Lovers share an intimate question
40 Days and 40 Nights
(out of 4) Co-produced by Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Electric Company Theatre and The Theatre Centre. Created and performed by Daniel Brooks and Kim Collier. Consulting director Jennifer Tarver. Until May 6 at The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. W. theatrecentre.org or 416-5380988
Daniel Brooks and Kim Collier’s new performance piece is intensely personal. The two acclaimed theatre artists — both recipients, at different points, of the prestigious Siminovitch Prize for directing — are lovers, and the production is, on one level, a sharing of intimate questions about what it really means to commit to someone in the long term, to decide to grow old with them.
It is also framed as an interactive engagement with the audience, and this aspect sat uncomfortably with me. It feels like Brooks and Collier want to invite you into their living room to share stories and experiences, but insufficient steps are taken to establish trust and intimacy and there is no escape route made available.
While there is clearly a very generous spirit to the piece (coproduced by Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Electric Company Theatre, and The Theatre Centre) the creators’ immersion in love appears to have leaked through into assumptions about what their audience is willing to undertake and to reveal.
Physically, the production cre- ates a beautiful, if hermetic, environment (design is by Ken Mackenzie, assisted by Lindsay Junkin and Jennifer Lennon).
The action takes place in a curtained-off space in the middle of the Franco Boni Theatre; the several dozen audience members sit in chairs around the periphery and much of the action is played on dark red oriental rugs.
Beams of light from the ceiling and on diagonals across the space create painterly images of the performers and a few sym- bolic props. Nearly constant musical underscoring, composed by Andrew Creeggan and Debashis Sinha, further contributes to the creation of a heightened, not-quite-of-thisworld experience — which is then ruptured by the very personal information spectators are asked to disclose.
Brooks and Collier perform as themselves, symbolically leaving the domestic world behind by lighting a piece of flash paper over a basket of laundry and a toaster, and then playing out a series of rituals and actions — drinking wine and reading love poetry aloud, and in a particularly moving passage, acting out what it will be like for one to care for the other in old age.
Many of the inspirations for the piece came out of a shared trip to India. A further source is the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, and his conception of the Event — something that tears the fabric of experience open and reveals the possibility for change.
Their engagement with these ideas is quite fleeting, however, and because there are numerous borrowings from Eastern religions, rituals and symbols, the piece has the whiff of Orientalism. I’m with the audience member who piped up to ask what Brooks and Collier meant by their numerous references to “our culture” in the piece.
These respected mid-career artists are taking a lot of risks with this piece, in terms of selfexposure both literal (there is nudity) and figurative. They are on a journey that is clearly valuable to them, but I found it very hard to jump on board.