Vital, vulgar—and painfully real THEATRE

C’mon, Angie! dissects a #Metoo moment with a woman who refuses to wear the blame

C’MON, ANGIE!

By Amy Lee Lavoie. Directed by Lauren Taylor. A Touchstone Theatre production, in association with the Firehall Arts Centre. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Friday, June 1. Continues until June 9

“It’s so simple. I need to know 2

that you’re listening to this. To me.”

It’s not much to ask of the person who assaulted you, and yet it’s everything. In the world premiere of C’mon, Angie!, Amy Lee Lavoie’s brilliant and necessary new play, this is all Angie (Kayla Deorksen) wants from Reed (Robert Moloney), and we spend 80 incredible minutes in an intense and honest dialogue that illustrates just how difficult it will be for Angie to get what she needs.

It’s the morning after a one-night stand, and when Angie confronts Reed about violating her, he is blindsided. It’s impossible to say whether it’s willful or feigned ignorance on Reed’s part that he’s so outraged and shocked by her accusation, and the power dynamics between the two are a bit more complicated than if they were two strangers. Reed is older than Angie, rich and suburban, a father to a little girl, and married to Angie’s boss. Angie is poor, lives in a small studio apartment downtown, and is single. She’s been to Reed’s home. He’s fantasized about having sex with her. In fact, at one point he tells her, “You can’t control fantasy. And you were my fantasy.”

Lavoie’s script is intelligent and vital, vulgar and funny, and exhaustingly, painfully real. There’s a reason that so many women were laughing at Angie’s cutting sarcasm, and gasping and muttering to themselves under their breath so often in recognition and shared frustration. It was also jarring to hear so many men laughing at Reed’s entitlement and his refusal to take accountability for his actions over and over.

For example, when Reed says, “I’m never going to be spontaneous again,” it’s him demonstrating yet again that he’s not listening to Angie and that he still doesn’t get it—and everyone laughing in the audience doesn’t get it either.

Director and dramaturge Lauren Taylor cultivates the intensity of C’mon, Angie! without ever exploiting it. Taylor makes the space as safe as possible—considering the triggering material—for both the audience and the actors by staging the play in such a way that Angie always seems in control. It’s cathartic and a bit of wish fulfillment to witness the clarity with which Angie’s able to articulate her anger and hurt, her exasperation and fear. She’s had her share of #Metoo moments, and refuses to take the blame Reed keeps trying to push back onto her, and she won’t be manipulated or gaslighted or feel sorry for him.

Moloney is masterful as Reed, and Deorksen is a revelation as Angie. Her delivery is by turns bone-saw sharp and heartbreaking. C’mon, Angie! is visceral, important, lifechanging theatre, and could play a critical role in helping advance the cultural conversation around sexual assault, consent, and coercion.

> ANDREA WARNER

Starring Jodi Foster. Rated 18A

It’s 2028 L.A., and the Hotel 2

Artemis is a fortress against the violence outside: streets exploding in a bloodbath of rioting, police decked out like Robocop, and nonstop gunfire and explosions. Vaulted off to anyone but members, the high-rise is a secret high-tech hospital for wounded criminals. And did we mention it’s a grand altar to the art-deco movement?

So it is with the strange, stylized directorial debut of Drew Pearce (who wrote Iron Man 3): over-the-top art design meets over-the-top violence and characters. The film’s marketing geniuses have aptly coined the look “digital deco”; think dim sepia lighting and computer screens. Wounded assassins, bank robbers, and arms dealers are assigned rooms with the names of exotic places— Honolulu, Nice, Hollywood—with giant murals to match.

At the centre of it all is Jodi Foster, the gruff and frumpy septuagenarian Nurse who runs this establishment under strict rules. Foster is in her element here, in orthopedic shoes, hospital whites, and reader glasses. Her character heals criminals with the latest computer technology and 3-D printers, but loves playing the Mamas & the Papas on her old vinyl-record player. She (perhaps understandably) suffers paralyzing agoraphobia. Flashbacks hint that a loss in her own life has pushed her to devote herself to healing others—though why she’s helping these miscreants is hard to reconcile.

A documentary by Sara Driver. Rated PG

Veteran docmaker Sara Driver, 2

who interviews long-time partner Jim Jarmusch alongside numerous other survivors of the Lower East Side art scene of New York City’s hellacious 1970s, could have dropped her Basquiat. As a breezy, often compelling overview of that period, when the murder rate was high and rents were low, Boom for Real clicks. As biography, less so.

Driver is taking for granted that her film will mostly attract viewers who already know the late artist’s back story, possibly via other docs or contemporary Julian Schnabel’s biopic. Still, at 78 minutes, the film could have recapitulated a little of the background that made Jean-michel Basquiat such an instigating outsider in an already volatile milieu. Although he was born in Brooklyn, his erudite father was Haitian and his mother, who had serious mental problems, was Puerto Rican, and the young Basquiat was trilingual. After a childhood car accident, he recuperated while learning the clarinet and studying a copy of Gray’s Anatomy—things that would show up later in his paintings, and in his art-rock bands.

He arrives here at the age of 16, as a high-school dropout and incipient graffiti artist. His erstwhile tagging partner, Al Diaz—one of the most interesting interview subjects here—shared with him the pseudonym SAMO, short for “Same Old Shit”. Their mysterious afterlife on the subway cars and buildings of Lower Manhattan made them the Banksy of their