Reviews
SOLOCENTRIC FESTIVAL
Solocentric Theatre & Dance and One Yellow Rabbit
Ran May 17 to 21
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Everybody’s got a story, but whether it’s worth a one-hour solo show is another matter. Three of the shows I caught at this year’s Solocentric Festival were autobiographical pieces in which the writer-performers set out to convince us that their personal tales were the stuff of compelling theatre.
Nicole Zylstra’s EFFable succeeded, by virtue of witty writing and an engaging performance, as did Elliot Grey’s Strapped, thanks to a smart use of video and hip-hop clichés. But Eric Rose’s STRUCK, literally the most shocking of the three stories, failed to become more than an overextended anecdote.
EFFable proved an apt title for Zylstra’s show. Although she teases us at first by appearing to be helplessly tongue-tied, it turns out this loquacious playwright-comedian has no problem putting her experiences into words. Very funny words.
In this glib romp through her first encounters with romance and religion, Zylstra reveals that, for her, the universal quests for love and the meaning of existence have always been confusingly entangled. Raised by atheists, she had a prepubescent crush on Jesus – although eventually realizing it couldn’t work out ("He was 34 and I was 12") – which led to a brief teenage flirtation with Christianity. When God finally jilted her (He has a way of doing that), she took up with the Antichrist – a proto-Goth boy seemingly allergic to sunlight and food. It was the beginning of an adult pattern that, she explains, finds her continually drawn to devilish men even though she knows they’ll always get the best of her.
A peppy, pigtailed Zylstra punctuates her memoir with entertaining digressions – turned into literal "sidebars" by Terry Gunvordahl’s lighting design – and excerpts from her ongoing correspondence with the Devil, a delightfully perverse twist on Children’s Letters to God in which little Nicky asks big Satan about life in Hell and wonders if Celine Dion, rather than metal, might be a more appropriate musical torture for the damned.
As a writer, Zylstra’s equally at home referencing religious texts and the late ’70s-’80s pop culture of her childhood. One minute she’s glossing the Gita or dismissing the irrelevancies of Leviticus, the next she’s discovering antiwar sentiment via TV’s MASH or ruminating on the foggy relationship between Mr. Roarke and Tattoo of Fantasy Island. And she delivers her material with an onstage personality at once vivacious and sardonic. If there’s anything missing from EFFable, it’s just a more creative staging, which would transform the show from an elaborate stand-up routine into a real piece of theatre.
There’s no lack of theatricality in Elliot Grey’s Strapped, in which the filmmaker-cum-rap artist ambitiously mixes together video segments and imagery, hip-hop verse, a diverse soundtrack and even some dancing, courtesy of a graceful Christy Greene. (Apparently the show had so many sound and light cues that it crashed on its first performance; I saw the second one, which may have been accordingly stripped down since not all the music listed in the program was played.) Grey effectively marshals his multimedia resources to tell the parallel stories of Matthew, a kid from a middle-class Calgary family who ends up grappling with a crippling disease and a coke addiction, and Grey himself, a self-styled gangsta rapper and murderer who claims to have iced Matt in the john of a downtown bar.
You can see the show’s Fight Club-style twist coming from a distance, but that doesn’t detract from its implicit commentary on both white youth’s appropriation of black ghetto culture and the ageless desire to remake one’s identity into something more romantic and dangerous. This is also one of those rare shows in which the video and live portions are seamlessly integrated.
Eric Rose’s STRUCK falls somewhere between Zylstra’s Spartan style and Grey’s high-tech approach, with vivid sound and lighting designs (by Cameron Faulkenhagen and Ian Martens, respectively) that suggest Rose’s sensations when he was hit by lightning while camping with his buddies outside Sudbury in 1999. It’s a great story, obviously – especially since the lightning bolt ripped through Rose’s body, leaving a burnt trail, yet he managed to survive it. But is it worth a whole show? Not if, as is the case here, the experience isn’t placed in a larger context.
Rose does use the incident to reflect a little on his life to that point, but mostly he just gives us the trauma – and some of the black humour – of the situation. And his descriptive writing is much better than his acting; he doesn’t have a strong stage presence and his enunciation is often poor. Thunder and lightning may be the perfect ingredients for theatre, but STRUCK ultimately feels as if it belongs in the pages of a Reader’s Digest, not on the stage. |
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