Tarragon Theatre/Feast, written by Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Soheil Parsa, Primary 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 refined 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, equivalent to it’s, is constructed round a troubled household.
Mark, the daddy (Rick Roberts) is a few type of guide who’s all the time travelling the world, which results 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 influence of local weather change and the ensuing compelled mass migration. She quits faculty to affix an activist NGO as a way 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 one 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 viewpoint. 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 rework this walkway into, for instance, a lodge hall.
The visitors movement of the play is a press release in itself.
Characters stroll by these sliding doorways to carry out both in a scene or to offer a monologue, and Hickey has offered the odd scenic piece as wanted, like easy chairs or a desk. In different phrases, nothing intrusive.
It’s virtually as if director Parsa wished to offer the phantasm that the characters are launched by these doorways to allow them to do their responsibility, so to talk, after which introduced again by the doorways by some invisible management. Motion does happen within the walkway and solely includes Mark which makes its personal metaphor.
This managed artifice carries over in supply.
Each Emeka and Julia, to varied levels, speak in a matter of truth, calculated method. In distinction is the predictable ardour of Isobel, Gen-Z as marketed.
One would assume that Mark can be emotion on steroids, that he would inject the play with uncooked vibrancy however, as an alternative, for probably 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, quite 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 mobile phone, every making an attempt to say one thing vital. Mark needs to inform Isobel that he’s in rehab, and she or he needs to let him know that she has dropped out of faculty, however they’re defeated by a defective WIFI system that cuts off their phrases.
By the way Mark’s rehab facility is known as 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 brilliant glare, however he has the actors ready to go on, so to talk, in darkish shadows, similar to in a play.
The ever-present Thomas Ryder Payne has give you a sound rating made up of results — birds, visitors and the like. There’s even a periodic menacing growth that appears to point Mark’s downward spiral.
Last Ideas
At the start 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 about.
This household and the world are falling aside collectively.
Are you seeking to promote an occasion? Have a information tip? Must know the very best occasions occurring this weekend? Ship us a observe.
#LUDWIGVAN
Get the every day arts information straight to your inbox.
Join the Ludwig Van Toronto e-Blast! — native classical music and opera information straight to your inbox HERE.
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 function 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.
