Tarragon Theatre/Feast, written by Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Soheil Parsa, Major House, Tarragon Theatre, closes Apr. 27. Tickets right here.
Award-winning Canadian playwright Guillermo Verdecchia is a theatrical gadfly. He loves to impress by placing his personal spin on the key geo-political and social problems with the day, whereas making incisive observations on the human situation.
Take his newest play Feast, now enjoying on the Tarragon.
In two hours (sans an intermission), he touches on local weather change, globalization, consumerism, household relationships, cultural and racial intersection, prepperism, wokeism, pseudoscience, obsession, surrealism, and Greek mythology.
Verdecchia, nevertheless, isn’t for all markets.
His subtle and satiric performs might be perceived by some as impenetrable and even boring. Nonetheless, if one is keen to go the place Verdecchia leads, the mental journey he supplies has its deserves.
Feast has Verdecchia in unconventional mode — a non-linear narrative line, jumbled time and house body, characters who break the fourth wall, and forays into surrealism.
There are, nevertheless, so many themes packed into the play that they obscure any emotional centre.
Story & Characters
The narrative, similar to it’s, is constructed round a troubled household.
Mark, the daddy (Rick Roberts) is a few form of marketing consultant who’s all the time travelling the world, which ends up in a rising estrangement from his spouse Julia (Tamsin Kelsey), daughter Isabel (Veronica Hortiguela), and a son we by no means meet.
Mark has an odd mania. In no matter metropolis he’s in, he searches for actual native meals which might be as harmful an enterprise as it’s unique. He additionally has developed a dissociative dysfunction which renders him to be more and more erratic.
But, he additionally finds Starbucks wherever he goes.
One other obsessive member of the family is Isabel who’s consumed by the disastrous affect of local weather change and the ensuing pressured mass migration. She quits school to hitch an activist NGO with a purpose to, in her phrases, save the world.
Isabel’s doom and gloom mantra begins to have an effect on Julia, who begins to have nightmares. It leads her to change into a prepper — somebody who prepares themselves to be prepared for any catastrophe or emergency, or maybe, even the apocalypse.
The fourth character Chukuemeka (Tawiah M’Carthy) is a Nigerian hustler-cum-fixer who resides in Kenya. He’s an enabler who fortunately searches out “genuine” meals for the broken Mark who resides in his obsession. Emeka, as he’s known as, has his personal agenda that drives his character.
Kelsey, Hortiguela and MCarthy play different characters as wanted, which appears to place much more give attention to the only actor Mark.
The play is made up of a sequence of episodes which run from the curious to the weird. They element scenes from the lives of those 4 characters, who’re clearly designed to be the mouthpieces by which Verdecchia disseminates his thematic materials.
The Manufacturing
Director Soheil Parsa has rightly approached Feast from a minimalist perspective. Presumably, it’s his imaginative and prescient, working with set designer Kaitlin Hickey, that produced the hanging glass walkway with sliding doorways that dominates the again of the stage. Hickey has additionally produced the projections that remodel this walkway into, for instance, a lodge hall.
The site visitors move of the play is a press release in itself.
Characters stroll by way of these sliding doorways to carry out both in a scene or to provide a monologue, and Hickey has supplied the odd scenic piece as wanted, like easy chairs or a desk. In different phrases, nothing intrusive.
It’s nearly as if director Parsa wished to provide the phantasm that the characters are launched by way of these doorways to allow them to do their responsibility, so to talk, after which introduced again by way of the doorways by some invisible management. Motion does happen within the walkway and solely entails Mark which makes its personal metaphor.
This managed artifice carries over in supply.
Each Emeka and Julia, to numerous levels, speak in a matter of reality, calculated method. In distinction is the predictable ardour of Isobel, Gen-Z as marketed.
One would assume that Mark could be emotion on steroids, that he would inject the play with uncooked vibrancy however, as a substitute, for essentially the most half he’s speaking in a impartial voice that appears unaffected by his downward spiral.
Once more, I presume that director Parsa has mandated medium cool for the actors to permit Verdecchia to take centre stage. This deliberate distancing of the viewers means we consider the playwright’s themes and concepts, slightly than being caught up within the lives of the characters.
Even when Verdecchia features a touching scene, it stays cool. At one level father and daughter are speaking by cellphone, every attempting to say one thing essential. Mark desires to inform Isobel that he’s in rehab, and she or he desires to let him know that she has dropped out of college, however they’re defeated by a defective WIFI system that cuts off their phrases.
By the way Mark’s rehab facility is named The Centre for Avant-Garde Geography, which is Verdecchia’s satiric nod to pseudoscience.
Set & Sound
Designer Chris Malkowski lights the scenes, monologues, and actions within the walkway, with a vibrant glare, however he has the actors ready to go on, so to talk, in darkish shadows, identical to in a play.
The ever-present Thomas Ryder Payne has provide you with a sound rating made up of results — birds, site visitors and the like. There may be even a periodic menacing growth that appears to point Mark’s downward spiral.
Remaining Ideas
Firstly of the play, Mark and Julia are engaged in desultory dialog. Isobel comes out and tells the viewers to have a look at her dad and mom and their empty lives.
And thus, the scene is ready.
This household and the world are falling aside collectively.
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Paula Citron is a Toronto-based freelance arts journalist and broadcaster who hosts her personal web site, paulacitron.ca. For over 25 years, she was senior dance author for The Globe and Mail, affiliate editor of Opera Canada journal, arts reviewer for Classical 96.3 FM, and dance previews contributor to Toronto Life journal. She has been a visitor lecturer for numerous cultural teams and universities, significantly on the position of the critic/reviewer, and has been a panellist on COC podcasts. Earlier than assuming a full-time journalism profession, Ms. Citron was a member of the drama division of the Claude Watson College for the Arts.