A punk spin on a coming-of-age tale
This one-man show about punk rock fandom is presented in an appropriately off-grid location: A dark, narrow bar above a burrito joint on College St. A co-production of the indie groups Pandemic Theatre and Pressgang, it was well-received at last year’s Summer-Works Festival and is now back for a longer run.
Ron Kelly’s smart sound design amplifies pre-show concert noise before the performance, establishing the convention that this is a theatre show in the guise of a music gig.
Early in the performance, writer-performer Graham Isador tapes a set list to the floor, extending the metaphor.
But Isador doesn’t sing — he talks, and talks, and talks beautifully, about his difficult youth, a tale told with such detail and precision that it conjures up clear mental pictures, while at the same time inviting connections with spectators’ own childhood struggles.
He earns audience complicity with an initial story about a moment of terrible exposure in gym class when he had just hit puberty and was carrying 230 pounds on a five-foot-10inch frame. Shamefully, it’s his teacher who leads the mockery and gives the boy a hurtful nickname, “Whale flop,” which haunts him, signalled in the show by the recurring sound of whales whistling.
Isador went to a very dark place after this and it was punk that saved him — not just the music, but the communities that form around it. While coming of age painfully is a familiar story, the specificities of this version are evocative: the independent record store as an oasis of cool in a Niagara mall otherwise full of chain stores, the message board as an “island of misfit toys” where Isador discovered solidarity with like- minded souls: “We were a bunch of kids with morals and dumb haircuts . . . We were going to change the world.”
Under the direction of Tom Arthur Davis and Jivesh Parasram, the show creates clear playing areas on the small stage.
Sitting in front of one mike, with Laura Warren’s lights glowing green in his face, Isador is online. Standing in front of another, under whiter light, he’s recalling a past experience in the present moment.
The show is billed as “creative nonfiction,” which amalgamates Isador’s relationship with several bands. But all of his youthful energy is directed toward the punk group Against Me! and its lead singer who, in 2012, made headlines by coming out as trans and now lives as Laura Jane Grace.
The crystal-clear passages of recalled experience are interspersed with a letter the adult Isador wrote to Grace, in which he expresses anger toward her. This part of the narrative still feels under-realized.
He says he’s not mad at Grace for making a “very public decision to live as a woman” (the fact that profits from the show are going to organizations supporting trans people would seem to bear this out) and he says he’s not mad that Against Me! signed to a major label and now tours with mainstream groups like Foo Fighters and Green Day. Rather he’s angry at Grace for “going away” — but what does that mean, exactly?
There’s a narrative jump in the story, from 17-year-old Isador’s harrowing experience getting beaten up in a punk club and being called the ho- mophobic F-word, to him as a 25-year-old writing for a major bank’s music website. About this job perhaps being a compromise of his punk values, all he has to say is, “whatever.”
When he has an opportunity as his adult self to throw himself back into Against Me!’s music, he resists because he’s at the concert as a journalist: “I was working.”
There is loads more to explore here, it would seem, about the evolution of identity as we move from youthful idealism to adult pragmatism; about the paradoxical demand for writers to stay distant from the heroes their work sometimes allows them to meet; and specifically about the adult Isador’s own experience of embodiment and sexuality.
The brave exposure in the piece of a teenage boy’s experience of bulimia and body dysmorphia could benefit from being brought into the present: that’s a story we don’t hear often enough.
Isador, now a theatre publicist and VICE writer, is ballsy enough to have attended a theatre production naked. Lending that capacity for self-exposure to the next phase of this story could lead to some original and revealing results.