The Changeling takes a striking look at lust
THEATRE
THE CHANGELING
By Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Directed by Luciana Silvestre Fernandes. A Department of Theatre and Film at UBC production. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts’ Telus Studio Theatre on Thursday, January 16. Continues until February 1
➧ A WOMAN, DAYS after her engagement to a man she’s ambivalent about, discovers her true love a moment too late. It’s a premise that would easily work for a modern romantic comedy, but in the Jacobeanera tragedy The Changeling, a macabre meditation on lust and passion ensues. Under the direction of Luciana Silvestre Fernandes, the play becomes an expressionist evocation of entrapment, in a patriarchal world of imposed wills and inflexible desire.
In the Spanish city of Alicante, Beatrice-Joanna (Bonnie Duff) is the daughter of Vermandero (Liam McCulley), the local governor, who has promised her in marriage to Alonzo de Piracquo (Connor Riopel), a noble lord. Meeting nobleman Alsemero (Hayden Davies) at a church, she finds that her affections have shifted entirely to him, and now she’s faced with the quandary of an unwanted union. Enlisting the help of her father’s servant, De Flores (Kyle Preston Oliver), she conspires to kill Alonzo, freeing her to marry Alsemero. Unbeknownst to her, the lecherous De Flores has other plans for them, and odious events are set in motion.
First performed in 1622, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play is a work that touches on universal themes that transcend the period in which it was written—notions of trust and honour abound, as does unbridled desire. Characters are unguarded in their assumptions about each other, as Alonzo is in his unfazed infatuation with Beatrice, and the latter is in her unsuspecting dependence on De Flores.
Such displays of confidence seem a ripe commentary on the limits of human perception and its inevitable failures in judgment. Reinforcing this view is the comic subplot involving the insecure Alibius (Lorenzo Tesler-Mabe) and his young wife Isabella (Monica Bowman), whose fidelity is greater than the men he has trusted to guard it. Rounding out this production is an expression of Beatrice’s inner state, as spectral figures that appear at moments of anguish, bearers of psychic distress.
Fernandes unfolds the action at several heights in the Telus Studio Theatre, creating clusters of scenes on the various levels of seating in the tiered venue. Employed by scenic designer Luis Bellassai, ropes form a metaphorical geometry, crisscrossing in a tangled web from floor to ceiling, which also stands in for archways and passages. Charlotte Di Chang’s costume design is likewise poetic, from Beatrice’s blood-red regalia to De Flores’s spiked epaulettes. Wisps of organ and violin populate sound designer Jacob Wan’s scene transitions, which complement a soundscape of Beatrice’s mental fixations, including incidental cues of moaning and knocking. Lastly, the show’s cast conveys 17th-century language with a flourish, vividly rendering the text into haunting action, its musicality and impact intact.
As a reflection on the fallibility of judgment and impulsiveness of passion, The Changeling is a work that continues to illuminate immutable human traits. New stagings can also explore the concealed cost of psychological burden, allowing for fresh readings of a classic story.
by Danny Kai Mak
HOUSE AND HOME
By Jenn Griffin. Directed by Donna Spencer. A Firehall Arts Centre presentation. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Saturday, January 18. Continues until January 25
➧ IN ACT 2 of Jenn Griffin’s new play, House and Home, grad student and renter Wren (Kimberly Ho) admonishes her girlfriend, Marika (Darian Roussy), for her spontaneous decision to quit her restaurant gig after a drunk patron gropes her. “Only rich people get to quit!” Wren says. Ho’s delivery is as perfect as the line itself: tragically funny and appropriately disdainful, because it’s horrible and true.
House and Home is a play about housing precarity and privilege in Vancouver, and when it works, it’s smart and funny. When it doesn’t work, which is a substantial amount of the first act, it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say.
Hilary (Jillian Fargey) and Henry (Andrew Wheeler) are a middle-aged white couple who bought their house after Henry inherited some money. Since then, the value of the house has more than tripled, but the couple (dual income, no kids) is financially strapped. Hilary is on stress leave from her social-worker job and Henry is a poverty lawyer who only has one client and is obsessed with Butoh dancing. The basement apartment they rent to Wren, a young queer woman of colour, is infested with rats and when she threatens to withhold her rent, Henry encourages Hilary to seize the moment, evict Wren, and transition into the short-term rental market.
The problems with Act 1 are that most of the characters feel like broadly drawn stereotypes rather than real people. For some reason, it’s Wren, the POC character played by a racialized woman, who’s tasked with telling Hilary that her white girlfriend Marika “doesn’t identify as white”, but rather as an “ally”. Hilary then tells Wren that women like her are the real problem with feminism, and goes on a tirade about power dynamics. The whole exchange is a mess, and it’s mostly dropped in Act 2. Sam Bob does everything he can with his character, the Pest Maven, who serves as a kind of magical Indigenous person popping up on-stage to talk in metaphors about rats, how he lives “communally” (a coded, winking reference to living on a reserve?), and the hypocrisy of owning a house on “home and Native land” (Bob’s emphasis and the gleam in his eye make the joke work).
Act 2 is more clearly focused, and it benefits from a fun villain in the ridiculous tech-bro douche Auxl (Sebastien Archibald, in one of three roles). Auxl has all the money and all the power, and the quick cash influx he promises comes with some razorsharp strings. Auxl is only on-stage for about seven minutes total, but Archibald’s performance is a standout.
House and Home understands that the Auxls of the world are helping to ruin the housing scene here, but it doesn’t quite go far enough to get at some deeper truths about what it really means to be settlers on stolen land in a capitalist system that treats housing as a commodity rather than a human right.