thirsty: thoughts on the play after the run is over.
Carol Cece Anderson and Andrew Moodie. Photo. permission NAC.
Dionne Brand is one of Canada’s most distinguished English language poets. Toronto Poete Laureate since 2009, she is the winner of the Harbourfront Writers’ Award and the Toronto Book Award. She has also won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award for literature. Theatre, however, is a new step in her literary career and somehow this production of thirsty leaves one with a feeling of incompleteness, in spite of a dream team of collaborators. Dramaturg Paula Danckert also worked on George Elliot Clarke’s oratorio of multiple voices for Whylah Falls; former director of the NAC English theatre Peter Hinton who also created Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey at Stratford several years ago worked on the stage adaptation and directed the play.
Still, there is a sense in this production of a deep artistic tension between the needs of a poetic text adapted to the stage, and the needs of a narrative text which has a story to tell and which fore grounds the sorrow of the women in Alan’s life as well as the writer’s attempt to transform the young man into a heroically martyred figure. Something in all this just does not work.
This world premiere of thirsty, based on the award winning book of poetry of the same title, is inspired by a real event that took place in Toronto where a young man was shot by police in a tragic situation of mistaken identity. This intrusion of the police into his living quarters became a symbol of the evils of racial profiling and the insidious racism which operates at the deepest levels of Toronto/Canadian society.
If the actual tragedy was a violent sequence of events that played out in reality, “thirsty” focusses on the world of the three women affected by this murder, (the wife, the daughter and the mother) . Alan, returns from the dead, to retrace events before the murder took place. It is therefore a form of memory play narrated by the voice of the dead hero who slips back in time to examine his relationships with those women, so we will never forget…
The play appears to take on the form of a poetic reading, an encounter of four voices, each relating their emotional states, through the heightened language of the poet; simultaneously, this is also a series of short sketches where realistic exchanges fore ground the dramatic moments of confrontation between Alan and these women. Conflict with his wife, conflict with his anguished mother and a deeply troubled daughter as Alan continues his life as a lay preacher trying to help his community. Clearly however, the form gives rise to a difficult encounter of theatrical styles that creates a certain malaise during most of the performance. On the one hand, the beautifully creative language which constructs layer upon layer of visual associations, is foregrounded in the dialogue/monologue, but the nature of the staging of those dialogues does not foreground the language. Instead, it tries to make the poetry sound as though it were naturally spoken language.
This was not the best solution to my mind because this poetry does not communicate a realistic theatrical content. This poetic text seizes states of mind, images that reflect feelings. It does not construct characters, or psychology, or any form of realistic information that would give any theatrical substance to the characters . By attempting a nearly realistic reading of this play, the director has created a contradiction between the form and the staging. He has removed all the true beauty that was only to be found in those dense images expressed through a heightened play of voices , something that a truly vocal orchestration of this quartet would certainly have captured. The rich velvet depths of Jackie Richardson’s speaking voice were underused. The higher tones of Audrey Dwyer the wife, associated with the angry and shriller calls of the Carol Ceca Anderson the daughter, working on the substance of the language, the rhythms, the pauses , and the articulation of those complex word association. A focus of this kind on the form of the text in relation to the form of the language would have produced the kind of play that is very rare in the English speaking theatre world of Canada., so obsessed as it is with realism.
Denis Marleau (Montreal ) is always interested in these kinds of poetic texts and he has found his own solutions, often by denaturalising the actors, turning them into filmed faces projected onto a mask on stage glowing in the dark. This is not at all what one would expect to see here but Dionne Brand’s play lends itself to a form of intensely emotional poetic reading which was not quite given here. .
The first moments were, nevertheless promising. We see on stage three actors, each one standing in her own space, defined by a circle of light. Within each space there is an object that relates to the voice within that circle. These three are placed within a larger all-encompassing circle that captures the global oral landscape of all the connected temporalities, of those speaking voices, the temporality of legend that will certainly emerge out of this death. The set captures that very well.
During the first moments, the voices are silent. The characters appear to be waiting. Our gaze moves up a long staircase at the back. It reaches the upper floor of an apartment where an orange light suggests an interior living space. Police sirens and excited voices fill the night. We hear a male narrator contemplating, more than describing the events. The cacophony of this excellent soundscape is composed of sirens, confused noises of a crowd, voices that distinguish themselves off stage and suddenly the crack of a gun. Someone has been shot.
Out of those excited voices comes the lone voice of the male victim. . The voice that will carry the story, that will take us back in time, that will become reincarnated on the stage and lead us along this oratorio of memory that tries to show us the past life of this person who is no longer among his loved ones.
At that moment, the play shifts its mode of functioning. It is no longer a series of acts but an orchestration of poetic images taken up by these voices who try to give them some physical incarnation in space. It is at this point that the play falters for me because the poetry is so densely woven, that all attempts to fore ground the characters and their physical performance send us beyond the text and we lose the sense of memory play, we lose that interplay of meticulous voices producing poetic effects like the orchestration of a superior language. Somehow , through most of the evening, the theatrical process did not allow the actors to do justice to the poetry and in a similar manner, the poetry was not able to descend into the arena of human bodies and it all left me with a feeling that something was disconnected in this performance.
The quarrel between Julia , Alan’s wife (played by Audrey Dwyer) , and Alan, (played by Andrew Moodie), became an interesting moment that gave some shape to the performance and suggested a change in the style of the language. The actors found themselves within a form of expression that fore grounded a more realistic style of human interaction, the kind one usually sees in Canadian theatre. Here the characters express their frustration, their fears, their loneliness their anger. Thirsty lost its magic at that point and became a different play, a more conventional story of loss and murder where the murdered father loses his status as the assassinated figure of a black man who was destined to rise above the play and represent something greater than each of them individually. The return to realism quashed all the emerging legendary status of this martyred figure. The fore grounding of a more poetic experience, capitalizing on the richly flamboyant images and the orchestrated voices would have recaptured the presence of that male voice from beyond, that voice larger than life, that loomed above them all and then returns to tell its story by rising above the play. It should have captivated us all. Unfortunately, it did not quite succeed because it did not meld with Dionne Brand’s poetry.
The arrival of the flowers at the end was a solid moment of tragic fore boding. It was also a great pleasure seeing Andrew Moodie in Ottawa again, and especially seeing his important contribution to the professional theatre scene in Toronto and in Canada. His performance is energetic, and strong but he is caught in a staging that does not allow him to make the most of this poetic world where realism forces him to into a role that negates the tragedy of the play, except at the very end, where the flowers produce a powerful symbolism and the gesture of the young girl speeding away on her bike, elicited a great wave of emotion and sorrow.
In spite of my misgivings about certain aspects of the play and the staging, I feel this production should be travelling and should be seen. In the talk back after the show on Thursday night, there were a lot of young people in the audience who had been deeply moved by the story, by other performances and by the language. This is reason enough to keep the play circulating.
thirsty played at the NAC from November 5 to 17 in the Theatre of the National Arts Centre
Written by Dionne Brand
Directed by Peter Hinton
Dramaturg: Paula Danckert
Set and costumes: Gillian Gallow
Lighting design: Louise Guinand
Sound design: Troy Slocum
Cast:
Girl Carol Cece Anderson
Julia Audrey Dwyer
Alan Andrew Moodie
Chloe Jackie Robinson