Pushing boundaries between truth and fiction
True Crime
(out of 4) Co-created by Torquil Campbell and Chris Abraham in collaboration with Julian Brown. Until Saturday at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. Crowstheatre.com or 647-341-7390.
Christian Gerhartsreiter is a German-born con man currently serving 27 years to life in a California prison for first-degree murder. For more than three decades, if we are to believe the many media stories and documentaries about him, he assumed numerous fake identities — most famously “Clark Rockefeller” — and duped lots of people along the way.
Torquil Campbell is a Canadian musician from a famous theatre family who bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Gerhartsreiter. He’s turned his lifelong interest with true crime stories and his more recent near-obsession with the Gerhartsreiter case into a oneman show currently enjoying a brief run at Streetcar Crowsnest.
Of all of that, we can be pretty much certain. The rest, well . . . What makes this show so very smart and entertaining is the way Campbell draws you into a web of stories and constantly keeps you guessing about what you can and can’t believe. Art imitates life imitates true crime. Serial, Making a Murderer, now S-Town — why do we love these stories so much? This is the larger preoccupation that takes this piece from another retelling of the Gerhartsreiter story to the level of, well, art.
Gerhartsreiter is a latter-day Mr. Ripley, inserting himself into the lives of the rich and exposing their gilded lives as so much pretentious performance even as he defrauds and murders them.
Akey part of Campbell’s yarn is that he wrote to Gerhartsreiter and visited him in prison, and this ends up messing with his head big-time. He starts to see the criminal as some kind of muse and sings a couple of excellent torchy numbers that these encounters have inspired.
The passages of the story where he travels to Blythe, Calif., a to meet Gerhartsreiter in Ironwood State Prison are vividly told. As are his accounts of his wife’s growing discomfort with how deep into the criminal’s world he is falling: “I can’t believe you got an Ontario Arts Council grant for this s---!” he imitates her saying.
But, really? Did Campbell go so far as to engage directly with this fascinating, dangerous character? Or is he just a really good storyteller, a really good con man? That’s for him and his partners-in-theatrical-crime, co-creator Chris Abraham and musician Julian Brown, to know.
Brown sits at the back of the stage with a guitar and underscores most of Campbell’s dialogue. His stops and starts, and the different tones and rhythms of his tunes complement the storytelling. Remington North is credited as design consultant, so presumably he’s responsible for the superb lighting, which changes the vibe from film noir to intimate confessional to crime scene.
Part of Campbell’s personal narrative is that he’s an unsuccessful actor (he spent the early ’90s in New York as a “professional marijuana smoker with a sideline in pretending to go to theatre school”) with close connections to brilliant ones — his late fa- ther, Douglas Campbell, his wife, Moya O’Connell.
But the show proves him wrong: he’s an amazing mimic who creates distinct voices and personas for each of Gerhartsreiter’s several guises as well as for Abraham and O’Connell. He puts his musical skills to great use through songs woven into the storytelling. At times he reaches levels of intensity that verge on scary.
The otherwise supremely confident show sags a bit in its final third, as Campbell tries to figure out how to end the story — a struggle he openly acknowledges in the piece. He gets his footing back when he flips the focus back to the audience, inviting us to question why these kinds of stories are so fascinating.
Like Robert Lepage’s 887 and Karen Hines’ Crawlspace, both now playing in Toronto, and like the solo work of Daniel MacIvor, this brilliant piece of autofiction feels driven by Campbell’s need and desire to expose his vulnerabilities and compulsions. Its questioning of the porous boundaries of truth and fiction resonates strongly in our era of alternative facts and, in that, it feels particularly well-timed.
This show deserves a much longer life and would sit beautifully in international festival programs. Believe me. That’s the truth.