>>PREVIEW
HEAVEN
Runs until November 18
Downstage Theatre and Rogues Theatre
Pumphouse Theatres
In 2000, when Toronto’s CanStage first produced George F. Walker’s Heaven, its artistic producer, Martin Bragg, said of the play: "George wants to make people angry." In fact, Bragg was so certain that the play would offend audiences that the company transferred Heaven to the smaller Berkeley Street theatre.
All this for a comedy.
Of course, a cursory glance at the script’s first five pages reveals the vitriol that Bragg feared would turn audiences away – raw obscenity, a corrupt cop pulling a gun on the play’s protagonist, and the looming spectre of racism. What follows is no less disturbing, as a human rights lawyer named Jimmy stumbles through the microcosm of a city park, in a world where he has completely lost faith, where he speaks with a generalized hatred that sounds uncomfortably like bigotry.
Sharply political, Heaven is a natural choice for the social mandate of Downstage Performance Society, mounting a co-production with the artistic wing of the Company of Rogues Actors' Studio: Rogues Theatre. It’s a play that, like Alberta Theatre Projects’s recent run of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?, pulls its comic energy from the same moments that seem to be unbearable, moments so shocking that laughter is one of the only possible responses. And, like The Goat, Heaven is a play that is more concerned with raising questions of tolerance than providing ready answers.
"I think posing any kind of solutions to an issue like racism is incredibly presumptuous. It’s not like this is new, something that’s going to be gone in a week," says Downstage’s artistic producer, Simon Mallett, who is also directing the production. "It’s not about raising awareness – everyone is aware, that’s a bit simplistic. This is in terms of looking at racism in Canada and how as Canada we embrace this notion of multiculturalism, and some of the inherent problems that can arise in terms of conflicts. Not just in terms of in the country but in terms of dealing with immigrant populations with long histories of strife."
For Jimmy, played by Company of Rogues’s studio director Joe-Norman Shaw, these abiding prejudices exercised by Christians, Jews and every other religious and cultural group represent the unbearable reality of the world. With his marriage to Judy (Barb Mitchell) crumbling, and venting his frustrations on her rabbi, David (Hit and Myth’s artistic producer, Joel Cochrane), Jimmy wallows in his own dissatisfaction, provoking a young black drug addict named Derek (Johnathan Ramcharan) to violence. Simultaneously, Jimmy is pursued by Karl (Rob Hay), a bad cop nursing a hatred for the other man that is as intense as Jimmy’s broader loathing of the world. Though the play never leaves the confines of the park, its themes bleed into a wider world of prejudices that can even extend to the afterlife.
As a protagonist, Jimmy is undeniably an antihero. A man who has built his career on defending minorities, he nonetheless feels as though he, and the rest of the world, is fighting a losing battle against his own prejudices. But, like the play’s humour, his resonance does not depend on his likeability.
"A play doesn’t always require people to be perfect and have flawless records to make them empathetic," says Mallett. "I think there are connections that can be made to all the characters. I don’t think any of them are without flaws, I don’t think any of them are without anything to connect to, either.
"The other thing is that we all have our own biases as much as we try to suppress them and try not to acknowledge them, and because of that it’s a lot easier to recognize ourselves in the characters," he adds. "That’s an important part of recognizing what the characters are striving for, and provoke the self-awareness that way."
Either ironically or appropriately, casting the part of a black character proved to be a difficult task for the production. With too few local actors auditioning, Mallett went to Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan College, where he saw Ramcharan’s audition at the college’s Emerge audition event – an open graduate showcase. For that matter, the very idea of a white playwright exploring racism is a contentious issue, with critics labeling cultural appropriation as a new kind of exploitation.
But for Mallett, the benefits of bringing the issues that Heaven explores outweighs the enduring "old white men" reality that still largely pervades the arts. Whether the production angers its crowds, he notes, its silence would be worse.
"(Native Canadian playwright) Thompson Highway always said that he would rather have his productions done with white actors rather than not done because they can’t find native actors," says Mallett. "Ideally we would live in a world where there’s a playwright’s collaborative that address these issues of social stigma and racism. In the meantime it’s better for that to get air, however that happens, than not happening for fear of misappropriation." |
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