Dynamic actors are up to Judith Thompson’s challenge
NTS graduating class excels in poetic production of Lion in the Streets
In Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, a young girl wanders her neighbourhood, shedding a spotlight on painful scenes enacted between ordinary people, most of whom cannot see her, because she’s dead. Those who do see and interact with her, such as the children who bully her at school, do so within the context of flashbacks.
While the premise of this 1990 play resembles the 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, in that a murdered girl tracks down and comes to terms with her killer, the message here is one of forgiveness.
Accessible, Lion in the Streets is not. It’s a dark, madly fragmented play that leaves people scratching their heads at intermission, or even after it’s over. But if you’re ever going to explore this troubling work by a renowned Canadian playwright, now is the time.
The National Theatre School production that opened this week at the Monument National is a valiant, poetic one. Ravi Jain’s direction is intelligent and innovative. (Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is deftly inserted at just the right moment.) The performances are intense, disciplined and engaging.
The design team, led by Diana Uribe (set), Jordan Wieben (costumes), Corey MacVicar (lighting), Meredith Daley (sound) and Brian Kenny (video), has created a surreal playground framed with high catwalk ladders. There’s a carousel on one side, a sandpit on the other and a screen above. Magic realism is afoot.
As Isobel, Chilko Tivy is an appealing, credibly Portuguese waif, hungry for inclusion in the community of broken hearts and twisted minds that surrounds her. She’s a constant presence, but doesn’t have a lot to say.
The other 10 members of the cast have drastic character switches and tortured monologues (or dialogues) to deliver. Erica Anderson gets the session rolling as the motherly Sue, who rescues Isobel from the bullies, then loses her Betty Crocker cool when she realizes her husband, Bill (Andrew Chown), is having an affair with another woman, Christine (Megn Walker).
Each digressive scene seems dropped from the sky, none more so than a conversation between a gay man (James Daly) and a priest (Benjamin Wheelwright), conducted while both are sitting high above the stage on horizontal ladders.
Almost as enigmatic is a conversation involving a woman with cancer (Natasha Mumba) fantasizing an Ophelia-style death by drowning.
Nikki Duval gets to emote her heart out twice. First, she’s a daycare worker who blows up at a group of yup- pie parents who have accused her of turning their children into sugar addicts because she bought them jelly doughnuts, once. Later, she’s a woman with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair who confesses her secret sex life to a journalist (Walker again), then quickly regrets it and throws a fit.
Other challenging scenes include an edgy encounter between two former childhood buddies (Wayne Burns and Alexander De Jordy). Their reunion becomes violent after the remembrance of a kiss. There’s also a disturbing sex scene between a voyeur (Stephen Tracey) and his fiancée (Walker), in which he forces her to relive rape by another man.
As NTS graduating classes go, this group looks like one of the most promising in years.
Lion in the Streets, by Judith Thompson, is staged Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Monument National, 1182 St-Laurent Blvd. Tickets cost $9. Call 514-8712224 or visit ent-nts.ca.