Audience and performer are new to this play
Nassim By Nassim Soleimanpour, directed by Omar Elerian. Until June 16 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. Luminatofestival.com and 416-368 3100. Playwright Nassim Soleimanpour recently called this a oneand-a-half person show.
It’s performed by a different individual each time — frequently not a professional actor — who has not seen the script in advance. Soleimanpour piloted this technique in his play White
Rabbit Red Rabbit, which was by necessity performed by proxies in international locations because he was not at that point allowed to leave his native Iran. Now living in Berlin, he travels the world with relative freedom, and involves himself personally in this show in a way that would be unfair to spoil — because it happens early on and is one of its delights. Originally co-produced by the playwright and the Bush Theatre in London, England, it’s in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival, in association with Why Not Theatre.
The performer at the show I attended was the broadcaster and playwright Amanda Parris, who looked rather ill when she was shown a banker’s box and told that it contains a script that’s more than 400 pages long. In fact, it’s shorter than that, and she and the audience are quickly in safe hands as live images, projected from offstage, instruct us in the rules of this theatrical game. Parris was a genial and charming performer, open to the different challenges and invitations for emotional self-exposure the pro- duction sets out.
Over the course of the 70minute show, Parris and various spectators are instructed in basic Farsi, Soleimanpour’s native tongue, and are acquainted with aspects of his early life in Shiraz, at the same time giving him tips about how to navigate the 6ix. His droll sensibility comes through in the particularities of the script: the early insertion of the acronym “WTF” signals a fascination with vocabulary and swear words. We see the notebook where he’s written down complicated words he’s been taught everywhere the show’s played, from Seoul to Copenhagen to Düsseldorf. Director Omar Elerian and designer Rhys Jarmanskillfully use technology to extend the production’s themes of proximity and distance.
While the play is not overtly political, Soleimanpour is making points about freedoms we have in the West that we may take for granted. That’s important and fair, but there’s something in the logic of the play that didn’t stack up for me: it ostensibly spins around a capacity to communicate that is not available to Soleimanpour, but exactly what that capacity is became muddied, especially in a sentimental final reveal.
This show combines two cur- rent trends in contemporary performance: shows in which people play themselves, and those that involve performers engaging with a script in real time. The more familiar I become with these approaches, the more questions I have about them — and I offer these final thoughts as opportunities for debate, rather than as a discrediting of Soleimanpour’s point of view.
Everything this show has to offer — a gently critical nudging of Western privilege, smart writing, clever use of technology, a compact touring package — has made it highly popular on the international theatre festival circuit. But part of its offer is its authenticity — the fact that what’s happening is really happening not just to the guest performer but to Soleimanpour — which is rendered less credible to me because he’s performed it hundreds of times. Some of what is presented as spontaneity is being simulated and commodified, and two days later I’m still asking myself what he was really getting at by putting contingency so much in the foreground.