A whodunit story with an important underlying line of advocacy
A Man Vanishes
(out of 4) Written by Greg MacArthur, staged by the company. Until March 20 at Videofag, 187 Augusta Ave. Videofag.com.
This much, at least, we know for sure: actor William Ellis and director/ writer Jordan Tannahill are the cocurators of Videofag in Kensington Market, a storefront cinema and performance space where they also live. This is the third in a series of plays which Greg MacArthur has written for real-life collaborators in Montreal, Vancouver and now Toronto. MacArthur’s A Man Vanishes is loosely based on the acclaimed 1967 film of the same name by Shohei Imamura, which starts out as a documentary about a missing Japanese man but increasingly creates uncertainty about the nature of the story being told — truth or fiction?
The play’s premise is that a man, Paul Park, has gone missing and Ben (Ishan Davé), a filmmaker who lives in Park’s Montreal neighbourhood, is making a documentary about the case. Ben has traced Park as far as Videofag, and is interviewing Ellis and Tannahill on camera about their knowledge of him. Or, to be more precise, he’s interviewing Will and Jordan — the apparently exaggerated versions of their real-life selves that the resident artists play in this slippery Escher painting of a theatrical construct.
The viewing experience is acutely intimate. The audience sits on 30 chairs lining the periphery of Videofag’s front room. Before the action starts, spectators are invited to buy $5 beers in the kitchen from the chatty Ellis and Tannahill. Within the frame of the fictional story, the three performers deliver excellent, low-key, hyper-naturalistic acting, to the extent that it doesn’t seem like they’re acting at all.
At the same time, the form and delivery of the piece undercuts its simulation of real life: recorded videos are intermittently projected onto a wall in which various people associated with the missing person and with Videofag offer background testimony that starts to flesh out the mystery. All three performers as well as a visible stage manager operate the technology.
Initially, the play comes off as a satire of self-conscious artistic millennials: Ben reveals early on that his other projects include documentaries about gum and “Afghani infant suicide bombers,” and Jordan and Will come off as arty-trendy to the point of vacuousness, claiming that they “Oh my god . . . love” various cities that they then admit to never having visited.
The overall agenda, however, seems exactly to challenge such perceptions via the somewhat overburdened device of the missing person plot, in which Will and Jordan increasingly become suspects. This allows MacArthur to send up criticisms of artists collapsing their professional lives into their domestic ones as self-indulgent or worse.
“There’s something kind of desperate about this Videofag thing,” comments one on-camera interviewee. “It’s like they’ll disappear if they don’t have an audience.”
The whodunit plot represents the absurd endgame of such a reading of the Videofag enterprise: a black hole of narcissism into which Paul Park and subsequently Ben are fatally drawn.
Overblown and convoluted? A bit. But there is a nonetheless an important line of advocacy underlying it all: such multi-purpose spaces are arguably resourceful responses to the obscene bloating of the Toronto real estate market (accounts of Videofag’s monthly rent escalate from $3,000 to $5,000 to $8,000 as the play progresses). The piece also works as a sort of elegy for an enterprise whose time is almost up: Videofag is closing permanently this summer because Ellis and Tannahill feel it’s reached the end of its natural lifespan.
Am I reading too much into this metatheatrical confection? Best to make your way to Augusta Ave. and judge for yourself.