A quiet rage in the time of #MeToo
(out of 4) By Erin Shields, directed by Andrea Donaldson. Until May 26 at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. Factorytheatre.ca and 416504-9971.
That new movie, the one with the cops. That fantasy TV show, the one with “dragons and witches and ogres and characters to fight.” That canonical play, about backstabbing politicians in ancient Rome. That old-fashioned puppet show, with married-couple puppets throttling and kicking each other as audiences howl with laughter. Erin Shields’s play Beautiful
Man is about all of these forms of entertainment, but it stages none of them. It is mostly made up of three women (Ashley Botting, Mayko Nguyen and Sofia Rodriguez) sitting on tall stools narrating their experience of watching that cop show, in which the lead female cop watches the fantasy TV show, as part of which that canonical play is staged — a story within a story within a story. The female actors speak outward towards the audience, making no attempt to simulate a naturalistic conversation.
Meanwhile, a character called
Beautiful Man
Beautiful Man (Jesse LaVercombe) stands behind them in a recessed rectangular ministage. He sometimes becomes a character in the entertainments they’re talking about, for just a little bit (“How was your day? Honey? Are you listening to me?”), but more often is just idle.
The effect is to point up and satirize the sexism of these entertainments and the systems that produce them.
The cop show is full of gender-flipped tropes: its lead character Rosie is a drinker with a tortured past whose boyfriend is “smoking hot. Tight ass, strong chest, makes you want to slap him.” The heroine of the fantasy TV show keeps her husband chained up in her bedroom.
Shields wrote an earlier version of this play partly in response to the popularity of Game of Thrones, and it was staged in the 2015 Summer-Works festival by Andrea Donaldson — also the director of this current Factory Theatre production. In the meantime, #MeToo happened, offering up more evidence of systemic sexual violence to skewer. There’s a gossipy sideline about the female director of the fantasy show who drugged and sexually assaulted interns in hotel rooms: “So many beautiful young men” who could have been husbands and fathers and who now will take years to heal.
There’s a great deal of rage underlying this play, but also many humorous elements, and so many things to admire about Shields’s acute observations and inversions of expectation. The very fact of the gender-flipping is initially funny because of its incongruousness, and there’s pleasure in the details that she’s chosen to focus on and point up, including the ways the women sometimes egg each other on. Repetitions are funny, but also pointed — with all the men they’re talking about, they come back to the same “broad chest and sandy-coloured hair” (this play’s version of a blond with big boobs).
Donaldson’s directorial approach is all about coolness and precision. Gillian Gallow’s set successfully tames the Factory Mainstage and focuses our attentions on the women in the forestage and the deceptively serene space of the Beautiful Man’s lair behind them, which Jason Hand’s lighting transforms using a palette of pastel tones. Ming Wong’s costumes look like they’re straight off a rack at Aritzia and this seems the point: these are women we recognize, work beside, ride the TTC with.
While the three of them have character names, distinct personalities don’t really emerge through these performances, nor does a developing critical point of view on the material. Rather, the focus is on wellpaced, rhythmic delivery of the dialogue — the intellectual and emotional work of processing the message is handed to the audience. The relentless evenness of tone appears to be part of the show’s point: Again and again, we are asked to consider an objectification or scene of violence that seems ridiculous in its exaggeration, and then when we turn it over in our mind to make it a woman who has been objectified or violated, not a man, we’re reminded that what we’re seeing is the everyday stuff of mainstream popular culture.
We know all this, it could be argued. We know it, we’re over it. Feminism has gone mainstream. Discussions of the massive amounts of violence on GoT happen all over the internet. Well yeah, OK (I hear this production arguing back), but the systems are still in place that make these tropes the norm; that re-enshrine rather than challenge the canon; that protect studio heads, TV stars and radio broadcasters who serially abuse those less powerful than them over decades.
All that said, it could still be argued that everything stays on one level too long (in my view, the puppet-show episode pushes things into excess), but there’s a response to such a critique built into the show itself, about which I will say no more because we know what the internet does to people who spoil, other than to say that it’s really, really good. Having the female characters mime various activities while they’re speaking was not an entirely clear choice, in that it’s not obvious what they’re doing and why, and this muddies the production’s otherwise admirable clarity.
Shields is a multiple-awardwinning writer, best known for plays that adapt and/or riff on classic sources — Greek myth (the Governor General’s Award-winning If We Were Birds); last season’s adaptation of Paradise Lostat Stratford; the updated comedy of manners The Millennial Malcontent two years ago at Tarragon. Here, without a historical source, she’s still writing directly in dialogue with contemporary culture, getting inside it, wrestling with it, lampooning it and then throwing it down. Every new play from her is a challenge, and a treat.