Drama class captures the theatre of life
Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope
stars (out of 4) By Andrew Kushnir. Directed by Andrew Kushnir and Chris Abraham. Until March 16 at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. crowstheatre.com, 647-341-7390 Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope wraps up with an anecdote that would most likely be an audience’s first point of interest — many of the young leaders behind the Never Again movement, who have been loudly advocating for gun control since the shooting at their high school in Parkland, Fla., last February, were members of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School drama club.
To playwright Andrew Kushnir and University of Toronto professor and researcher Kathleen Gallagher — and probably anyone who worked on a high school production — this isn’t a coincidence. And the play that Kushnir and Gallagher created together is a full-length, continent-spanning, multilingual epic of research and theatrics to explain why.
Towards Youth was born out of Gallagher’s research into the distinct chemistry that occurs between students in a high school drama class — a chemistry that she says (through actor Liisa Repo-Martell as her theatrical stand-in) lets students get through the educational process with the least traumatization possible.
To take her research to the natural next level of analysis and dissemination, Gallagher wanted to create a play. She met her collaborator when she saw Project: Humanity’s 2009 play about youth shelter residents,
The Middle Place, written by Andrew Kushnir.
Actor Emilio Vieira (Kushnir’s alter-ego in Towards Youth) retells this journey as one that began out of artistic guilt and continued out of what he discovered to be “a low-grade fear of young people.”
Of course, the play pulls back Kushnir’s misplaced fear toward teens and reveals the humour, anxiety, thought and, most importantly to Gallagher, hope, that affects their world views and attitudes toward their future.
As Kushnir and Gallagher travel around the world to observe drama classes in Toronto, England, Greece, Taiwan and India, actors Aldrin Bundoc, Tim Dowler-Coltman, Jessica Greenberg, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Zorana Sadiq, Amaka Umeh and Loretta Yu portray more than 35 different students and teachers (Eric Armstrong’s dialect design is impressive in transporting us across the globe with few costume or scene changes).
Repo-Martell as Gallagher, quoting another leading educator, describes teaching as “receiving,” and the play also adopts this mind frame. The audience is meant to receive the students’ perspectives, instead of judging how they perform.
This isn’t an exploration of how a young person is trained in the art of acting — a misunderstanding around this with a Greek instructor played hilariously by Sadiq forms one of the funniest moments in Towards Youth — but instead looks at how a drama class helps a young person develop “an appetite to hear one’s voice in the world” as a Toronto teacher played by Greenberg articulates.
The script finds depth in a question from Toronto student Bella, a boisterous comedian-in-the-making played by Umeh (who’s a revelation in this production): “How are you going to hear me?” Kushnir’s writing repeats this question at key moments.
As a result, Towards Youth tracks what it’s like for a Canadian teenager to explore their homosexuality or Blackness in front of their school, a British foster child to work with an intercultural group of peers the week of the Brexit vote, Greek children to assess the refugee crisis in their country, Taiwan- ese young adults to face Chinese oppression, and Indian boys and girls to have their gendered expectations of public engagement challenged.
It’s clear that Kushnir and Gallagher amassed an incredible amount of interviews, video, photographs, questions and learnings to generate this play — at one point, the plan was to do a one-hour play for each country, and it’s easy to believe there’s enough material.
But there is evidence that Kushnir’s closeness to the experience means there are a few darlings still left in the play that should have been killed in the editing process. Breaking out of the classroom and into a cab in England is an unnecessary hammer on the Brexit nail, and, as comical as Dowler-Coltman’s performance is as a proBrexit octogenarian, feels like a callous caricature in such a production built on empathy.
Lingering on several comedic bits like this one also means there’s much less time to spend in Taiwan and India, the final two countries with political and social contexts that the play quickly skims over.
Despite its meanderings and reliance on cinematically sentimental sections of text built up by sound and video, the ensemble succeeds in delivering what Gallagher describes as a “faithful betrayal” of the project’s young research subjects. They’re charming and innocent, almost too much so for this world.
Fellow former drama nerds will ache for the comforting warmth of their drama room. And, with any luck, it will inspire others to get in touch with the drama kid inside all of us.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Twitter: @RadioMaga