Herb Whittaker and Nathan Cohen Awards presented by CTCA in Toronto: Judith Thompson, J. Kelly Nestruck and Patricia Keeney Honoured (read review by Keeney on our site)

The Canadian Theatre Critics Association presented its three national awards today to playwright Judith Thompson, Globe and Mail theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck and freelance critic Patricia Keeney.

Thompson, a prolific playwright as well as a professor at the University of Guelph, was presented with the prestigious Herbert Whittaker Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Canadian Theatre at a luncheon in Toronto. Previous winners include such major Canadian theatre figures as Bill Glassco, Susan Rubes, Ken Gass and Jackie Maxwell. The award has been presented biannually since 1975 by the Canadian Theatre Critics Association and its predecessor, the Toronto Drama Bench.

Nestruck and Keeney were presented with Nathan Cohen Awards for Critical Writing. Nestruck, originally from Winnipeg, is theatre critic for the Globe and Mail and won in the Long Review category (over one thousand words) for a piece he wrote called “Was George Bernard Shaw A ‘Monster’?” The piece appeared in the Globe on 2 July 2012.

Keeney, is professor of English and Creative Writing at York University.

Juros fro the 2011-2012 Cohen Awards were Robert Cushman, critic for the National Post and Kamal Al-Solaylee, former Globe and Mail critic and presently professor of cultural journalism at Ryerson University. 

Media Contact Don Rubin, President, Canadian Theatre Critics Association: drubin@yorku.ca 

Winner of Nathan Cohen Award for Short Review by Patricia Keeney:

Broadway Report

Rock and Rylance on the Great White Way

Seeing two of Broadway’s more serious plays back to back recently — Jerusalem and The Motherfucker with the Hat — is an exercise in astonishing contrast around similar material.

The most highly promoted of the two is Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, a transfer from the West End, boasting an extraordinary performance by Mark Rylance. This production would seem to have it all: myth, legend and poetry as well as a resonant title (referring to Blake’s anthemic song, “Jerusalem”).

The playwright believes that both song and play simultaneously celebrate and lament a lost state. Can a new Jerusalem possibly arise from Butterworth’s incarnation of England’s once green and pleasant land as a Mods and Rockers rumble? Chickens pecking quietly around it, the tarnished silver caravan of Johnny Rooster Byron sits garishly in the same woods that grace a country fair in the idyllic West Country. The St. George’s Day celebrations include Morris dances and May poles, rumours of dragon killings and pagan rituals.

King of his castle, Rylance’s Rooster Byron is the Lord of Misrule, the reigning counter culture hero, blasted on booze and drugs. Throughout this state of the nation play (as Michael Billington might term it) Rooster roisters through his trailer trash empire — a squatter waiting to be evicted — practicing substance abuse on local teenagers and conveniently stowing Wiltshire’s comely underage May Queen in his caravan.

The play’s opening blast lands us in this anarchy. Screeching music and flinging bodies, hysterical screams and roaring gutturals precede a solitary sylph in pale light emptily echoing Blake’s visionary England. The gentle lyrics and slowly swelling melody of “Jerusalem” meant to vanquish “dark Satanic mills” start us thinking how modern capitalistic systems can be

compared to the social evils of the Industrial Revolution condemned by Blake. Director Ian Rickson begins promisingly. Our interest is piqued.

No doubt, Rylance, playing Rooster Byron both as king and fool, turns in a virtuoso performance as the legendary green man of the woods reduced to sleazy outcast. He is outrageous and unbridled in his drug-hazed joie de vivre, eyes blazing, hurling a well-worn vitality around the stage from the weight of a clubfoot. Eyes blazing, he redeems his character slightly in too few moments that acknowledge his own lower depths and the extent to which he’s fallen. A powerful poseur, he is not suffering and we feel no tragic sense in his blowy grandeur.

The inequities of capitalism might well have exiled this new Byron and his disgruntled band to live rough in the forests of modern England. However, there is no attempt in this play to deal with that or any other real issue. These two worlds (the mistily idyllic past and the contemporary sordid) never connect – neither allegorically, narratively nor psychologically. There is no working political agenda nor effective social mandate. Rooster’s motley crew serves no purpose higher than beguiling the truth of their sorry state with the fake glitter of borrowed visions from some undisclosed heroic time.

The fault, I think, lies in the play rather than in the star. Playwright Butterworth admits he never intended any coherent allegory, claiming to write what gives him “goosebumps.” That’s fine but we also need connective tissue. The writer has to do something with the wealth of literary, historical and mythological allusions he throws around. Otherwise his characters all sound like pretentious parasites who should know and do better and who don’t deserve our sympathy.

By contrast, the bruised and battered people of Stephen Guirgis’ The Motherfucker With the Hat (another highly charged title) playing right across the street from Jerusalem do win us over. In scattershots of rhythmic street speech reminiscent of vintage Mamet, these barely articulate individuals spatter their stories all over us and each other, trying always to be cool but continually overheating with rage and need and fear. Drug dealing, jail time, love triangles and ludicrous rehabilitation are alternately funny and painful, crude and poetic but always authentic in these desperate articulations about what’s lost, what’s gained, what’s at stake and ultimately what’s meaningful in their sordid lives.

Guirgis has not always been so evenly paced in his work. His earlier off-Broadway drama, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot was, for instance, richly over-written. Here, cast and director (Anna Shapiro) cooperate with a much more balanced argument to produce a slice of raunchy urban life that is tragically tinged yet buoyed throughout by a raucous and honest humour that is both tender and raw.

Main man Jackie is played superbly by Bobby Cannavale. Big and muscular, his deep voice booms. Sculpted and craggy, he sweats pride and anger and hurt. This gleaming chiseled rock of a man, we also know, can cry.

Elizabeth Rodriguez as Jackie’s girlfriend, Veronica is equally convincing with lots of the smart, snappy, in-your-face, save-my-soul-dialogue that animates this piece. She gets the play’s comic opener: sniffing cocaine and yapping on the phone to her mother whom she cautions about alcohol and boyfriends: “Mom, get rid of him. He looks like a fish. You gotta decide whether to fuck him or fry him.”

With her husky voice and tough skinny presence, she struts defensiveness and desire. One knows why Jackie and Veronica are together. He comes in prancing like a peacock. He’s on parole, He’s got a job. All cocky sexual anticipation, he sways over her, quivering with machismo while she showers. Then he sees that telltale “mother fucking hat.” Whose been in her apartment? Who left it? Suddenly, he is a drowning man gasping for air.

He tries to understand why she would even want to be with another man. “If I bought you a fridge that made ice-cubes, would that have made a difference?” he pleads “No, I like my stuff at room temperature,” she shoots back both hilarious and hurt. “I did everything for you,” he charges on. “Yeah, what about the little house, what about the baby…” Defeated, he asks sadly, “Where can I reach you.” Her reply includes the kind of frayed hope that holds this hot-blooded play together. “I will,” she mutters with heartbreaking hauteur, “be residing at a undisclosed address.”

Playing Ralph, Jackie’s drug and parole counselor, Chris Rock is the ostensible “star” of the show. Competent but ultimately unconvincing, his performance is more stand-up than Stanislavski. You can always see him preparing for the next whippy line, going for the laugh, the punch, too aware of audience. Rock does have a nice moment at the end of the play when he himself is revealed as the owner of the motherfucking hat. Inevitably, the two men decide to duke it out. “Yes I fucked her,” he admits, moaning from the floor. And then, reasonably, “Now you can fuck my wife.”

Clearly one does what one must then accepts the consequences runs Rock’s sincere attempt to express some loopy male morality of the moment. This combination of the earnest and the feckless creates the humour and humanity that infuse this play, a humanity lacking in the much more highly promoted Jerusalem playing just a shout away.

— Patricia Keeney

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This review first appeared online in the CTCA’s own E-Bulletin