Project confuses audience
Breath in Between (out of 4) Written and directed by Anton Piatigorsky. Until March 11 at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. Crowstheatre.com or 647-341-7390.
In the first several minutes of this troubling production, a man holding a knife (Kyle Gatehouse), tells the audience that he advertised on the Internet for people to kill. Two answered and, after coffee, he killed them.
The man, Roger, declares that “it is easier to drop a bomb on Hiroshima than it is to hammer a baby in the skull;” that when he was a child, his religious father showed evidence of his gentleness by stomping an injured hummingbird to death; and that when he was 17, his father killed him during a confrontation over authority.
Something very extreme is going on in Anton Piatigorsky’s play about moral relativism; behaviour, belief and responsibility in the digital age; the positive and negative potentials of intimacy; and parenting. In its preoccupation with actual and symbolic violence, Breath in Between echoes the 1990s “in-yer-face” theatrical movement, in which writers controversially depicted extreme acts of sex, aggression and brutality.
At its best, such work used transgression and the challenging of formal theatrical norms to wake spectators up to all kinds of societal hypocrisies. Piatigorsky is attempting the tricky and admirable task of invoking extreme acts without enacting them. Violence is not literally depicted in the play, but any number of horrible activities and images are talked about.
Turning this level of provocation into critique requires skills that Piatigorsky, from the evidence provided here, does not yet possess. A central concern is that this award-winning playwright is directing his work for the first time, taking over directorial duties from Brendan Healy.
Piatigorsky’s production does not sufficiently establish and maintain a representational contract with the audience. Is Roger really dead — are we in the fashionable realm of zombie horror — or did his dad symbolically kill him? In the absence of further evidence of undeadness, the latter eventually seems the case, but this is one of any number of ambiguities that stack up to the point of blocking audience engagement.
Another big question is the nature of the relationship between Roger and Amy (Julia Krauss), who picks him up in a bar by talking about sex and porn and becomes his partner. Piatigorsky gives some of his most original ideas to her, in monologues about the nature of intimacy and the brutality of pregnancy and childbirth. At this point and others, the actors attempt to offer psychologically committed, emotion-driven acting. Krauss is more successful than Gatehouse in bringing us into the complexities of her character’s thoughts and feelings. But Piatigorsky hands them and the audience challenges by layering on more styles.
A further confusion is the terms on which the production addresses the spectator. Initially, Roger talks to us directly, then he and Amy play naturalistically and we’re just looking in, then Amy starts talking to us, too. There’s a voice-over that at first seems to represent Maxim and Laura — the people he killed — but then it might be police interrogation.
Perhaps all this is intended to dramatize a push-pull of control, but it is not clear between or within whom.
Production values are very strong in this Crow’s Theatre production, the second in its intimate Scotiabank Community Studio. Feren’s sound design, in particular, is masterful. But this misguided project raises questions about the level of artistic support and intervention Crow’s provided. Everyone’s overexposed here and nobody wins, including the audience.