Challenging the grey areas of masculinity
Daughter (out of 4) By Adam Lazarus, directed by Ann-Marie Kerr. Until Nov. 19 at Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. W. Theatrecentre.org and 416-538-0988.
It looks very simple. There’s a tall stool onstage with an iPod, dock and glass of water. An early-middle-aged guy enters, dressed like he walked off the street — T-shirt, hoodie, jeans, total normcore.
He’s also wearing a pink headband and a pair of small fairy wings, and in the first minutes of the show he plays pop hits and re-enacts a dance party with his 6-year-old daughter. He dances like her, he dances like himself; it feels like a contemporary happy family scenario.
People who are parents may recognize this. I, who don’t have kids, thought how cool it would be to have that easy space of freedom and nonjudgmental togetherness.
The 80-minute-long show continues to be delivered by one performer only, Adam Lazarus, who wrote it along with co-creators Ann-Marie Kerr (also the director), Jivesh Parasram and Melissa D’Agostino.
But it’s not simple — not simple at all.
The show aims to prompt conversations about masculinity in today’s society and it is surely succeeding in that task. It was a controversial success in the 2015 SummerWorks Festival and has since been further developed and performed in Kingston, and Romania, and will play next year in Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa. Its return in Toronto at this point in the cultural conversation about abuse of male power (it opened on the day the Louis C.K. scandal broke) could not be more perfectly in sync with the zeitgeist.
Lazarus is an expert in bouffon, a form of clowning that uses mockery and satire to expose society’s hypocrisies. He’s done shows before in which he plays other characters and sometimes wears costumes and makeup, but this one (co-produced by Lazarus’s company QuipTake and Theatre Centre, with Pandemic Theatre) feels, at least initially, like a mix between a solo autobiographical play and standup comedy.
As he tells a long story about his daughter’s painful, extended arrival in the world (the labour lasted more than 24 hours), the performer pokes fun at himself for maybe being selfcentred in the experience: “my wife had labour keeping her awake. What did I have?” Lazarus expertly invites the audience’s complicity by asking us frequently “You know what I mean?” and laughing along with us when we reply. He’s so easy on stage and seems so natural, so believable. A regular guy.
While there are hints from the beginning that he has some narcissism issues, things really start to turn when the performer focuses on his relationship with his daughter and how difficult it’s always been for him, ever since the difficulties around her birth. He’s never been able to be calm around her; when she was 3, he even got a little violent when she wouldn’t settle down to sleep. He tries for our complicity again — OK, that wasn’t cool, but we’ve all done stupid shit, right?
The focus then moves to the past, to pranks he pulled in his childhood and young adulthood, always on girls. He talks more and more about sexuality, violence and porn, to time spent in Japan where, he says, all the women worship Western guys and where the porn blurs out genitals; about sex with prostitutes; about living near the Fillmore Gentlemen’s Club in his “dirty 30s.”
Once the performer’s darkness is revealed, we spend a fair bit of time sitting in his toxic masculine world view. This will likely be challenging for some viewers, and may get in the way of seeing the presentation of his attitudes and behaviours as critical. The piece is all about grey areas and slippery slopes: is it autobiography or not? Is what he’s talking about OK? How do we square the nice dad with the misogynist, violent behaviour and attitudes he increasingly reveals?
The most important question, in my view, is how to identify where such attitudes and behaviours come from and start to address them, and this is where the show is at its most elusive.
But perhaps this is by design, and where Lazarus’s critique lies. In this story of one man’s development, what’s notable is what’s not present: There are no parents in his stories of the past. Authority is hospitals and cops.
As we are inside the performer’s skewed subjectivity, we are present- ed with his memory of the past — a void, perhaps, where positive models of care and civility might have been. Because there wasn’t any such modelling for this man, he’s even more messed up than the previous generation and is passing that on.
Subtly the show shifts from unadorned to technically sophisticated: The wash of lights (Michelle Ramsay) slowly focuses in on and isolates the performer.
The music he initially turned on and off is now controlled from elsewhere (sound design and composition by Richard Feren). We started out with one set of conventions and expectations and end up in an engulfing, confusing, overwhelming space.
The show offers no solutions. That horrible sucking noise at the end is the void we’re all sitting in. What comes next?