Drama on race is smart and important — but imperfect as a play
Calpurnia
(out of 4) Written and directed by Audrey Dwyer. Until Feb. 4 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St. Tickets at Nightwoodtheatre.net or 416-975-8555. “Well . . . that’s going to give us a lot to unpack!” said a young man in the audience to his friends after the lights came up after a performance of Audrey Dwyer’s provocative Calpurnia.
It’s a response that I imagine will delight writer/director Dwyer and her co-producing companies, Nightwood and Sulong theatres. Calpurnia, a realistic drama about a dinner party gone wrong in today’s Toronto, seems likely to prompt many a soulsearching conversation about how race, privilege and gender intersect.
It’s more outspoken and insightful about these issues than any Canadian play I’ve seen. It also doesn’t completely work as a play or production, in ways that somewhat undermine the effectiveness of its first twothirds. Its blazing final minutes, however, redeem a lot.
The central character is Julie (Meghan Swaby), an aspiring screenwriter who is trying rewrite Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the perspective of the Black cook and maid Calpurnia, justifying this by saying Lee wouldn’t know “what it was like to be a Black caregiver.”
Already we’re into some knotty and fascinating territory: about the usefulness and ethics of updating historic art works (Julie’s brother Mark objects to her project because he loves the original) and about whether those who don’t have a particular experience or cultural position have the capacity or right to speak to it.
Then we add in that Julie and Mark (Matthew Brown) are Jamaican-Canadian and massively privileged — their father Lawrence (Andrew Moodie) was the first Black judge in Canada and Julie still lives with him in their stunning Forest Hill home (Anna Treusch’s sleek design is spoton, down to the spotless surface of the stainless steel refrigerator).
Mark dismisses Julie’s project by telling her that she’s “not Black enough” and this really seems to get at the heart of what Dwyer is exploring.
It’s part of what prompts Julie to ask questions of the family’s longserving Filipina housekeeper Precy (Carolyn Fe) about what it’s like to do her job. Precy draws the line angrily when Julie calls her a servant.
Creating a situation where Julie expects Precy to serve her food during their conversation feels like too much underlining of a strong point already made about Julie’s paradoxical insensitivity. Julie’s frustration that she’s not found a way to get inside Calpurnia’s experience prompts an outrageous action that turns a dinner Lawrence hosts for his white colleague James (Don Allison, silken and effective) into a cringefest for characters and the audience alike.
While this situation is on the edge of implausibility, Swaby and the rest of the company play its awkwardness and ambiguity with full conviction. And Dwyer is ramping up the stakes toward her big finish; Lawrence’s attempt to turn this into a “teaching moment” is brilliantly played and prompted an explosive release of laughter from the audience.
Mark’s white girlfriend Christine (Natasha Greenblatt), who up to this point has seemed rather superficial, expresses her disgust at what she perceives as James’s racist treatment of Mark and Lawrence, and the fact that she’s clocked this more than they have prompts discussion of white privilege and respectability politics.
The constant presence of Precy, listening, labouring and growing more frustrated and incensed — Fe’s performance is well-observed — underlines the moment’s complexity.
How this situation might resolve is left for the audience to debate. For me, the play and production made me uncomfortably aware of my own white privilege and of how very hard it is to talk about race and class.
Dwyer has a lot to say about these issues and I look forward to her next plays.