Playwright’s debut tackles teen sex club
The ’94 Club
K (out of 4) By Thalia Gonzalez Kane, directed and choreographed by Monica Dottor. Until May 12 at Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, 30 Bridgman Ave. Tarragontheatre.com and 416-531-1827. Based on true events, Thalia Gonzalez Kane’s first play tells the story of a group of 15-yearold girls who create a sex club and score points for every sexual act they perform.
The ease, even insouciance with which the four central characters in The ’94 Club buy into this plan is shocking, and this is a big part of Kane’s point. Sex is everywhere around these young women and they don’t take it seriously. But at the same time, they reveal naivete — even ignorance — about the relationship between sexual activity and intimacy.
This is clearly a passion project for Kane, a busy multidisciplinary artist and a leader in the current movement for gender equity and anti-harassment in Canadian theatre. She is the show’s writer, producer (for her own Crave Productions), and participated in nearly all aspects of its design, as well as performing in it.
The power and timeliness of the play’s content, however, is compromised from the start by the weakness of its script. An outside eye could have helped to create a storytelling structure that didn’t signal so much from the very beginning.
Monica Dottor’s direction includes brief passages of movement, which hint at the anxieties and emotions that the characters are feeling but unable to express in words. This adds some depth and texture, and the innovative set (designed by Dottor) also contributes a level of metaphor: the girls weave in and around of a web of strings and piles of books, the physical challenge of this suggesting the hoops they jump through every day to cope with pressures and expectations.
Overall, though, these elements cannot fully cut through an overriding reliance on naturalism, which gives the evening the whiff of an after-school TV special transposed to the stage.
The main plot line concerns the sex club, led by the promiscuous Jenn (Tamara Almeida) who schools sweet but pliable Laura (Lily Scriven) in how to play guys off each other.
Another vector is an exploration of the relationship between earnest Sarah (Shaina Silver-Baird), the most reluctant member of the club, and Tommi (Kane) who has different investments in these questions of sex and love.
Given the play’s short running time (65 minutes), Kane does not have the chance to explore all the issues she brings to the table, so that the two sides of the play compete against each other.
Jeanie Calleja plays Mrs. Wright, both Laura’s mother and the school’s guidance coun- sellor. While this adds to Kane’s portrait of a small community where roles overlap and privacy is hard to maintain, a lot of contradictory things are asked of the character.
At one moment, she’s spouting jargon and seeming clueless about what’s going on under her nose, and at the other, she is the voice of compassion and reason, providing the audience glimpses at the young women’s internal lives and individuality. It’s possible, of course, that a person in Wright’s position could have these multiple qualities, but the briefness of the play and the lack of subtlety in the writing conspire to make her come off as a mouthpiece, not a character; Calleja visibly struggles to find a balance between stiffness and grace.
The four actors playing the girls fare much better; their emotionally committed performances help bring nuance to the somewhat stereotyped characters as written.
The ’94 Club is playing at the same time as the much-talkedabout Girls Like That in Tarragon’s mainstage, while Selfie continues its run at Young People’s Theatre. All three, in various ways, are stories about teenagers, sexuality, community and intimacy — hot-button issues in the current moment.
But it’s just not clear where Kane’s critique is aimed — what systems she is pointing to that create the circumstances for the disturbingly rudderless behaviour of her young characters.