A graveyard tale of nostalgia and culture clash
No Clowns Allowed
★★ 1/2 (out of 4) By Bri Proke, directed by Katrina Darychuk. Until Dec. 16 at Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen St. W. theassemblytheatre.com
This short, dark comedy is the third Toronto production by Blood Pact Theatre. Its combination of macabre and humorous elements and the struggle of its characters to cope with past trauma are in keeping with the company’s previous offerings, Kill Your Parents in Viking,
Alberta and After Wrestling, and help cement its brand.
At the same time this show brings some new elements: an accomplished all-female creative team and a focus on nostalgia replacing the aggressiveness that so characterized the company’s first two shows.
Playwright Bri Proke’s scenario is full of promise: Sheila (Emmelia Gordon) and Emile (Xavier Lopez) are ghosts and graveyard neighbours, and the play is about them figuring out how to share this space for eternity. Proke’s and Imogen Wilson’s simple set effectively creates a central playing area but lacks some detail (the characters can see writing on the tombstones, but we can’t).
Sheila died in the ’80s and stylistically still lives in that era: her heavy eyeliner, teased ’do and tie/vest combo (design also by Proke and Wilson) are a fun homage to John Hughes films. Emile, in his skinny jeans, is a contemporary millennial, and a lot of the show’s humour derives from the culture clash between them (she’s rotary dial, he’s iPhone).
The strength of Katrina Darychuk’s production is how well it’s acted, particularly Gordon’s performance as the earthy and self-destructive Sheila. She and Lopez create a believable, compli- cated and evolving relationship onstage, listening and responding physically to each other with full attentiveness.
This commitment to honesty kept me engaged even though I found some of the script’s elements to be explored only at surface level and its central preoccupations hard to fathom (this is in part surely because I’m a gen-Xer and the show seems geared to a younger audience).
The very fact that the characters are ghosts could be a reference to millennial anxiety that older generations broke the planet before their generation even reached maturity. There are multiple levels of nostalgia here: Emile listens to ’50s doo-wop on a transistor radio and the contemporary passion for reboots is a big theme, as is the popularity of choral singing.
The play needed more dramaturgical support for these ideas to be fleshed out and integrated into the characters’ journey toward telling the truth about themselves and accepting each other. What the culture-clash theme has to do with the very serious information introduced later on about Emile did not come clear to me. A piece of advice for potential audiences is to pay attention right off the top, as information provided then informs everything that follows.
This feels like a well-produced Fringe show and needed a companion piece (or greater development) to make for a full theatrical evening. It is, in any event, exciting to see producer/designer/filmmaker Proke step to the foreground of Blood Pact and focus on her own creativity, alongside other colleagues with roots in Vancouver who are forging careers across geography and artistic genres.