After Wrestling has us fighting . . . to understand
After Wrestling
(out of 4) Written by Bryce Hodgson and Charlie Kerr, directed by Hodgson. Until March 18 at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. factorytheatre.com or 416-504-9971
Playwriting duo Bryce Hodgson and Charlie Kerr made a strong first impression on Toronto theatre in September 2016 with Kill Your Parents in
Viking, Alberta, a punky/millennial family drama co-produced by their own Blood Pact Theatre and the Storefront Arts Initiative at Storefront’s nowdefunct Bloor St. headquarters.
This followup is a Blood Pact production, supported by Storefront (which endures as a producing organization without a venue) in association with Factory Theatre. The blasting sound of ABBA hits as soon as you enter Factory’s Studio Theatre foyer and sets a particular tone, combining kitsch and aggression, which extends throughout.
I found it difficult to connect to and sometimes even to understand this production, but it also seems clear that I am not its target demographic. Hodgson and Kerr here attempt a more adventurous formal structure than Kill Your Parents and have taken on serious subject matter — mental illness and suicide — through the stories of characters who all struggle to express themselves, in some cases through the haze of medication.
In my view more dramaturgical and directorial shaping could have helped the audience through the work’s layers, but it’s possible it communicates to millennial theatregoers on a wavelength into which I can’t quite dial.
A series of quick-fire opening scenes establishes the basic terms of the story: siblings Hogan (co-playwright Kerr) and Leah (Libby Osler) are living together in her squalid Vancouver apartment. He’s in some form of distress and has been brought home by cop Jaggy (Gabe Grey), who takes a shine to Leah.
Jaggy’s passion for karaoke has apparently inspired the overall design concept that we’re all inside a dive singalong bar, and his parallel interest in pro wrestling becomes a plot point in his burgeoning relationship with Leah. Bri Proke’s set design, coupled with Jacq Andrade’s lighting, creates three distinct playing areas on two levels.
The final character is Gibby (Anthony Shim), a smoothtalking DJ in a Dayton, Ohio, radio station who doles out lonely hearts advice while spinning oldies — or so we’re initially led to believe.
That he’s got a wound in one of his temples offers a big clue that he may not be fully of this world, and information about exactly who he is to the other characters is eked out slowly until a big reveal at the end of the first act. It never becomes clear, though, why the relationship had to be kept secret in the first place. There are layers of subtext in the connection between Hogan and Gibby that are not fully explored in the script nor the production. As the second act plays out, character after character explodes into frustrated rage, but what is causing the characters all this angst did not come into focus for me.
The production’s highlight is Grey’s sweetly credible portrayal of the socially awkward but sincere Jaggy; Blood Pact founding member Osler, who also appeared in Kill Your Parents, offers another intriguingly intense performance as Leah. Shim does impressive work as he attempts to navigate the different aspects of Gibby’s character, but there’s a limpness to the scenes between him and Hogan because the relationship between the characters is unclear. Kerr, for his part, seems locked in a single mode of physical and emotional defensiveness.
In a tone and style that echoes the works of Tracy Letts, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Martin McDonagh, Hodgson and Kerr seem clearly to be working out something Oedipal in their oeuvre. This was announced quite clearly in their company’s name and the title of the previous play, and is extended in the brokenness of family and social structures in this one. But the specific demons they are wrestling with remain obscure to this viewer.