Show is a collage of musings on family origin, mortality
Paolozzapedia
★★1/2 (out of 4) By Bad New Days. Directed by Adam Paolozza and Kari Pederson. Until March 3 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. passemuraille.ca or 416-504-7529 The suffix “pedia” means both learning and the exploration of the prefix it modifies. Thus this world-premiere production by Toronto company Bad New Days sets out its stall. Artistic director Adam Paolozza investigates himself and his relationship to family and place in an ongoing piece of creative research that, the program tells us, will continue to grow and change after opening night.
First presented as a workshop version in the 2015 Riser Project, Paolozzapedia still has a strong work-in-progress vibe. Paolozza has a background in clown, mime and commedia dell’arte, and an inspiration for the production is the commedia character Pulcinella, an elusive, earthy trickster. Alternatively awkward and charming, playful and self-indulgent, the show channels the spirit of this figure.
Four talented physical performers — Maddie Bautista, Eduardo DiMartino, Christina Serra and Paolozza himself — are dressed in Pulcinella’s signature white clothes, pointy white cap and hook-nosed black mask. Composer/sound designer Matt Smith sits in an onstage booth, producing sound effects live, and sometimes serving coffee and snacks to the others.
Paolozza introduces the show and tells us he’s been grappling with questions about origins and mortality since his father recently had a stroke. This prompted him to think both about his childhood in Oshawa and his family’s roots in the Campania region of Italy. The show is a collage of vignettes that spring from these musings, sometimes accompanied by recorded voice-overs in which Paolozza talks about contem- porary Italian philosophy or recalls a childhood memory.
André du Toit’s lighting helps create some beautiful stage pictures, as when Paolozza remembers recently tiptoeing into his parents’ bedroom to get some Christmas wrapping paper and is captivated by the sight of them asleep, vulnerable and childlike.
In another we see a flickering light from a TV and then a screen is pulled away to reveal a performer creating the effect by moving fingers in front of a projected light source.
Like a number of the show’s elements, this latter sequence seems to want to sum up the whole: the audience watches both the image and the construction of the image. But what’s the bigger message? About 50 minutes into the hour-long running time, Paolozza and co-director Kari Pederson stage a montage of key images and ideas but, because everything has been so fleeting and disconnected, this doesn’t feel cathartic but rather like a Hail Mary pass to pull things together.
For Paolozza the material is obviously deeply felt and there’s a lovely spirit of playfulness between the performers. But moving so swiftly back and forth between moments of very personal identity exploration and broader themes of mortality and cultural identity risks making everything in the show banal.
While, on the one hand, it’s interesting to be invited into a creative process that’s so open and alive, the lingering impression is that this production needs a lot more time to come into focus.