Bringing animal testing closer to home
Lab experiments on humans in bleak ‘black comedy’
It’s never been a pushover, the Varscona stage. That wide, shallow crescent moon has resisted, and defeated, more than a few directors in the course of Varscona Theatre history. Call it a theatre IQ test — or to take its cue from Category E, a director-testing facility.
How bittersweet it is, therefore, to discover that the last show at the old Varscona before demolition and rebuild finds such a striking, artful and elegant solution to its many challenges. Nancy McAlear’s production, for the experimental collective The Maggie Tree, gets a gold star for that.
Belinda Cornish’s horrifying socalled “black comedy” Category E happens on a gleaming, whitetiled, gauzy-lidded perspective set designed by T. Erin Gruber to trick the eye, and the mind, into following the visual logic of the set, and the narrative logic of the play, back, back, back into an invisible torture chamber into which the characters disappear periodically, and from which they reappear, more damaged than before. Instead of side walls, there’s a geometry of batons of light, orthogonals suspended and splayed like spears.
In Category E, we’re in the cell of an English test laboratory, where people — not animals — are the guinea pigs for commercial experiments. Testimonials, with their generic enthusiasm for disposable diapers, cleaning products or cosmetics, flicker across the angled translucent “roof” from time to time. The three subjects, though mysteriously matter-of-fact about their imprisonment, are not volunteers. In throwaway bits of dialogue darkened by hints of eugenics, we learn surreptitiously that they’ve been selected. After all, when’s the last time you heard of a rabbit or a monkey signing away freedom, health, gender and a full complement of limbs to benefit a multinational bottom line?
Corcoran (the wonderful Louise Lambert), the eldest and most knowing of the three, is in a wheelchair, picking away at a grisly looking eye scab and a 17-year-old crossword puzzle to pass the time. Filigree (Jenna Dykes-Busby) is a young, feral creature with only rudimentary, crudely learned social skills and an alarming tendency to snarl and bite; she spends her time drawing. A newcomer, Milet (Miranda Allen), with a cheery chinup quality — “we can all strive to raise the bar” — bounces in, trailing memories of a mother, green spaces, books. Her time-passing device is the Fibonacci sequence, on which she has an ever-shakier grasp. The revelations, their comforts are small; they include strangely fanciful stories about childhood dreams elicited from Corcoran, who has a kind of gruffly maternal, old-pro bristle to her in Lambert’s performance.
Three characters, two cots: You do the math.
Periodically, a silky intercom voice says 45574-C or 816123-A, or whatever. The back door opens, and the prisoner in question must leave, as the door shuts ominously behind her. Every return from a “procedure” reveals an escalation in terrible wounds, or suspicious itches, or scars. “Kidney,” surmises Corcoran, examining stitches on Filigree’s back. “Added or missing? Hmmm, that’s a D procedure, You shouldn’t get a C call if it’s a D procedure ...”
The performances, all three in McAlear’s production, are vivid, and the exchanges sharply timed. And Cornish is skilful at letting awful revelations just seep through the fabric of dialogue instead of presenting them in exposition. If this is “comedy,” however black, it’s of a particularly bleak kind, the kind in which laughing isn’t really a viable option.
True, the traffic of the stage — roommates getting on each other’s nerves — is a sitcom setup dropped into an antiseptic chamber of horrors. True, too, that Category E has a certain surface affinity to Beckett’s Endgame, but there’s not much of that play’s tilt to existential absurdity here.
Nope, Category E, which doesn’t really need the added weight of its (admittedly artful) projections of ads, is a blistering condemnation of our wilful brutality and venality in animal testing, using human characters for the purpose. It gradually accumulates grisly details, and gathers dread around it. When someone in Category E says their lunch tastes like drain cleaner, well. ... A throwaway like Millet’s breezy “where’s my head?” sets up palpitations, too. Now, that’s a horror story. The mysterious culture that has engendered the characters’ docility in the face of barbaric practice is our own. lnicholls@edmontonjournal.com