of love and harm that are too entrenched and complex to harmoniously resolve in a three minute pop song (or even a two hour play). Cooper doesn’t succumb to the temptation to tie a saccharine or comedic bow onto the play’s finale, and it is this which elevates the production from theatre that entertains to theatre that transforms.
Mary Pipher writes that “relationships matter. Mutual trust and respect facilitates the growth of souls. Both endeavors require openness to ideas and a willingness to reconsider and expand one’s point of view. Relationships create the environments that allow humans to extend their circles of caring.” Generally, these characters make a clumsy (although very funny) muddle of ideals like mutual trust, respect, openness, and learning. Really, most of us do. We recognize ourselves in this play precisely in those moments of gracelessness in the search for love and redemption, and it is that which opens the door of possibility to slightly newer, slightly better relationships with ourselves and each other— with or without a happy ending, but certainly with laughter and the beautiful shock of real connection.
Social Studies presented by Prairie Theatre Exchange. Performances November 22 – December 8, 2013, 3rd floor Portage Place, 393 Portage Ave., Winnipeg MB.