Such Creatures by Judith Thompson, presented by the Incompletely Strangled Theatre Company, January 2, 2014
Reviewed by Chandra Mayor
Remember (or imagine) what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old girl. Try to do this with honesty instead of nostalgia. You were as sensitive, sporadically insightful, and self-righteous as Hamlet; you were as powerless as Miranda, marooned by adolescence on an island which was not of your own choosing or design. You weren’t a child, and already had your own coterie of ghosts – grief, regret, guilt; you were as idealistic as Ariel, assured of your impending freedom, and as bitter as Caliban, secretly certain of your own innate monstrosity. You were mostly powerless, and this filled you with an inchoate fury. You also believed whole-heartedly and desperately in justice or goodness or some other magic. You were clumsy, illogical, brassy as a fistful of new pennies and totally incapable of irony. It is a miracle that you survived, whatever survival looked like for you.
Now imagine yourself as a fourteen-year-old girl in a downtown park, AWOL from the foster home, waiting for the gang of other fourteen-year-old girls coming to beat you, possibly to death. Alternately, imagine yourself as a girl of the same age in Auschwitz, waiting for the Russians while hiding in a pile of the corpses of friends and strangers. Either way, you may or may not survive the night or the war; you may or may not survive your own attempts at survival.
In other words, this might not be the best theatre choice for post-holiday stress relief, feel-good whimsy, or date night. If you need an hour or so of comfortable emotional mush, Saving Mr. Banks is playing down the hall at the Globe (and for the record, it’s entirely satisfying in a familiar, Tom Hanksian kind of way). But if you are brave enough to remember, imagine, confront, and reconfigure those moments in your own soul (and in some collective dark corners of the world’s soul) that are excruciating and true, go see this rare and powerful production during its very brief run.
Gislina Patterson as Blandy; photo by Leif Norman
Acclaimed Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s script presents two characters speaking directly to the audience in alternating monologues. “I’m always getting myself in trouble for telling other people’s secrets,” says teenaged Blandy, played by Gislina Patterson, in the opening moments of the play. Blandy talks fast and tough, and she may or may not have said too much about the wrong thing to the wrong people. In her urban war-zone world, retribution is swift and violent; while she waits alone in a park for a brutal confrontation with the girls she’s angered, she talks to us compulsively about her life.
Patterson’s performance is astonishing, authentic, and absolutely compelling. Especially for a young actor, it would be all too easy to play this character as an angry cliché, but Patterson finds and tears open the complexity and vulnerability in Blandy. She is terrifying and terrified, genuinely funny and unbearably tragic, brave and broken, and Patterson takes us through some extremely complicated emotional terrain with an openness and commitment to character that is, gorgeously, almost painful to watch.
Venerated Winnipeg actor Doreen Brownstone plays Sorele, an elderly Holocaust survivor. She tells us she has returned to Auschwitz to find her “wildcat,” the teenager she was in the camp. Brownstone plays her with a vivacity and bird-like brightness that humanizes the brutish story. Sorele and Blandy are both loquacious and direct, speaking in animated torrents, and director Arne MacPherson (with Assistant Director Daniel Thau-Eleff) frames the play within an extremely taut pace that succeeds in escalating the tension towards its inevitable climax.
This is a remarkable play that asks us to consider difficult questions of loyalty and defiance, brutality and redemption, when and how to fight well or foolishly, and what it might mean if the most despised and reviled among us were truly able to inhabit their lives with the dignity and gravitas of Shakespearian heroes, tragic or otherwise. At its best, this production of Thompson’s play takes up these questions with vulnerability and fierceness, anger and desperation, and this almost, but not quite, makes up for the production’s flaws.
Various visuals are projected onto the back wall during Patterson’s monologues, and while these are effective when conveying background setting for her stories (school lockers, graffiti-sprayed walls, etc.), they too often become ham-fisted in the attempt at metaphorical or thematic significance. The visuals of snarling dogs, art history depictions of purgatory, floating heads and old movie clips are too often distracting, and detract from the power of Patterson’s performance. Patterson’s Blandy feels raw and authentic; in unfortunate contrast, this only heightens the artifice and obviousness of many of the projected visuals. Brownstone plays Sorele with tenderness and obvious skill, and invites us to engage with both her elderly and teenage selves. Unfortunately, she seems to be frequently reading from a script (propped open behind a book on the desk in front of her), and this is also distracting, interrupting our suspension of disbelief.
This is, however, the kind of play that is perhaps more forgiving of flaws than are those theatrical productions which rely on slickness and gloss instead of depth and directness. These characters are also flawed, and the worlds they (and we) inhabit are monstrously flawed. We newly understand how our attempts to survive are also tragically flawed. Thompson’s script doesn’t provide neat, glossy answers, and this particular production pushes outwards at the boundaries of expectation instead of playing the characters and scenes to stereotype or cliché. If you’d asked me, before I walked in, if I remembered what it felt like to be a fourteen-year-old girl, I probably would have said yes. I wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly, but I walked out of the theatre with the actual taste of it in my mouth, a salty bite of the terror and tenderness of the most acute moments of powerlessness.
“We who have suffered unbearable cruelty will not be cruel to others,” Sorele tells us, expressed as a direct statement yet certainly pleading and hopeful rather than absolute. Patterson and Brownstone leave us broken open. More than anything else, this production asks each of us to pay attention to how we choose to put ourselves – and each other – together again, and to temper that attention with mercy.
Such Creatures, presented by the Incompletely Strangled Theatre Company, runs at the Colin Jackson Studio, Prairie Theatre Exchange January 2 – 5, 3rd floor Portage Place, 393 Portage Ave., Winnipeg MB.
Terror and Tenderness for the Weekend
Columns
Such Creatures by Judith Thompson, presented by the Incompletely Strangled Theatre Company, January 2, 2014
Reviewed by Chandra Mayor
Remember (or imagine) what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old girl. Try to do this with honesty instead of nostalgia. You were as sensitive, sporadically insightful, and self-righteous as Hamlet; you were as powerless as Miranda, marooned by adolescence on an island which was not of your own choosing or design. You weren’t a child, and already had your own coterie of ghosts – grief, regret, guilt; you were as idealistic as Ariel, assured of your impending freedom, and as bitter as Caliban, secretly certain of your own innate monstrosity. You were mostly powerless, and this filled you with an inchoate fury. You also believed whole-heartedly and desperately in justice or goodness or some other magic. You were clumsy, illogical, brassy as a fistful of new pennies and totally incapable of irony. It is a miracle that you survived, whatever survival looked like for you.
Now imagine yourself as a fourteen-year-old girl in a downtown park, AWOL from the foster home, waiting for the gang of other fourteen-year-old girls coming to beat you, possibly to death. Alternately, imagine yourself as a girl of the same age in Auschwitz, waiting for the Russians while hiding in a pile of the corpses of friends and strangers. Either way, you may or may not survive the night or the war; you may or may not survive your own attempts at survival.
In other words, this might not be the best theatre choice for post-holiday stress relief, feel-good whimsy, or date night. If you need an hour or so of comfortable emotional mush, Saving Mr. Banks is playing down the hall at the Globe (and for the record, it’s entirely satisfying in a familiar, Tom Hanksian kind of way). But if you are brave enough to remember, imagine, confront, and reconfigure those moments in your own soul (and in some collective dark corners of the world’s soul) that are excruciating and true, go see this rare and powerful production during its very brief run.
Gislina Patterson as Blandy; photo by Leif Norman
Acclaimed Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s script presents two characters speaking directly to the audience in alternating monologues. “I’m always getting myself in trouble for telling other people’s secrets,” says teenaged Blandy, played by Gislina Patterson, in the opening moments of the play. Blandy talks fast and tough, and she may or may not have said too much about the wrong thing to the wrong people. In her urban war-zone world, retribution is swift and violent; while she waits alone in a park for a brutal confrontation with the girls she’s angered, she talks to us compulsively about her life.
Patterson’s performance is astonishing, authentic, and absolutely compelling. Especially for a young actor, it would be all too easy to play this character as an angry cliché, but Patterson finds and tears open the complexity and vulnerability in Blandy. She is terrifying and terrified, genuinely funny and unbearably tragic, brave and broken, and Patterson takes us through some extremely complicated emotional terrain with an openness and commitment to character that is, gorgeously, almost painful to watch.
Venerated Winnipeg actor Doreen Brownstone plays Sorele, an elderly Holocaust survivor. She tells us she has returned to Auschwitz to find her “wildcat,” the teenager she was in the camp. Brownstone plays her with a vivacity and bird-like brightness that humanizes the brutish story. Sorele and Blandy are both loquacious and direct, speaking in animated torrents, and director Arne MacPherson (with Assistant Director Daniel Thau-Eleff) frames the play within an extremely taut pace that succeeds in escalating the tension towards its inevitable climax.
This is a remarkable play that asks us to consider difficult questions of loyalty and defiance, brutality and redemption, when and how to fight well or foolishly, and what it might mean if the most despised and reviled among us were truly able to inhabit their lives with the dignity and gravitas of Shakespearian heroes, tragic or otherwise. At its best, this production of Thompson’s play takes up these questions with vulnerability and fierceness, anger and desperation, and this almost, but not quite, makes up for the production’s flaws.
Various visuals are projected onto the back wall during Patterson’s monologues, and while these are effective when conveying background setting for her stories (school lockers, graffiti-sprayed walls, etc.), they too often become ham-fisted in the attempt at metaphorical or thematic significance. The visuals of snarling dogs, art history depictions of purgatory, floating heads and old movie clips are too often distracting, and detract from the power of Patterson’s performance. Patterson’s Blandy feels raw and authentic; in unfortunate contrast, this only heightens the artifice and obviousness of many of the projected visuals. Brownstone plays Sorele with tenderness and obvious skill, and invites us to engage with both her elderly and teenage selves. Unfortunately, she seems to be frequently reading from a script (propped open behind a book on the desk in front of her), and this is also distracting, interrupting our suspension of disbelief.
This is, however, the kind of play that is perhaps more forgiving of flaws than are those theatrical productions which rely on slickness and gloss instead of depth and directness. These characters are also flawed, and the worlds they (and we) inhabit are monstrously flawed. We newly understand how our attempts to survive are also tragically flawed. Thompson’s script doesn’t provide neat, glossy answers, and this particular production pushes outwards at the boundaries of expectation instead of playing the characters and scenes to stereotype or cliché. If you’d asked me, before I walked in, if I remembered what it felt like to be a fourteen-year-old girl, I probably would have said yes. I wouldn’t have been wrong, exactly, but I walked out of the theatre with the actual taste of it in my mouth, a salty bite of the terror and tenderness of the most acute moments of powerlessness.
“We who have suffered unbearable cruelty will not be cruel to others,” Sorele tells us, expressed as a direct statement yet certainly pleading and hopeful rather than absolute. Patterson and Brownstone leave us broken open. More than anything else, this production asks each of us to pay attention to how we choose to put ourselves – and each other – together again, and to temper that attention with mercy.
Such Creatures, presented by the Incompletely Strangled Theatre Company, runs at the Colin Jackson Studio, Prairie Theatre Exchange January 2 – 5, 3rd floor Portage Place, 393 Portage Ave., Winnipeg MB.