Short play in a tight space explores complex relationships
The Mess
(out of 4) Created by Mikaela Davies and Polly Phokeev. Until Dec. 17 at Apple Self Storage, 530 Adelaide St. Tickets at bit.ly/messplay or daviesandphokeevproductions@gmail.com.
A character in The Mess is into micro-podcasting, which apparently is a thing (I googled it): short-form audio content of a couple minutes or less.
We might, in turn, call this a microplay: 45 minutes long, performed by three actors for 10 spectators in a storage unit, sitting inches from the action.
The experiences and feelings expressed in the production aren’t lightweight, though. This is the second in a series of three plays created by MikaelaDavies and Polly Phokeev that intend to convey life-altering experiences of heartbreak in intimate spaces.
The first, How We Are, staged in 2016, had two women waking up together as the audience sat around them in a real-life bedroom, and grappled with a complex question of sexual consent a year before that term became a cultural flashpoint.
In this one, Annalise (Robyn Stevan) is sorting through boxes and bags of stuff as we enter the cubicle and sit around the periphery. It’s messy: clothes and a bike hang from the overhead grid; there’s a filthy area rug and little sense of order.
Without speaking, Stevan conveys complex emotions as she looks at this book, that piece of clothing. The belongings don’t seem to be hers, but they mean something to her.
Two other people arrive. First, it’s Mackenzie (Rebecca Applebaum) who, in a very of-the-moment Toronto reference, saw Annalise’s post on the Bunz app to come collect free stuff.
The other, Tristan (Michael Ayres), has a relationship with these belongings and their owner that it is the business of the play to reveal.
The plotting flirts with implausibility in just how few degrees of separation there are between the characters, but this also seems part of the creators’ point. The production conveys how, in the contemporary moment of online hookups, random pop-up parties and precariousness as the new normal, it’s hard to distinguish a true connection from a brief intensity.
This sense of things being unstable and fragile is reflected in the play’s structure, which is built around a person who never appears but is nonetheless at the centre of everything.
The other characters’ differing viewpoints about that fourth figure further underline this sense of uncertainty: one person’s soulmate is another person’s mess. To convey so much information about complex relationships in such an indirect manner is an impressively daring move, and Phokeev and Davies just about accomplish it, though Mackenzie never stops seeming like a narrative foil.
Most jarring about the whole experience, for me, was the sight of the fourth character’s face in a photograph, older than I’d imagined. Does knowing what they look like really give me more information? What does it take to really know someone beyond a surface impression, and what’s risked by attempting such knowledge?
Big questions emerge from this deceptively small theatrical package.