A compelling, cramped rebellion
The term “gaslighting” has gained more mainstream popularity over the past few years, now commonly used within the context of one person manipulating another (usually with a gendered connotation) into mistrusting their own observations and instincts.
“Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s dark comedy that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, is filled with people who make decisions that, on the surface, go against common logic. Or, at least they’re told they do.
In one of the rare remaining rent-controlled apartments on Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side lives former NYPD cop Walter Washington (Alexander Thomas), or “Pops” to the people who live there with him, Junior (Jai Jai Jones), who’s taken on a caretaker role since Walter’s wife Dolores died, Junior’s girlfriend Lulu (Zarrin Darnell-Martin) and Oswaldo (Nabil Rajo), who lectures Walter about his sugary eating habits, blaming them on his “emotionalisms.”
Walter’s told he should, like
Oswaldo, focus on “getting all fit and diesel, like how I’m doing from eating these almonds and making other healthful choices.”
“‘They’ always saying something,” Pops responds. “Then later, they’ll go and say something else that’s inevitably completely ass-backwards from what they originally said. Happens all the time. For example, them almonds. Don’t be surprised if we learn in the future that almonds cause cancer.”
With this introductory interaction, we see Guirgis’s mastery of language that possesses a king of poetic rhythm on the page but is sneakily natural when said out loud, particularly within an actor like Thomas, who gives Pops a slow and thoughtful pace, with wide eyes that have, as we eventually learn, seen quite a bit.
But with Pops’s reaction, we also see how he resists the socalled “correct” rules of living. Eating healthily is not a controversial piece of advice, and his skepticism at first comes off as an old man’s stubbornness. But he’s actually speaking from years of being told his experiences are not real, and he’s simply given up listening when others tell him the world is this way or that.
From the way Lulu’s tight clothing leads to assumptions about her profession, or Oswaldo’s instructions to stop eating Ring Dings with bologna, or Junior’s defence of Dolores’s legacy as a cook, caretaker and financial provider for the family, every character is trying to reconcile what feels right to them with what is established as correct by the world around them, in the context of a gentrifying New York City in the mid-2010s, shortly after the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island.
The most extreme instance of this comes to Pops in the form of his former partner Audrey (Claire Armstrong) and her fiancé, Lieut. Dave Caro (Sergio Di Zio).
To curry favour on the brass ladder, Dave has taken on the task of getting Pops to drop his eight-year-long lawsuit against the NYPD after a white rookie mistakenly shot Pops six times. Audrey and Dave, the only white characters in the play, are constantly telling Pops they’re trying to help him, but their condescension reveals itself the more Pops digs in his heels, even if it means losing even more money to lawyers’ fees and puts Junior, Lulu and Oswaldo in even more precarious situations.
Pops is impervious to Audrey and Dave’s arguments from logic, like they’re living in worlds with different laws of nature. In many ways, they do. Pops has just learned to accept this, and embraces condemnations that he’s acting, as the title says, “crazy.”
This dynamic lets Guirgis’s play take surprising, sometimes bordering on absurd, turns while staying rooted firmly in a very recognizable and realistic world.
In fact, director Kelli Fox’s production perhaps leans too heavily on its realism, trying to fit an entire apartment awkwardly into the Danforth’s tiny Coal Mine Theatre. Anna Treusch’s set design — a believably humble but spacious kitchen, living room and bedroom with a clever reveal of the building’s rooftop — is squeezed into a long, narrow thrust in the Coal Mine Space; it’s not ideal for a variety of arresting stage images.
The strongest moments involve a bold look from Steve Lucas’s lighting, which sends the backlit sky into fiery reds or deep purple whenever the mysterious Church Lady (a completely charming Allegra Fulton) visits Pops, with whom he senses a similar embrace of the “crazy” way of life.
But overall, Fox’s production delivers a solid Toronto premiere for a stunning play, with strong performances from the ensemble that sometimes face split-second derailments by a wayward accent but can also reach otherworldly heights. In this topsy-turvy world, believe the hype.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga