Having a frank talk about free speech
Theory
★★★(out of four) By Norman Yeung. Directed by Esther Jun. Until Nov. 25 at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave. Tarragontheatre.com and 416-5311827.
What would Jordan Peterson say about this play?
In Theory, idealistic young professor Isabelle (Sascha Cole) offers university students unmoderated expression on an internet message board: “Your identity is yours: the name you choose, the pronoun you prefer ... I’m not going to choose your words for you. You’re adults. Make it not suck.”
So you’ve got Peterson’s valuing of free speech above all else, but deployed (he might say weaponized) by an ultra-progressive prof who is using this film-theory course to challenge the hegemony of “dead white dudes” and give the finger to the establishment.
Given the play’s acute topicality, it’s amazing to learn in the program that Norman Yeung has been developing it for nine years. It must have been a headspinning ride as he and director Esther Jun prepared this Tarragon Theatre production even as the issues it treats came to top the headlines.
Peterson, the controversial University of Toronto prof waging a high-profile public campaign against political correctness, is never directly mentioned, but debates around his views illustrate one of Yeung’s many good points: that far left and far right positions on free
expression converge.
The play is admirably ambitious as it works through layers of complexity: Isabelle’s wife Lee (Audrey Dwyer) is Black, and a number of Isabelle’s students are non-white and queer; she is not always sensitive to the ways in which her free speech crusade makes sense to her in theory but plays out for others in hurtful ways.
A critique levelled at her late in the play — that she’s blinkered by a kind of righteous “woke” vanity — has the ring of truth about it, but it’s hard to square this with how brilliant we’re told she is by Lee and her department head (Fabrizio Filippo), and how terribly wrong her experiment ends up going. A subplot about fertility never quite feels integrated into the
rest of the intrigue.
The old-fashioned tropes of stage thriller hold the storytelling back, as Isabelle falls deeper into obsession over her students’ online activity. The cool efficiency of Jun’s production, as the cast members shift the adaptable pieces of Joe Pagnan’s set to move the action quickly between university and home, illustrates the point that
the boundaries between Isabelle and Lee’s professional and personal worlds are becoming increasingly porous. Cameron Davis’s projections of the barrage of media communications coming at Isabelle are impressively and precisely timed. But the very materiality of the stage setting weighs the story down: perhaps these ideas would find their fullest realization in virtual reality.
Under Jun’s direction, Cole offers a compelling portrait of the unravelling young ideologue, and Dwyer is equally impressive as her older and more savvy (or perhaps resigned) partner, though they look too close in age to communicate a generation gap that’s a big point in the script.
Bilal Baig, Asha James, Kyle Orzech and Anthony Perpuse are excellent as Isabelle’s smart and self-possessed students, and while initially coming across as a cliché of a preoccupied academic, Filippo relaxes into his crucial scene.
It’s a tribute to the sophistication of many of the ideas in this play that I still can’t make up my mind about the initial question I posed. Does this play prove Peterson right, or would the extent to which it takes identity politics seriously send him marching out of the theatre?
Please judge for yourselves, and maybe bring someone with opposite values to your own with you. Let the debate begin. Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: