Friendly question with an angry tone
Will You Be My Friend
(out of 4) Written and composed by Janice Jo Lee. Directed by Matt White. Until Nov. 11 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave. PasseMuraille.ca or 416-504-7529 Janice Jo Lee’s new solo musical Will You be my Friend gives new meaning to the term “playdate.” Depending on who you are, this might be either the most challenging and uncomfortable or relieving and empowering platonic blind date you’ve had in a long time.
Lee, a Korean spoken word performer, musician and playwright from Kitchener-Waterloo, is looking for a friend who can help her get by in a white world and, after another unsuccessful attempt at interracial dating, anyone in the audience is fair game as her next option.
Will You Be My Friend premiered at Kitchener’s In the Centre series in 2017, and its success there sparked the attention of Theatre Passe Muraille, which presents the play now — following a line of thought that was triggered in last season’s Take d’Milk, Nah? by former associate artistic director Jivesh Parasram.
Both Parasram and Lee take the notion of the racialized “identity play” — a quirky, funny, often touching production of a performer coming to terms with their identity in a contemporary Canadian context — and break it open in resistance to fitting their story into a formula that white audiences have come to expect. They’re still charming, they’re still funny. But above all, they’re angry and tired and writing for the audience they see themselves in, and want to see inside a theatre.
Case in point: Lee enters the stage after an introduction by her (white, male) director Matt White, shyly waving and moving immediately to the farthest side of the stage, almost plastering herself against the wall in Theatre Passe Muraille’s Backspace. Her opening number as a kid in elementary school trying to fit in with her white classmates. “I have bubbles, I have skip rope, I have shrimp chips,” she sings. “Please play with meee-* inhale*- eeee.”
The intentional self-effacing demeanour that Lee lathers on the first half of her solo show — which introduces the audience to the extraterrestrial-like Dr. West, a specialist in helping racialized patients assimilate into white society — plays into these “identity play” tropes. It’s easy to get on her side with her folksy tunes and bashful smile, even when her true convictions start to peek through, especially when dealing with her new white boyfriend, Mike (whom she builds into a cringeworthy stereotype of woke white privilege), or when she picks up a traditional Korean barrel drum and sings a piece she inherited in her family.
Once the play breaks, Lee completely drops the façade. And the command she has as a musician and spoken word performer illustrates how contrived and specific her opening performance really was — evidence of her practice in being strategic in how much space she takes up and how loud to make her voice. In this section, she turns the performance from spectacle into protest, and purposefully gets the audience to sing along (no matter their colour).
Knowing that the thoughts of this white critic aren’t likely a top priority for Lee, I do think this switch could have been more impactful if it had happened earlier, trimming down some excess action in Lee’s previous exploits in white friendmaking, and giving the overall production a more focused, piercing effect.
It would probably mean more to her for me to admit that her final song and the refrain, “Take that little bit of space you have and let’s make it free, let’s make it free,” made me wonder if I should even take up this little bit of space at all.