Sargent and Victor & Me, written and performed by Debbie Patterson, presented by Theatre Projects Manitoba, runs at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film, February 27, 2014
Reviewed by Chandra Mayor
Sargent and Victor & Me is a one-woman play written and performed by veteran Winnipeg playwright Debbie Patterson, and attentively directed by Arne MacPherson. Patterson was selected as the Theatre Ambassador for Winnipeg’s year as the “cultural capital of Canada” in 2010; working with the campaign’s theme of “Arts for all,” she conducted interviews with current and former residents who live near the intersection of Sargent Avenue and Victor Street, in central Winnipeg. After various theatrical stagings and incarnations (including a version featuring three local actors performing in the West End’s St. Matthew’s Church, and a solo production in Iceland) these interviews and stories have been condensed, amalgamated, and workshopped into the interlocking monologues of this production, featuring Patterson performing as eight different characters, each of whom is connected to the food bank (and therefore the neighbourhood) as a client or volunteer.
Debbie Patterson in Sargent and Victor & Me; photograph by Leif Norman
The advantage of this structure — a single actor performing and moving back and forth through a series of monologues — is that a diverse array of voices and stories are presented directly, even intimately, to the audience; each character seems to tell her own story to us (rather than mediating it through dialogue or narration), thereby allowing each character agency over her own narratives. As audience members we are directly addressed by these characters and we feel actively engaged as listeners and witnesses, rather than passive viewers (or voyeurs), and this can be a powerful method of inviting and generating emotional engagement between the performer or characters and the audience, as individuals and collectively.
Martin Buber, in spiritual kinship, perhaps, with the play’s Pastor Mitchell and his quest to create human relationships with the neighbourhood residents via the direct human contact necessitated by feeding people, writes of the sacredness and empathy created and sustained through the kind of “I/Thou” relationship that this structure privileges; when this play works, it is precisely because of the emotional arc and power created by this structure and by Patterson’s skills as an actor. In terms of structure —as a multi-character one-woman production — and content (diverse narratives that detail strategies and experiences of living in a socio-economically depressed and racially tense neighbourhood), the success of this play utterly depends on the quality of the emotional relationship created between the characters and the audience. This play doesn’t particularly attempt to engage us intellectually. Instead, it seeks to get inside our guts, to make us feel things, and to find ourselves transformed through our emotional recognitions and reactions.
The production succeeds and soars through Patterson’s portrayal of Gillian, a (non-resident) food bank volunteer and well-spoken, personable, nature-loving middle-aged white woman living with MS, an unpredictable yet inexorably degenerative neurological condition. Moving skillfully and convincingly between humour, anger, grief, and vulnerability, Gillian takes us with her on her journey through changing physical ability, from the onset of symptoms, the slow and frustrating diagnostic process and the surrealism of some of the “treatments,” and through her search for the necessary new ways to inhabit the emotional landscape of her physically-altered body, as well as to learn the strategies and limitations of this new body as it inhabits and moves through the physical landscapes of a newly dangerous and inhospitable world.
Everything in Gillian’s world is destabilized; as her body becomes literally unstable, the meaning and significance of nearly everything else in her world shifts as well. Grass becomes predatory, winding itself around her ankles and pulling her to the ground. Her favourite places and activities become impossible for her to access and are lost to her forever. Concepts like “the future” are also radically destabilized for this character, and we engage with her emotional struggle to understand her new realities.
The I/Thou relationship only works when it’s genuinely intimate. A play which relies on emotional connection to fuel the narrative arc must also create intimacy. True intimacy requires authenticity. Gillian’s character is the most powerful element in this play because it feels the most authentic. Perhaps this authenticity is derived in part from Patterson’s own experiences as a person with MS, but I think that assessment is too easy (and too patronizing), and doesn’t give sufficient credit to her strengths and abilities as a writer and performer.
Gillian feels authentic because she is a complex character who elides easy classification. She is convincingly inconsistent, sometimes genuinely funny and sometimes shockingly mean; she is angry, altruistic, filled with inconsolable grief, insightful, considerate, and self-absorbed. She invites us into her most vulnerable physical and emotional moments without apology or protective barriers; we believe her and we trust her. Through her, we experience something of what this feels like for Gillian – or, at least, we feel that we do. This empathetic connection creates the possibility of a genuine shift in understanding for able-bodied audience members who may not have personally experienced the world in these ways, but who are transformed through this vicariously relational and authentic experience and identification.
The original music and sound design by Christine Fellows and John K. Samson is also unfailingly emotive and compelling. Somehow, these extremely accomplished musicians can break your heart with a series of chord changes, and the play is enriched by their contributions. Andrea Von Wichert has created an absolutely authentic church basement food bank, from the table of styrofoam coffee cups to the speckled floor and banged-up folding tables. As always, Hugh Conacher’s lighting design is both unobtrusive and perfect.
Unfortunately, this production is also deeply flawed in both conception and execution. Gillian is only one of the eight voices and characters in the production, and the rest of the characters feel more like caricatures than genuine people. They lack the depth and complexity of Gillian, and instead read as “colourful” background, collections of familiar stereotypes, and/or one-dimensional foils to reinforce Gillian’s own emotional journey. Gillian is the only character to speak in a voice that sounds natural; the other characters are signified by not-quite-believable accents/vocal tics and by facial contortions (the pastor, for example, inexplicably squints one side of his face whenever he speaks, like Popeye singing about spinach).
Mostly, these other characters are a grab-bag of stale tropes: the ninety-year-old man who sounds a little like an Icelandic leprechaun and offers up familiar chestnuts about the Depression (“everyone pulled together!”) and the ways that the street has changed; the racist elderly white woman who speaks in a singsong quaver and is fearful of the Aboriginals, their “poor parenting” and big dogs; the do-gooder (white) pastor who practises the social gospel of the Eucharist/feeding the hungry, etc. Bob is presented as Gillian’s brother; unlike the extremely articulate Gillian, however, he speaks with the exaggerated accent and vernacular of an early-80s Great White North hoser, which strains the credulity of this sibling relationship. None of these characters offer much in the way of insight or complexity, and while they provide some background information about the neighbourhood, they are ultimately too superficial to add depth to the production, instead contributing little more than excess noise and unnecessary commotion.
The most problematic aspect of the production, however, is Patterson’s portrayal of Theresa, the young Aboriginal woman and the only explicit person of colour in the entire show; this in itself is strange, given the racial and cultural diversity of the neighbourhood in question, and the result is that the white voices and stories are necessarily privileged over the experiences and voices of people of colour – all of whom are collapsed into one representational character.
It is additionally problematic that the character chosen or created to carry all of these stories is a young Aboriginal woman who only and exclusively tells stories of violation and exploitation. She is made to speak in a clichéd and unconvincing North End kind of accent overlaid with white Valley Girl intonations. She is also the only character who is portrayed as explicitly speaking to Gillian, rather than to the audience; this involves some rapid and awkward character-shifting for Patterson, and we are left to wonder why it is only this young and abject Aboriginal woman who is disallowed even the agency of her own unmediated storytelling. As the audience, we are no longer the Thou: we are also forced into the role of voyeur to their conversations and interactions.
The list of exploitations experienced by Theresa is thorough, encompassing nearly every fear and fascination that colonial white culture suspects and possibly secretly desires that Aboriginal bodies (especially Indigenous female bodies, portrayed in the mainstream media almost exclusively as sites of sexual degradation and danger) contain and continue to be recognizable by: substance abuse, childhood sexual exploitation and exploitative sex work, gang involvement, physical violence in the home and the community, street involvement, loss of language, childhood suicide attempts, an unfit mother who dies of addiction-related causes, abusive relatives, constant (yet unhelpful) CFS involvement, uncaring foster homes, criminal activities and lock-ups or police involvement, foster care, violent dealers/pimps/johns. It’s an exhausting list for one young woman to contain/convey – especially to an audience that is, at least on opening night, almost exclusively white; this only serves to highlight the all-encompassing Otherness of this character.
It begins to feel like spectacle, like Theresa is telling stories that are designed only to simultaneously shock and pruriently satisfy white middle-class expectations in a carnival of the grotesque kind of way. After this catalogue of exploitations carried by Theresa, there isn’t time left in the play nor space within this character to communicate the kind of complexity and varying responses to hurt that Gillian is allowed to express. Additionally, this character is so mediated by Gillian/Patterson that there is little possibility of the audience building or engaging in authentic intimacy or empathy. The structure of the play and Patterson’s portrayal of this character proscribes an emotional response of pity, of feeling for Theresa instead of with her. Even the lighting becomes flat and harsh only when Theresa appears.
I don’t believe that Patterson (nor any of the other – albeit entirely white – production team) intended to perpetuate racism or colonialism; I’m certain that they intended the opposite. In some ways, Theresa’s narratives are privileged over the other secondary characters; this is communicated to us through Gillian’s portrayal of her emotional connection with Theresa. Unfortunately, this serves to further disempower Theresa and further deny her agency, as it becomes clear that she is meaningful to Gillian as a living exemplifier of the “brokenness” that Gillian is struggling with in her own body.
The intersectionality between disability and racist colonization feels contrived, and ultimately exists only to serve Gillian’s emotional trajectory. (In the play’s climax, Gillian uses Theresa’s narrations of “brokenness” as both a foil which allows her to feel better about her own body’s “brokenness,” and as a lens through which she develops and expresses her own newly-expanded sense of empathy for her perceptions of other people whom she perceives as disadvantaged). Theresa, however, stays static in her broken state. While Gillian uses (exploits?) Theresa’s narratives in order to “heal” her own perceptions of brokenness in herself and the world, Theresa just stays broken and emotionally unchanged throughout the play. She doesn’t get to learn anything, heal anything, or even speak directly to any of us.
It is frustrating that the techniques and dynamics utilized by Patterson and MacPherson to create such a powerful narrative and performance for Gillian are the very same things that, in their absence, weaken the portrayal of the various secondary characters, and actively problematize the entire production because of the dynamics created by the performance of Theresa. The same things that produce such powerful empathetic intimacy between the audience and Gillian simultaneously produce further Othering and alienation in the audience’s engagement with Theresa.
Throughout the play, Gillian becomes less and less of a representational character, and more of an individual with whom we develop a relationship, while Theresa becomes so buried beneath both the numerous representations of Indigenous femininity and Gillian’s emotional needs and projections, that by the end of the play we have almost no sense of her as a unique and authentic person, and almost no genuine engagement with her at all.
Perhaps this is a play still in flux, caught between what it used to be (a theatrical document or presentation of a range of lived experiences in a specific geographical and socio-economic site) and what it is becoming: a powerful and emotionally-engaging one-woman play about inhabiting disability. Perhaps this is the play’s experience of gracelessness as it learns its new body, just as Gillian experiences extreme gracelessness and occasional failure in her changing body’s attempts to navigate once-familiar terrain. Then again, perhaps that’s just another way to appropriate and whitewash Theresa’s stories and experiences — and worse, the authentic lived stories and experiences of all of the real, invisible and nameless women upon whom this character is built. As artists and as communities, we have to find better ways to tell, hear, and honour all of our stories.
Sargent and Victor & Me, presented by Theatre Projects Manitoba, runs February 27 – March 9, 2014, at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film, 400 Colony St. (University of Winnipeg Campus).
5 Comments
To Gord and Chandra,
Chandra, your review is insightful, erudite, and you attempted to champion voices silenced in particular mainstream conversations. With tentativeness, though, as a writer involved in the excruciatingly difficult matter of creating art, in which we bare our souls and our vulnerability and human failures, I know that Debbie Patterson, brave explorer and vibrant artist that she is, needed to be extended more trust in your deep and challenging review. Tone is so critical in how you extend your views. When you have something that you believe is valid to extend as criticism, you do not need to be so afraid that you will not be heard or understood that you end up speaking in a scathing and demeaning way, especially by fellow artists who are making the same difficult journey as you. When I read your review, my knee jerk reaction was “Well, that’s it for art! I should just put down my pen and die.” Having seen Victor and Sargent, I felt that Debbie brings the voices in her play to light out of a place of love and the desire for inclusion, but as with any artistic expression, revisions could round out characters even further. Debbie is an artist. She could have heard that suggestion. As artists, we constantly hear criticism and take it or discard it as not what we want. Writing offers a chance for the evolution of the self, and above all, writers know how hard it is to be in process and still trying. My experience of the play was that I trusted that our brokenness does create bridges; this is a basic component of compassion—we are able to enter into another’s painful reality through our own pain. It is a mistake to argue that such entry is only projection in which we objectify the other; we are limited, but bravely try to imagine the reality of another, and we compare notes, adjust, edit, and try for greater understanding—an entirely vulnerable process that Debbie obviously worked with as she met with an aboriginal girl and met with her own attempt at the artistic recreation of that girl. I was also moved that Theresa helps Gillian up at the end of the play and was responsible for getting Gillian into the church, revealing that Theresa is not defined only by her loaded history, but is so unassumingly and triumphantly able to extend the kindness that lives on in her, in spite of multiple abuses. These abuses are not stereotypes; they are real as any native or non-native person will tell you who walks in those shoes. With a husband who is an anti-poverty activist, who has been an active companion and helper for his adult life journey to people in the aftermath of colonization, I know the crimes Debbie touched on are real. Perhaps if the characters were viewed more as figments of Gillian’s consciousness, that revelation would be a clearer transformative point for Gillian. Or, if the characters stand alone, then Theresa’s strength and complexity might be woven in sooner to balance Gillian’s intricate development. I so applaud Debbie Patterson and Arne MacPherson and all artists involved, as well as the contributors to Victor and Sargent. They had a standing ovation the night we were there, and they deserved it. Chandra, you have ideas to offer—just believe that enough to be kind, and trust that others are listening, and can listen.
Gord, thank you for your response to Chandra’s review. I understood your passion, having felt, as I said above, that we artists might as well just lay down the pen and die if we are to be so mistrusted and misunderstood as we sincerely attempt to weave realities out of our vulnerabilities. You come at that review from a deeply personal place of righteous rage, as an artist who so profoundly understands the act of creation and your great points are numerous. You indicate sheepishness at the end of your outpouring, and I think that’s because Chandra is an artist too, with feelings, even though she wrote as if Debbie and Arne have no feelings or artistic or moral integrity. Our inner critics can be so scathing, and I thank you both for your heartfelt, revelatory discussions of how we need to proceed as artists and critics.
I don’t agree with the two comments below, mostly because of the assumption that discrimination can be a deliberate act. Something, in this case the play, or someone, like the individuals from the theatre world named by Mr. Tanner, can create a situation that is known in the Human Rights Code as “discriminatory on its face.” An action is taken to deliberately be exclusionary. But what is much more often the case in terms of discriminatory violations is something known as “discriminatory in its effect.” There is no set intention to be prejudicial, but because of appearance, omission, or unfair representation, the effect is discriminatory. Incidentally, far more legal actions are taken because of the latter than the former. Ms. Mayor’s review suggests that the play appeared to be discriminatory, and, albeit harsh, I would agree. In the meantime, she appears to have kicked the hornet’s nest of the theatre in-crowd, who, rather than taking her perspective into careful consideration, are buzzing about with their stingers out.
Did the reviewer have no ears when at the end of the play the audience hears the voices of the very real people Deb interviewed? These aren’t stereotypes. Women are violated every day. Do we stop telling their stories when violation becomes stereotypical?
A personal crusade has no place in a theatre review.
Thank you Gordon Tanner. I don’t know you or Chandra Mayor but I was the person who introduced Deb Patterson to the young woman known as Theresa, and I know she would be very angry to hear Chandra’s comments about herself, about the play and about Deb Patterson. She is not broken and she is not the embodiment of all Aboriginal girls and women. She is a real survivor and she said everything Deb quoted, and more, in a very long interview with Deb. In fact she wouldn’t let Deb leave until she finished talking about her life, on her own timeline and in her own terms. She would be so insulted to hear the comments made by Chandra. “So mediated” indeed!
To the Winnipeg Review,
I’ve posted a response to Chandra Mayor’s review at my own blog nerdgoonrant.com.
Regards,
Gordon Tanner [Complete response inserted below by TWR]
On the Problematized Intersectionality of Othering
Dear Chandra Mayor,
What do you think you’re doing?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. In your article “Learning a New Body in the West End” (which starts out as a review of Debbie Patterson’s new play “Sargent & Victor & Me”, but which descends into a screed accusing the production of racism, neo-colonialism and cultural appropriation) you seem to set yourself up as a champion, or protector or at the very least judge and jury, and I’d really like to know who it is you think you’re protecting, and from whom?
Do you honestly believe that Debbie Patterson, Arne MacPherson, John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, Andrea Von Wichert, Iris Turcott and all the rest of the production team on Sargent & Victor & Me, are racist?
I don’t believe that Patterson (nor any of the other – albeit entirely white – production team) intended to perpetuate racism or colonialism; I’m certain that they intended the opposite.
You don’t believe they intended to perpetuate racism or colonialism. But there’s no point in mentioning it if they didn’t intend to do it, and they subsequently didn’t do it. That would be a non-event. So they didn’t intend to, but they did. Did what? Perpetuate racism and colonialism. Making them… Racists. Not only are you accusing them of being racist, you’re accusing them of being unintentionally racist. Well-meaning fools, too stupid to understand that what they thought was helping (or at the very least, doing no harm) was in fact hurting the very people they sought to help. And what is this “albeit entirely white” ? Are you suggesting that the team was selected based on skin colour? If you are, come out and say it; if you aren’t, why mention it? I’ll tell you why. Because that’s your style. This article is full of vile insinuations of racism that you don’t have the courage to state directly, but which you nevertheless hope will linger like a bad smell in the back of our minds, making us wonder where the stink is coming from, and concluding it must be the smell of racist theatre.
Sidebar: I’m not going to get into Theatre Projects Manitoba’s history of First Nations production. Let me just say it speaks for itself. It speaks very, very plainly. And it is something to be proud of.
The most problematic aspect of the production, however, is Patterson’s portrayal of Theresa, the young Aboriginal woman and the only explicit person of colour in the entire show; this in itself is strange, given the racial and cultural diversity of the neighbourhood in question, and the result is that the white voices and stories are necessarily privileged over the experiences and voices of people of colour – all of whom are collapsed into one representational character.
So here is the complaint that people of colour have been intentionally (if something is strange there must be nefarious intention behind it) left out of the show, and here
It is additionally problematic that the character chosen or created to carry all of these stories is a young Aboriginal woman who only and exclusively tells stories of violation and exploitation. She is made to speak in a clichéd and unconvincing North End kind of accent overlaid with white Valley Girl intonations.
is the complaint that the character of colour created for the show is clichéd and unconvincing.
You need more characters of colour! + You can’t do characters of colour! = I am morally superior to all of you!!
Do you want to know what’s really problematic, Chandra? What’s really problematic is that “the character chosen or created” to carry all of these stories is a real person, who has actually experienced all of the things she describes, who sat with the playwright and talked about them for hours understanding exactly how they would be used in telling this story, who overcame her initial distrust both because Deb Patterson has deep human empathy and because this young girl was happy to have someone listen to her. It’s problematic to me that you think you’re smarter than this girl, that you know what she needs more than she does, that she needs to be protected from the likes of Deb Patterson, and that you’re the person to do it. It’s problematic to me that in describing the character of Theresa you use the words “broken” or “brokenness” six times in a single paragraph. I saw the play on opening night, and honestly the word “broken” never crossed my mind in describing Theresa. Had you asked me to choose a word to overuse in describing her, I would have chosen “resilient”.
This is also problematic:
She is also the only character who is portrayed as explicitly speaking to Gillian, rather than to the audience; this involves some rapid and awkward character-shifting for Patterson, and we are left to wonder why it is only this young and abject Aboriginal woman who is disallowed even the agency of her own unmediated storytelling. As the audience, we are no longer the Thou: we are also forced into the role of voyeur to their conversations and interactions.
Yes, we are left to wonder… What is this playwright up to? Why is she keeping this girl from talking to us directly? Why is she forcing this semiotic modality on us? Why is this reviewer suddenly using words like “forced” to describe our experience of watching a young girl tell her story onstage?
Actually Chandra, this entire component of your argument is nonsense. I saw the play. I’m sure you were very excited when it occurred to you that you could make a Martin Buber reference. Oh my god! That would make Thou look so smart! Unfortunately, your desire for a good reference has rewritten your memory. That pure I/Thou experience exists only in your imagination, because all of the characters at one point or another are talking to Gillian. Some of them are louder, some of them move their focus around, yeah, sure maybe sometimes it’s hard to tell who they’re talking to. That’s something you could have mentioned in a theatre review. What I saw was that because Theresa was quieter and more focused, it was easier to tell that she was talking to Gillian, but she was not a lone hostage. I think that one reason you might have believed Theresa to be performed in a qualitatively different way than the others is simply that after Gillian, Theresa is the most fully realized of all the supporting characters.
The intersectionality between disability and racist colonization feels contrived, and ultimately exists only to serve Gillian’s emotional trajectory.
It feels contrived, Chandra, because you just contrived it. I just watched you contrive it. That’s why it feels contrived. If you want to know what Deb Patterson was trying to intersectionalize, maybe you should read her Playwright’s note (you did get a program, didn’t you?):
That’s when I started writing about MS, using the process of living with an incurable degenerative condition as a metaphor for living in a neighbourhood that’s being overtaken by crime.
Oh, crime! Not racist colonization. (Is “metaphor” an old-timey way of saying “intersectionalization”?) Hey, you may still find it contrived, but at least try to be accurate when you’re being smugly dismissive. Also, let me point out that the fact that something “ultimately exists only to serve Gillian’s emotional trajectory” is what you would expect from something that is part of a play about Gillian’s emotional trajectory. Ultimately, that’s why the play exists. To use something as part of that overall goal is not, as you would have us believe, to automatically debase and abuse it. If it is done well, if it resonates with us, if it makes the story clearer, then it serves art. If it perpetuates lies, if it clouds the truth, if it creates false comparisons, then it does not serve art. You, it seems, would censor the act itself. You would place certain things off limits to certain artists. You would like to decide for people what is and is not acceptable before they see it. You would be a blight on growth.
Theresa, however, stays static in her broken state. While Gillian uses (exploits?) Theresa’s narratives in order to “heal” her own perceptions of brokenness in herself and the world, Theresa just stays broken and emotionally unchanged throughout the play. She doesn’t get to learn anything, heal anything, or even speak directly to any of us.
What’s this naughty little “(exploits?)” doing here, Chandra? Is it an accusation or not? It comes along with some sort of smarmy hand gesture that says, “I don’t wanna say she’s exploiting her exactly, but y’know…” I’m curious, once you had decided that this play was exploiting the character of Theresa, did you even keep watching it? Or were you just compiling a list of moments that you would use as evidence at the tribunal? Did you see the scene where Theresa helps Gillian up in the parking lot, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all? Why do you keep calling her broken? Why could you not see beyond that? And why are you trying so hard to force everyone to agree with you that something shameful has been done here?
What I think you should do, Chandra, is sit down with the young woman who Theresa was based on. You should explain to her why Deb Patterson is wrong to want to use her story as part of “Sargent & Victor & Me”. You should tell her about the group of First Nation high school students who attended a matinee, and explain to her that when they came down onstage after the performance to hug Deb, and to tell her that Theresa was their favourite character, and that her characterization was “spot on”, that those young people didn’t know what they were talking about. They don’t understand how insidious racism is. That just because they were excited and engaged to hear a character from their streets speaking in their voice telling their stories, that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. You should tell her that you will be the one to decide what’s good for her, because she’s too broken, too abject. She needs someone like you to protect her from the likes of Deb Patterson. You should tell her all that, but you should wait till I can be there, because more than anything I want to hear her, in her bad North End accent, with that weird hint of Valley Girl thrown in, tell you just what she thinks.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my partner Ardith Boxall is the Artistic Director of Theatre Projects Manitoba, and I was a member of the TPM board from 2004-2012. I am, however, writing this post as a private individual and have not consulted with anyone at TPM, or with the creative team of Sargent & Victor & Me. For all I know they will be horrified. I’m still a bit surprised at how angry this review made me.