>>REVIEW
NECESSARY TARGETS
Urban Curvz Theatre
Runs until April 22
(Dancers’ Studio West)
Subtlety is one of those words that all too often seems to be taken as necessarily positive. We go to the theatre not to have a message and its constituent characters explicitly read to us from lecterns, but to gradually learn the subtleties and nuances and the journey that brings us to a conclusion, clear-cut or otherwise.
But what if the message needs to be delivered like a backhanded blow?
Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets, currently produced by new theatre company Urban Curvz, is simply not subtle. Its characters are strong, their dialogue is dynamic and the subject matter is nothing less than the post-war trauma of the last Balkan war, in the ruins of Bosnia.
Best known as the author of The Vagina Monologues, Ensler brings two American protagonists, psychiatrist J.S. (Valerie Planche) and counsellor-cum-journalist Melissa (Christin McComb) to a war zone that forces them to directly confront both the horrors of war and the fundamental humanity of its victims. Weighty stuff.
In the hands of a less capable company, Ensler’s script might succumb to its occasional, unfitting moments of indulgence, as characters deliver lines so leaden with Ensler’s own poetic sentiment that they threaten to bring an already confrontational play into the realm of scripted sermonizing. Ensler has been accused of exploiting the interviews she conducted in a Bosnian refugee camp, which form the basis for the play, simply to add credence to subject matter that only further establishes her as a feminist icon. But, in its inaugural production, Urban Curvz has found a cast and crew whose combined creation is a sublime if jarring look at humanity in all its forms, a struggle that is executed with intensity and sincerity that subtlety simply cannot match.
In the relatively small space of Dancers’ Studio West, the cast of seven characters nearly busts the venue. Along with Planche and McComb, five refugee women of the camp provide firsthand glimpses into the war – the would-be patients of J.S.’s trans-atlantic therapy session. Planche is simply magnetic as JS, assuming the role of a woman whose upper-class accoutrements and self-assuredness are brought into sharp focus against the backdrop of the refugee camp. Her counterpart, Zlata, a former doctor whose life has been shattered by war, played with iron-strong confidence by Elinor Holt; McComb’s exploitative Melissa exposes her own frailty in her driven façade, and Ann Barret’s comic Azra pines for her lost cow. The genuinely frightening breaking of Lorianna Lombardo’s Seada, recounts with visceral intensity the trauma of rape warfare; Jessica Parker Kennedy’s wide-eyed ingénue, Nuna, and her obsession with American culture.
Necessary Targets has been gifted with an exceptional cast whose honesty and intensity is absolutely riveting in the world created by the production’s crew.
Making her promising debut as a set designer, Deneen McArthur’s demarcated set separates J.S.’s luxuriously appointed apartment from the areas of the refugee camp, a witty and stylistic nod to the literal and figurative layers of separation so integral to the play and J.S.’s development. Used to further effect, the scrims that divide McArthur’s world serve as screens for projections of post-war Bosnian devastation. Through this world, both subtle and explicit, director Jane MacFarlane draws the play’s characters with a dynamism that rises far beyond the tableside chats that form much of the play’s early discussion, all against the atmospheric soundscape of sound designer Michael Gesy.
The result is a production whose devotion to its subject matter does not allow its message to be hidden beneath subtlety – certainly a good start for a theatre company mandated to highlight and encourage women. Necessary Targets is a pair of hands grabbing its audience’s lapels, pulling them face-to-face with an explicit portrait of humanity placed under unimaginable trauma, and it demands nothing less than complete attention.
Subtlety be damned – they have my undivided attention. |
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