>>REVIEW
Ground Zero Theatre and FireBelly Theatre
Written by Lindsay Burns
Runs until March 4
Pumphouse Theatres
On October 22, 2004, Alexis Stewart appeared on Larry King Live to announce that prison food is, as suspected, "terrible" and that, nevertheless, her mother Martha was doing just fine, working out in "a nice gym with a Stairmaster" and getting up earlier than everyone else. The number of posts the segment generated on message boards across America ("How could we allow such a beautiful woman to suffer this humiliation?" "Yes, it was a witch hunt – and they caught one!" "We REAP what we SOW") was likely greater than the number of theatre tickets sold, that same night, around the world.
It’s all too easy to disdain the complex stew of anxious dreams and excited envy forever bubbling around the phenomenon that is Martha Stewart. But such a reaction also, by extension, dismisses the millions of people, a great many of them women, to whom Stewart is either a domestic diva or a demon or, quite simply, "a good thing."
Fortunately, Calgary actor/writer Lindsay Burns’s current one-woman show, Dough: The Politics of Martha Stewart, chooses to dig deeper rather than dismiss. This is not a play "about" Martha Stewart: instead, it uses Her Martha-ness as a binding agent in an examination of how and why contemporary women still find themselves under the spells of damaging archetypes of female perfection. By taking a cubist approach, exploring the stories of nine different women struggling with "lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation," Dough paints a disturbing composite portrait of a culture driven by the terror of being unremarkable. Even at their most decadent – picking up boy-toys in Banff, obsessed with finding "the right shade of sea foam" for the bathroom off the kitchen, barking orders for an eighth-birthday party straight out of Martha Stewart Living itself ("It should feel wholesome and remind us to use the farmers market more often") – these women are tiny and terrified, seemingly convinced they’re clinging to the sheer face of a cliff by nothing more than their expensive manicures and their wits.
Without a single costume change outside a few simple props, Burns creates nine women entirely distinct from one another. One spins Bush-versus-Hillary-via-Martha conspiracy theories through a Joan Rivers accent and a bottle of champagne; one mousily gears up for a striptease she’s been perfecting in an Adult Education course, gushing at audience members as if we’re her classmates ("I am so glad the bent-willow birdfeeder class was full!"); one cold-bloodedly threatens to jump off a building to garner attention for her daughter’s album ("If I don’t do this, they won’t even want her on The Surreal Life"). Subtle nuances and unexpected reversals in the writing prevent these characters from being mere caricatures. Still, in the hands of a lesser performer, Dough might be a much lesser play. Burns’s physical, vocal and facial expressiveness do more to create discrete stories than nine separate top-dollar locations could. Take that, TV!
The intimacy of the Pumphouse’s Joyce Doolittle Theatre is perfect for this production. It’s staged in the round (or rather, the oval), highlighting the point that Burns’s women are perpetually on display. Colin Ross’s set design is simple and effective: a central, three-tiered dais evokes a wedding cake but, more importantly, gives Burns a world of room to move in a tiny space. A nice touch, too, is a set of breezy white curtains surrounding the audience, cloistering us with the performer and creating a feeling of privacy and shared secrets.
Each of Dough’s nine segments is introduced by an ingredient or element, printed on oversized, coolly retro placemats – of the bread-making process, from "water" through "punch down" (my favourite) to, finally, "bake." Having once suffered through a 20-minute performance-piece in which a kerchiefed actor did nothing but knead air, I’m happy to say the breadmaking here is almost entirely symbolic. It’s an apt metaphor, though, for a play whose humour, like bread, is both delicious (the 90 minutes speed by) and substantial (days later, I’m still thinking about it). And although cupcakes do figure (rather nicely, actually) in the action, Dough is moving without being saccharine.
"There is nothing more unattractive than a crying woman," one character’s grandmother used to say, while another puts forth the theory that Martha was crucified by the courts because she refused to cry. Stoicism, it seems, can be just another coat of polish on those clinging claws. But if Burns’s artistic choices here are anything to go by, her own recipe for resistance seems to be much heavier on the dark laughter than the tears. And, yes (come on, you knew this was coming): it is indeed a good thing. |
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