Circle Mirror Transformation: A Well-Crafted Crowd pleaser
Reviewed by Alvina Ruprecht.
The Circle Mirror Transformation is one of those plays that is very deceptive. Until the intermission, you wonder where it is all going because it appears to be nothing but a series of funny moments in an adult drama class taking place in a Community Centre in Shirley (Vermont) where five adults have come for different reasons. The exercises and games which are supposed to be related to a form of theatrical training that acts upon the mind by first acting on the body- a psychophysiological approach according to Richard Schechner – can be amusing, or boring, or silly or whatever you want to think, depending on your relationship with the material. Of course it is a parody of those counter culture encounter groups that became so important in the 1960s and 70s. It takes us back to the “communitas” of the peace and love era where the characters here are caricatures of those for whom theatre is a pretext, because individual therapy is the real motive behind all these gyrations, these exercises, these touchy feeling encounters that came out of the anti-psychiatry movement of the hippy period. “When are we going to do some real acting?” yells the sullen young Lauren ( Catherine Rainville) who never really gets into the spirit of the class as it unfolds in a series of short sketches separated by Marc Désormeaux playful but disquieting music, and by quick blackouts, or interrupted by the arrival of various class members during delicate moments of intense conversation.
