My Funny Valentine from previous page
That tragedy and the surrounding court case are the inspiration for Vancouver-based playwright Dave Deveau’s My Funny Valentine, which has been remounted in a new, touring production by Zee Zee Theatre for the company’s 10th anniversary.
But it’s the 1998 murder of another young gay man, Matthew Shepard, that’s at the root of My Funny Valentine. More specifically, it’s Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, a documentary-style play from 2000 based on hundreds of interviews with inhabitants of the titular college town where Shepard was killed.
Like Laramie, Valentine is performed as a series of monologues by people peripherally affected by the murder: a local teen who longs to escape her small-town California life for New York City and celebrity, an enraged father whose son was sexually harassed by the murdered boy in the school locker room, a journalist who owes his career to the tragedy, an older gay man who can’t fathom the dead boy’s open sexuality, a teacher who seems to imply with a shrug that the boy got what he deserved, and a precocious little girl who receives a liver transplant from the victim. Our lodestar is an effervescent do-gooder English teacher (and the only character to recur) who, over the course of the intervening years, is beaten down by the incident and the seemingly neverending stream of school shootings.
In a marathon performance, Conor Wylie ably inhabits each character over the course of 85 minutes, pausing only for breath or the occasional, rehearsed sip of water. Dressed in neutral jogging pants and an open button-down over a T-shirt, he uses a totemlike prop such as a notebook or a candy bar to channel each character, alternating between high camp and quiet earnestness, rage, and helplessness. It’s an impressive display that’s spurred on by the playwright’s finesse with character-building.
Although it’s more in evidence in the comedic sections, Deveau is an adept of the little details. Teenage Gloria hides her baby-sitting money in a Doritos bag, where her parents would never find it; the young transplant recipient engages in a delightfully loopy mental calculus with her gay dads “Dad One” and “Dad Two”; a father convincingly recalls his daughter Georgia’s all-too-convenient love of peaches, and a subsequent family vacation to the Peach State.
It’s also to Deveau’s credit that Valentine doesn’t devolve into preachiness, nor does it seek to lionize the unseen victim at its centre. Valentine knows that King’s shooting wasn’t simply a senseless, isolated, black-and-white incident. It’s one that, thanks to political polarization and cable news, eventually became a complex series of events with more than enough blame to go around and nowhere to place it. And maybe that, alongside a dead teenager and one who will spend 21 years in adult prison, is the real tragedy.
NO FOREIGNERS
2> STEVEN SCHELLING
Created by Hong Kong Exile and FU-GEN Theatre. Produced in association with Theatre Conspiracy. At the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab on Thursday, February 8. Continues until February 17
No Foreigners is bursting at the seams with interesting ideas and cool ways of presenting them. But in trying to accommodate too many threads, the show becomes a frustrating viewing experience.
The text, by David Yee, follows a character called the Foreigner who lives in an Asian mall, a Canadian who’s trying to learn how to be Chinese enough to satisfy the Hong Kong shopkeeper who wouldn’t let him into her store. He meets a woman named Sodapop who becomes his sifu, providing inspirational quotations and prescribing a “diet for optimal chi” that includes Dan Dan noodles and chicken feet. He also stands to inherit a fortune from his Hong Kong grandfather if he can discover a secret password.
That’s the skeleton of the story, but the show tries to pack enough meat for at least three bodies onto those bones. There’s a lot of self-mocking wit in the Foreigner’s quest, along with informational sidebars and visits to specific businesses at the mall, like the electronics store trying to drum up business by creating a website that lists all its inventory as “out of stock online—available in store”. And there are supernatural elements like the Moth Museum, where the central character communes with the dead.
But there’s very little to connect with emotionally. Performers Derek Chan and April Leung are disembodied voices and technologists for most of the show, creating various tableaux by manipulating miniature figures, two video cameras, and five downstage monitors, and then compiling and projecting the images onto one big screen. These projections are handsome, but static: the human figures are always shadows, and they don’t move. The text is sometimes spoken into microphones, sometimes projected onto the screen for us to read.
It’s only late in the play, when the Foreigner comes into the audience for an over-the-top karaoke performance, that we finally see a human face. Yes, the emotion is ironic, but it’s a refreshing break from the alienating technology we’ve been immersed in.
Experimentation is clearly a priority for the creators of this play; the program doesn’t credit a director, but lists Milton Lim as “project lead”. Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Remy Siu designed the miniatures and the media apparatus, respectively, but the show could have used an outside eye and ear to solve the pacing problems that plague a number of scenes, where dialogue is broken up by inexplicably long pauses. Lim and Siu designed the projections, which make effective use of simple elements, as well as the sound, which evokes the mall setting through electronic Muzak that is sometimes maddeningly chirpy and sometimes soporific. (Cue instrumental version of “Careless Whisper”.)
No Foreigners addresses topics— identity, authenticity, the longing for a sense of home—that many Vancouverites will relate to. It’s innovative, and it offers many aesthetic pleasures. But in trying to incorporate too many ideas, it sacrifices the satisfactions of a clear, heartfelt story.
> KATHLEEN OLIVER
My Funny Valentine,