>>REVIEW
MAN OUT OF JOINT
Runs until May 19
Downstage Performance Society
The Studio (Vertigo Theatre, Tower Centre)
Sharon Pollock is a double Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, a giant in Canadian theatre and a presence whose latest premiere has caused nothing less than a tremor in Calgary’s theatre scene. In collaboration with Simon Mallet and the company he founded, Downstage Performance Society, Pollock has premiered her first play in almost six years, an examination of the American abuses at Guantanamo Bay billed as a piece of provocative political theatre. This is a play that comes with expectations layered so thickly they are almost palpable.
Is the play provocative? Absolutely. Is it dexterous in that provocation? No. Man Out of Joint is a piece of political theatre whose semblance of human drama is lost in a storm of political fury.
At its best, Man Out of Joint provides a striking, evocative image with a sprawling esthetic that matches the tone and cohesion of the play’s text. The play opens with an assault of strobe lights and explicit propaganda messages that fade to a more deceptively sane scene. With its entire, large cast constantly scattered along Anton deGroot’s impressive set – a central playing area half enclosed by a raised platform that both exposes and imprisons the Guantanamo detainees – the sheer sight of the scene is arresting. Yet, when its characters begin to speak, they are unable to evoke the same fury of the play’s striking visual production or the outrage over the atrocities it is based on.
Modelled on Rocco Galati, the lawyer representing the Toronto terror suspects, Joel Gianelli is a civil liberties lawyer living in the shadow of both his son’s death and the enduring fallout from the 9/11 attacks. Drawn gradually into a world of conspiracy and shocking revelations about the United States government, its relationship to the attacks and its treatment of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay (and, importantly, Canada’s own "Guantanamo North" in Kingston), his newfound enthusiasm for the truth soon places him at loggerheads with his willfully ignorant wife, Suzanne. A "not in my backyard" denier, a cardboard cutout of a character who might as well have been written as an offstage presence, Suzanne eventually disintegrates under the deluge of conspiracy theories and evidence of U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
In many ways, Joel and his personal melodrama are lightly drawn because, simply, they seem to be absorbing the reality of post-9/11 poison whole, leaving little room for anything else. While Joel and Suzanne’s relative lack of characterization might have been counteracted, Mallet cannot unify the performances into a consistent whole as he directs the largest cast in Downstage’s production history. The ragged energy of the script demands precision to give full voice to its desperation, but instead the production finds little genuine humanity and a stream of uneven performances. Carrie Schiffler adds little to the role of the one-dimensional character Suzanne, whose only depth comes too late with a single note of grief. And Downstage artistic associate Julie Mortensen finds herself absurdly cast in the "hoo ah" machismo of Soldier #2, where she falters under an authority she is too weak to convey.
Robert Hay, while serviceable as Joel, fails to demonstrate a range beyond the wearied vitriol showcased in Downstage’s earlier co-production of George F. Walker’s Heaven, where he played a misanthropic, burnout cop. While he brings fury to the role, little else seeps through. In a production so dependent on nuanced performances to save it from becoming a single-minded political diatribe, Hay simply can’t deliver.
The uneven strength of the production’s cast shows most clearly in the contrast of otherwise impressive performances. Businessman-turned-impresario Joel Cochrane offers a striking turn as conspiracy whistle-blower Ed Leland, with the only misfortune being the length of his too-brief performance. Likewise, Iain Dunbar lends a persistent desperation to the "never forget" pleas of Joel’s late father, Dominic, who likens the Gitmo atrocities to his own experiences as an Italian-Canadian internment victim. Where singular, plaintive fury is integral, Sam Hageahmad offers gripping intensity as one of the Guantanamo detainees, his dialogue literally taken verbatim from a report by The Center for Constitutional Rights.
It is this intensity that serves as an unfortunate reminder that the truth of Guantanamo, the atrocities revealed by Hageahmad and other prisoners, is far more compelling than the disintegrating domestic melodrama of Joel’s marriage. Even though the staging literally places Joel and his associates at the forefront, relegating the prisoners to the play’s dynamic background, its peripheral details quickly overwhelm the familiar anger of grief as it consumes a marriage.
Admitting that the play’s political implications are shocking, however, does not concede that these implications find unity. Attacks on the American government fail to rise above the level of chatter around the Internet’s most ubiquitous conspiracy documentary, Loose Change, and the use of Omar Khadr as a connection to the Guantanamo abuses is underdeveloped, surfacing meaningfully only after the play is nearly complete. That he is introduced at all is odd, considering the clear emphasis that Pollock places on four equally real men whose dialogue explicitly outlines their torture.
Even with huge assumptions made about the connections between events, Man Out of Joint’s politics are developed with far more rigour than any of its characters, including its protagonist. Joel’s journey progresses with singularly frustrated anger, and his grief over the death of his child never fuses meaningfully with the play’s Guantanamo overtones. At best, they are parallel narratives, with his growing political awareness simply fuelled by his personal rage.
Politics, then, is the play’s central thesis, and to discuss the full implications of the play requires that its entire plot be laid bare. What follows, then, is an unabashed series of spoilers. Man Out of Joint cannot be understood without its conclusion, because it is, at its core, a play about raising and then responding to questions, even if the answers it provides are problematic.
The greatest cliché in political theatre is that the play aims to raise questions, rather than answer them. Yet, with almost didactic enthusiasm, Man Out of Joint builds and then destroys a host of straw men and women, from the barely one-dimensional "just following orders" Gitmo guards to Joel’s wife and her mantras of denial. Audience members are offered an insulting and internally incongruous choice: remain passive and therefore tacitly complicit in the heartless machinations of the American government’s oppression, or take arms against a sea of injustices. These are not questions – they are ready-made answers.
The latter option is taken literally in the play’s conclusion, with its now-galvanized protagonist shouldering an assault rifle after wrapping himself in a headscarf, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his friends and family against K, a symbol of the American establishment. It is an image whose clear implications are troubling and inconsistent with the broader reality of Downstage’s production.
In the first, concluding the play with a sympathetic protagonist identifying himself with the mujahedeen or any other freedom fighter/insurgent is decadent wish fulfilment for primarily white, middle class audiences railing against American jingoism. It is Rambo as interpreted by the Left. So begins the inconsistency.
Imagine, then, an audience member walking out of the play after its curtain call, his hands shaking with the injustice of it all. Imagine, having seen Joel take literal arms against injustice after enduring torture that sharpened his resolve into a lethal weapon, that this audience member also wants to make a difference. Opening his program, he finds inside a sheet of instructions titled "What Should We Do," and learns that, presumably in addition to the taxing effort of watching a play, he should write polite letters to his MLA. There is also a free copy of Alberta Views.
Presumably, purchasing a subscription for 46 per cent off the newsstand price will drop the scales from the audience’s eyes in much the same way that government conspiracy and torture did for Joel.
Capped with an image of such deliberate provocation that it might as well have been an image of the Twin Towers falling, with a photocopied insert offering one more method to assuage guilt, Man Out of Joint is patent audience pandering. It is further intransigence masquerading as involvement, a play roaring with political fury capped by the whimper of polite letter writing. It invites action and offers none.
Neither Pollock nor Mallett have misread their audience or the political zeitgeist. Far from it. In fact, the production is likely to be a rousing success. In a climate where even the home of the neo-con reviles its president, to say nothing of a world full of far less generous critics, we have won the day, which, Pollock is erudite enough to observe, does not mean the end of war’s horrific brutality.
In the end, however, political theatre must challenge. This play does not challenge a single one of its audience’s assumptions. Political theatre must compel, and rage coupled with a pat program insert provides compulsion toward nothing. Man Out of Joint will succeed because it is loud and provocative, but it cannot succeed as either a production or manifesto. Without a story that holds its own against the horrors of the American cultural war, or a production that is more than just sincere, Man Out of Joint is the kind of background noise that its script worries will eventually recede completely from public consciousness. There is still the need to fight, but not like this. |
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