Corpus: an intriguing play that plunges into the heart of the matter.

Photo, Andrew Alexander.

This is an intriguing play that makes a serious effort to work through the complex questions dealing with survivors of WWII death camps and all the associated issues of racism, anti-Semitism, survival guilt, as well as the working of abjection, oppression and domination that are not at all easy to flush out on stage. It is clear that author Darrah Teitel is a talented playwright who plunges headlong into the heart of the matter with much post structuralist theory in her bag. One does have the sense that she might have taken on too many issues at once but she still has succeeded, for the most part, in capturing the contemporary sense of what those past events mean to today’s younger generation.

The scenario plays out in two time frames. The present involves young Megan White (Sascha Cole) who is doing her PhD at a Canadian university under the supervision of her Professor (John Koensgen) a specialist in Genocide studies. Megan, who wants to understand the biological origins of racism, does not seem too clear about the direction of her work until she gets a note from an eccentric young German hacker named Heinrich (Daniel Sadavoy) who says he has some important information for her. After a very contempory cyber encounter with this young man, she is soon  off to Berlin to meet him and events pick up from there. On the other side of the stage, the past time frame takes us back to 1944 as the war is coming to an end. A certain German woman named Eva Reiniger, (Colleen Sutton) wife of one of the Administrators of the death camp Auschwitz and thus living in that Polish town, receives a visit from Eli, (Eric Craig) a polish Jew, also an inmate at Auschwitz, but one who has a special function in the camp. He has been sent to Eva’s home by her husband to teach her Polish. Why should she learn Polish? Why does Eli seem so terrified in her presence? Why does she want him to “hurt her" and why does she lie to him about his sister who was also at Auschwitz? Questions accumulate, events precipitate, , especially as soon as we swing back to the present, in Canada. Megan finally does come to Berlin to meet her hacker friend and all the pieces from the past, which Megan dug up in her research, start falling into place. Tension builds, and there is a taught meeting at the end which holds our attention but which  does not quite resolve itself because  nothing new is revealed. That is no doubt the idea because we leave the theatre  asking questions, which is a good thing.

One clear weakness of the staging however is the performance by Sascha Cole as the PhD candidate. She performs as though she were in a TV sit com farce and I can’t understand why the director did not clamp down on her hysterics and bring her into line with the content of her character. Yes the text does have amusing moments and Megan’s character does offer some comic relief from the dark tension coming from the other side of the stage, but the actor transformed the grad student into ditzy clown in baggy pants who works against her character. And when she starts spouting notions of post-modern ethics which are thought to undermine clear concepts of good and evil, as she tries to explain her image of survivor guilt and and the work of the Sonderkomando in the camps, those serious arguments fizzle because the person talking is not credible. At another moment, she mentions Julia Kristeva’s ideas of “abjection”, which sounds like empty name dropping when in fact the idea of abjection was definitely explored in the play, through the very interesting Eva Reiniger/Wolf and Eli relationship tinged with violence. However, in the mouth of Megan that word meant nothing because we could not believe she understood what she was talking about. Why did the author feel the need to put such serious talk in the mouth of a character who was a clown? There was really no need to even introduce abjection theory. Jean Genet shows abjection beautifully in his play Haute Surveillance. Liliana Cavani does it with a blood chilling clinical gaze in Night Porter, and there was no mention of Kristeva in those scenarios. I have seen Sasha Cole in other shows and she is a good actor, so why did she resort to this performance style that completely undermined the very thing that was the centre of this character’s existence in the play? It made no sense.

On the other hand, the interaction between Colleen Sutton and Eric Craig was subtle, tense, beautiful, and often stimulatingly ambiguous. The acting was generally excellent and they captured the violence, the fear, the way the memory of Eli still haunts the elder Eva Wolfe (Laurie Fyffe) , and enhances the quality of the mystery, fitting perfectly into the structure of the play. The portrait of the perky young hacker Heinrich created the sense of a mischievous creature from cyberspace , all enhanced by his expressive eyes, projected by the web cam, on both screens.

The second act of Corpus introduced moments of staging that sent us back to the Cabaret style of Pre-war German performance but the Bronwyn Steinberg’s directorial choices were not clear enough and might have benefitted from more specific visual references to  the genre. Megan’s mother (an unrecognizable Laurie Fyffe) as a Tsatska from Brooklyn with blond hair and a heavy American accent, was a figure straight out of Cabaret hyper theatricality, perhaps even a hallucination from Megan’s high flying  mind. As for Megan herself in that heightened stage moment, as much as she went overboard in her university office in Canada, her Cabaret performance in the spotlight with Boa and long dress, looking like a theatrical academic, was much too subdued to be explicitly grotesque. The staging has to clarify the esthetics of this portion and weed out the unnecessary meanings.

There is much performance potential in this work, that touches at the very depths of survival guilt which soon becomes clear  even though it does seem to drop the quest for the biological origins of racism that is announced at the beginning. The conclusion then takes us somewhere else ….and leaves one with a feeling that perhaps it is still too ambiguous. Some editing is in the picture and certainly some of the staging choices must be rethought but this is certainly a play worth seeing.

Corpus , the World Permiere, can be seen at Arts Court,at 8pm, from May 1 to May 9, 2014. Tickets are 15-25$

Corpus by Darrah Teitel  Presented by Counterpoint Players.

Directed by Bronwyn Steinberg

Costumes and props: Patrice-Ann Forbes

Lighting design: Leeza Gulliver

Sound and Video design: Wes Kline

Cast:

Megan      Sasah Cole

Eli             Eric Craig

Eva Wolfe  Laurie Fyffe

Homer       John Koensgen

Heinrich     Daniel Dadavoy

Eva Reiniger  Colleen Sutton