huff: A well-worth it emotional roller-coaster

Playwright-actor Cliff Cardinal’s one man show, huff, has received rave reviews practically everywhere it has appeared. That’s a lot to live up to. Cardinal and director Karin Randoja’s opening night performance at the NAC started off a bit shaky, but ended with such a powerful bang that I’m sure many of us in the audience will be carrying the events of the play and its message for days, if not weeks, to come.

In this one man show, set on a First Nations reserve, Cardinal combines mythic storytelling and a dark, twisted sense of humour to portray over 20 characters surrounding three brothers as they cope with the harsh realities of their lives and the one year anniversary of their mother’s death. Backdropped against a tall, plastic drapery on which they project patterns and images corresponding to the mood, Cardinal and his team have created a world somewhere between harsh reality and gas-induced hallucination. The subject matter is very dark and the team certainly doesn’t shy away from showing the depths of its pain and destruction. There were a couple of scenes that had me writhing in my seat with discomfort and disgust.

However, as dark as the show gets, it balances itself out with dashes of very dark humour. Some of it works really well, while some of it seems almost too dark to laugh at. However, overall, Cardinal has found a way, as he says to “draw the audience in, not push them away; to inspire hope, not hopelessness; and especially to incite others to tell their own stories.” This isn’t an easy feat when the story you’re trying to tell includes abuse, alcoholism, and sexual assault to name only a few elements. This has to do with the quality of the writing, but it’s also Cardinal’s performance that draws us in and evokes empathy and laughter even in the bleakest of moments. He not only has the ability to transition between characters relatively seamlessly, but between emotions and modes as well. One moment, he is a radio-show announcer and another an anthropomorphic skunk and he somehow seems to make all the absurd and uncomfortable elements seem everyday and like they should follow one another.

The set is very simple with the lighting doing much of the heavy leg work to set the tone. It does this powerfully, as it bathes the stage in shades of grey and different shapes such as raindrops, flames, and tomato juice splatter. It is always refreshing to see a show take an element such as lighting and infuse so much humanity and use into it. huff invests so much into its lighting that it also becomes a character, one at some points equal to those Cardinal portrays.

huff is a chance for us, the audience, to see life through someone else’s lens. In this case, the lens shines a light onto pain and perhaps confronts us with issues we may not be comfortable even acknowledging. However, it is this ability to bridge space across cultures and lives, as well as to draw us in, that is the beauty and purpose of art. Whether we have experienced parts of it or it’s completely foreign territory, the story is now part of all of us. So next time when we deal with people who are different, seem down and out, are addicts, or erratic, perhaps we’ll stop and ask ourselves why and how before reacting. Most importantly, perhaps the empathy unlocked during huff will find its way into our lives beyond the show. If knowledge is power, then understanding another’s experience, especially a painful one, is one of the most enduring and important tools we can possess.

huff plays at the NAC from April 29-May 10. 

 

huff

Written and performed by Cliff Cardinal

Directed by Karin Randoja

Designed by Elizabeth Kantor

Lighting design by Rebecca Miller