Review
X-RAY
Ghost River Theatre
Starring Kira Bradley, David van Belle and Doug McKeag
Written by David Rhymer, Kira Bradley and David van Belle
Directed by Eric Rose
Runs until September 26
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
We have already acquired a visual shorthand for September 11, 2001: a rain of office paper from the sky, which instantly evokes the debris which came pouring down with the destruction of the World Trade Center. In September 10, Douglas Coupland’s pre-9-11 monologue which recently previewed at One Yellow Rabbit, the paper fell late in the performance. In X-Ray, Ghost River Theatre’s musical take on the world’s post-9-11 madness, it comes down right at the top of the show. After which, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the Iraq invasion are similarly quick-sketched, at times to the point where they aren’t even named. Yet the images are so current and universal, everyone will get them. I’d bet you don’t even have to speak English to understand most of this play.
And it’s also easy to identify with the confusion of its central character, a young woman named Alison (Kira Bradley), another victim of the age of information overload, who is trying to suss what the so-called war on terror is really all about.
Holed up in her seedy apartment and glued to her computer, Freakygirl (as she calls herself online) engages in a chat-room conversation with a brainy American conspiracy theorist who goes by the alias Bro (David van Belle). But even as Bro sows doubt and suspicion in her mind, she’s confronted with a personal dilemma right outside her door, where the fed-up building manager (Doug McKeag) has finally got tough with the wife-beater across the hall – too tough – and is now asking Freakygirl, his favourite tenant, to turn a blind eye to the crime.
And so we have an allegory for Canada’s difficult bystander role in the Iraq war, an attempt to link the personal with the political, which, like much of X-Ray, is uneven but sporadically effective.
As Freakygirl freaks out in her flat, the play juxtaposes her real experiences with her inner journey, guided by two wacky manifestations of her conscience – a pair of chipper song-and-dance men (McKeag and van Belle) in prison-issue orange jumpsuits who mix jokes, patter and Broadway-style numbers with a world tour that takes in everything from Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray to a church service with the Bush clan.
It’s a device that, much of the time, seems goofy and strained, but occasionally clicks. There’s one sombre number (the songs are by David Rhymer) in which the two drip with dark irony as they survey the carnage in Baghdad while reciting the Rumsfeld mantra about a "manageable war." And, even more deftly satirical, there’s a cartoonish skit in which a God-fearing, rod-unsparing Barbara Bush (McKeag in drag) belts out a jolly ode to corporal punishment – a seemingly silly spoof of Christian fundamentalism that suddenly takes on meaning as it slowly segues into a grimly realistic scene of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison.
There are also some intriguing touches, notably Freakygirl’s introduction to Hassan i-Sabbah (who could have wandered in from another Rhymer musical, the William S. Burroughs-inspired Dream Machine) – the legendary hash-dispensing Muslim leader of a team of ace assassins – who puts Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida in perspective.
From her journey, Freakygirl is meant to derive the lesson that, in the global village, we all have moral responsibilities. It’s a laudable message, but it would have more impact if we had a better idea of why she is so scared and spineless in the first place. We need a little more back-story here.
At 90 uninterrupted minutes, the show is fluidly staged by Eric Rose on a mobile, minimal set by Terry Gunvordahl, dominated by large partitions of chain-link fence and expressively painted by Gunvordahl’s masterful lighting. The trio of Bradley, McKeag and van Belle deliver full-throttle performances, although only McKeag has a real singer’s voice. And Rhymer’s music isn’t all it could be, either. Some of it is simply forgettable, while a self-justifying ballad for McKeag’s building super feels too much like a retread of the soul-baring songs the composer gave Wiebo Ludwig and Jim Keegstra in the musicals An Eye For an Eye and Ilsa, Queen of the Nazi Love Camp.
But despite its weaknesses, X-Ray is a useful piece of theatre. For those who don’t seek out alternative news sources, some of its information may prove revelatory. And for the rest of us, a call to action can be found embedded in its allegory, a demand that, like Freakygirl, Canadians refuse to stand by and let the guy on the other side of our threshold/border get away with murder, no matter how big, powerful – or friendly – he happens to be. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.