Face it: live theatre-goers are privileged. You can tell it just by scanning a typical Vancouver stage-play audience – mostly white, “of a certain age,” well-upholstered and seemly in dress. At least, being Canadian, we have the decency to be sorry about our privilege. That’s why performances lead off with elaborate acknowledgements of funding subsidies and land theft.
But this week a couple of our pre-eminent stage companies go well beyond such pro-forma apologetics to offer far more incisive dissections of entitlement. Gateway brings us a laugh-till-you-cry family farce, Straight White Men, while Arts Club mounts a taut, tense sleuth-opera, Cipher.
Thanks to smart casting and slick production values, both shows go down easy enough, as long you’re comfortably seated in their respective auditoria. But both, if you seriously mull their enigmatic conclusions, could seriously roil your digestion over after-theatre supper.
Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee, 45, has spent nearly half her life-to-date troubling tummies with her explorations of identity dynamics. Vancouver audiences most recently encountered her in The Shipment, a thoroughly provocative disquisition on Blackness, which ran here for two successive seasons.
But her latest play, SWM (to borrow a shorthand from the kinkier Alt Weekly lonely hearts ad pages), broaches a class-cum-ethnic identity so long dominant that, until lately, it seemed almost invisible to its cossetted beneficiaries, like the air we breathe. All the more shock, then, when the air turns stiflingly toxic, as it has for the four titular protagonists, each of whom is facing a mid- to late-life crisis.
Number One Son Matt (Daniel Martin), a Harvard-educated Golden Boy who’s now working off his student loans as an N.G.O. office temp, has moved in with his recently widowed Dad (Peter Anderson). His two younger siblings, freshly divorced merchant banker Jake (Carlo Marks) and author manqué Drew (Sebastian Arnold), come home to the family MacMansion for that Whitest of holidays, the Caucasoid Christmas.
In their unaccustomed, womanless isolation, they find themselves each at loose ends. So they wind up ritualistically enacting the male bonding rites of Yuletides Past: jokey wrestling, rank-out banter, pajama breakfast, Chinese take-out dinner, a few rounds of Monopoly.
Except their Monopoly playing board has been customized by their late Mom into a new game, called “Privilege,” in which -- just for being a SWM -- you have to ante up a penalty every time you pass “Go.” That’s how punctiliously “woke” they are in this family.
They lovingly re-enact Matt’s Klan-themed spoof of their high school musical, “OaKKKlahoma!” Jake’s Ex- is a Yuppie of Colour and his children are well-groomed little Hapas. Therapy-addled Drew (it changed “my whole fucking life”) prioritizes empathy above all. Starting, of course, with self-empathy.
In short relatable people, at least to much of the Gateway crowd. Well-meaning and principled, by their own lights; no Trumpian deplorables.
But the two visiting kid brothers can’t get over the spectacle of Matt, the erstwhile high-flyer, now drawing temp pay and tidying up after Dad at home. A waste of Talent! An affront to Merit! Their pain and puzzlement become acute when, over Christmas dinner, Matt briefly and unaccountably weeps into his Chinese take-out.
What gives? He’s clinically depressed, Drew diagnoses. Nothing therapy can’t deal with. He should just learn to love himself.
“He should learn to sell himself,” Jake rejoins. As a case in point, the brothers role-play a mock job interview for a staff (versus a temp) position at the NGO. No surprise that braggadocious Jake woefully upstages shambling Matt.
Still in lingering awe of his elder brother, though, Jake deploys a convoluted moral calculus to construe Matt’s self-abnegation into an act of passive aggressive heroism: “He’s penalizing himself. Guys like us are being told to get out of the way so that ‘other’ people can have a chance. Matt’s actually doing that! It’s noble!”
Hardly, Matt shrugs. He’s just “trying to be useful.” Jake’s appalled: “So you don’t even have your principles? You’re a loser for no reason?” Drew, for his part, recoils in therapeutic self-empathy: “Can’t you see what it’s doing to us to see you like this?” And even Dad, finally, can’t allow himself to “enable” his firstborn’s self-eclipse any longer.
So Matt’s left utterly alone in the end to wrestle with his unsought White Man’s Burden – a strikingly generous and humane conclusion from a playwright hailed (by New York’s Village Voice) as “the queen of unease.” Oblivious assholery all around, but nobody in the play sets out to be deliberately vicious.
But bridle your empathy. Co-directors Chelsea Haberlin and Fay Nass (guiding lights, respectively, of ITSAZOO and the queer-themed Frank Theatre Company) frame their production with a couple of distancing effects of almost Brechtian scrupulosity to keep us emotionally detached from the characters and focused on the polemic payload.
For one thing, there’s the 22’ x 41’ faux-rococo picture frame surrounding the entire proscenium to bracket the suburban banality of set designer Shizuka Kai’s meticulously realistic stage set. Then, too, a pair of conspicuously non-straight, non-white non-men -- Kim Villagente and Raven John – hover about the stage throughout the show as designated “Persons In Charge.”
Flamboyantly costumed (by designer Laura Fukumoto), they welcome us in with raucously shrill rap songs and introduce themselves with elaborate ethnic lineages and non-binary pronouns. And then, at the start of each of the play’s three scenes, they position the SWM players for the action ahead like department store window dressers or bunraku puppeteers.
So much for the vaunted free agency of the SWM.
Of course, the real puppet master of the show is choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who’s tutored her titular quartet to make Straight White doofus-dancing look somehow synchronized yet spontaneous, gawky yet weirdly graceful. Friedenberg’s had a busy time of it in February, having just world-premiered City Opera’s latest commission, Berlin 1934, in this year’s PuSh Fest.
But, to my mind, her greatest tour de force for the month has been another dissection of white privilege, Vertigo Theatre’s original production, Cipher, on Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage. Two of the show’s five co-stars, Arash Khakpour and Delia Brett, dance virtually non-stop with hardly a line to utter throughout the entire impressionistic psycho-espionage thriller. Another two, Praneet Akilla and Ellen Close, hardly stop talking throughout the entire two acts in a steady barrage of flirty banter, soulful soliloquies, steamy smooches, poetical quotations and techie (cybernetic, forensic or toxicological) jargon.
And the fifth co-star, Braden Griffiths, splits the difference, silently dancing his way through Act One as a trench-coated, fedora-sporting Spy-versus-Spy model Secret Agent only to re-emerge in Act Two as a logorrheic Columboesque CSIS agent of shrewdly shambling obliquity. Griffiths plays both roles to a tee – and no wonder, as he co-wrote the prizewinning script, along with Close, on commission by Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre.
Over 40 years, Vertigo has made a name for itself specializing in mysteries of the British drawing-room or American Noir “Whodunit” genres. But with this production, the company breaks new ground for “a bold step into the future,” according to Craig Hall, Vertigo’s artistic helmsman, who directed Cipher. To wit: we’re left at the end without knowing for sure Whodunnit, nor even quite what nefarious “It” the mysterious culprit done dunn.
For Cipher is hardly your prototypical theatrical thriller puzzle piece. Rather more of a mood piece, ratcheted up to a pitch of sustained, angsty tension by the seamless coordination of its technical team. Narda McCarroll’s set, an array of swivel-mounted translucent panels, serves as screens for Jamie Nesbitt’s panoply of projection images – now a forest, then a slummy back alley, then a brooding seascape or an intimate bistro.
This allows for endless fluidity of action, with the production paced according to sound designer Torquil Campbell’s propulsive score and Friedenberg’s choreography, rather than mere mundane changes of locale. Yet when the story line calls for dramatic punctuation, lighting designer Parjad Sharifi stands ready with front-lit clinches or back-lit shadows against the translucent screens. Now and again, the pivoting panels even allow us to view both sides of a door or a wall at once.
All this abstract staging comes at the cost of some narrative ambiguity, which may be precisely the point of a post-modern mood piece like Cipher. Hard to come to terms, though, with an open-ended enigma, as the play’s two protagonists learn to their sorrow. Close’s character – ambitious, up-and-coming forensic toxicology professor Grace Goddard – challenges her seminar students with the long-unsolved “cold case” of an unidentified body found poisoned to death on a beach in Victoria some 63 years ago.
She sketches in some intriguing details: the victim’s frantic peregrinations prior to his demise, the torn-out end piece of a poetry book found sewn into a seam of his well-tailored suit, the later discovery of the rest of the book with a mysterious cipher penciled into its margins, his desperate clawing – all in vain – at the unopened beachside doorway of a reclusive local nursing trainee.
As she spins her tale, it’s all enacted in choreographic mime by Khakpour as the victim and Brett as the nurse, shadowed by Griffiths as a skulking Secret Agent. But – Lesson One in forensics – forget all those gaudy narrative distractions, the professor admonishes her students, and just home in on the cold, hard, chemical facts of toxicology to hypothesize a cold case solution for your extra-credit problem set. Class dismissed.
But, lurking in the back of the classroom, a handsome half-Pakistani Hapa (Akilla) 10 years the professor’s junior turns out to be not so readily dismissible. He comes up after the lecture to query her about the beachside body’s lurid trappings. The two of them wind up sharing a drink. And then a bed. And then a DIY illicit web-crawling “botnet” search engine that clandestinely siphons off the processing power of a massive network of unwitting computer users to crack the cold case cipher.
He has his personal, familial reasons for pursuing this quest. She’s driven by professorial publish-or-perish ambition at first, with perhaps a dash of September-May erotic intoxication later on. Between them, they cook up a whole gamut of theories about the cold case backstory – some sinister, some romantic, some just plain cockamamie, all of which the dancers pantomime.
By Act Two, though, the botnet has attracted the notice of Griffiths’ shambolic CSIS sleuth, who’s mainly fixated on Akilla’s Islamic affiliation. From the outset, the play’s been built around a pair of interlocking triangles: the cold case cadaver, beachside nurse and Secret Agent, on the one hand, versus the professor, the Hapa and the G-man. But now we sense the two triads starting to converge towards tragic denouements.
And in each story line, one of the protagonists may wind up broken-hearted but the other is doomed to utter personal annihilation. Guess which one buys it in the end; it’s a matter of privilege.