Drama from Toronto’s Volcano Theatre troupe nimbly negotiates tricky questions of good and evil.
Captivating performances help negotiate compassion- and- cruelty questions
Why do good people rush to do evil and what do they become? These are the questions at the heart of Goodness, a powerful exploration of human compassion and cruelty brought to heart- stopping life by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre for the 2012 Chutzpah! Festival.
The story begins with a fictional version of the actual playwright, Michael Redhill, as performed by Paul Braunstein, who perfectly captures the character’s self- deprecating humour as well as his darker side.
After Redhill’s wife leaves him for his best friend, his psychiatrist suggests he take a vacation.
But rather than drowning his sorrows in Las Vegas, Redhill travels to Poland, to the town where Nazis murdered his grandparents and seven of their children in 1941. His wife’s betrayal has given rise to an obsession with the Holocaust.
Rather than taking a position, the play asks the audience into the heart of each archetypal character — the innocent and the slaughterer of innocents alike.
Unable to find satisfaction in his family’s hometown, Michael decides to give up and return to Canada, but during a layover in London he meets a man in a bar who claims to have the answers he’s looking for. The man gives him an address for an apartment where he claims Redhill will find a woman who will be able to give him what he needs. He also gives a name — Mathias Todd.
Redhill goes to the apartment and finds Anthea, played with terrifying strength by Lili Francks, a survivor of an unnamed genocide. In her country, 500,000 people are said to have died because of the actions of a single intellectual. In a darkened apartment, Anthea tells Redhill a story that will call into question all his beliefs about the nature of good and evil.
By giving the character his name, the playwright implicates himself in the slippery movement between autobiography and history, justice and vengeance. Anthea’s story could easily teeter toward appropriation and pathos, but the author’s presence turns the rote narrative of the genocide survivor on its ear.
The Firehall’s unadorned black box thrust stage draws the audience into the drama. If Redhill is implicated, then so are we. Evil ceases to be something far away, something out of history or born of ignorance, but a dark possibility that lays dormant in all of us, waiting for the right circumstances to appear.
This is a difficult piece of theatre. The remaining four cast members must slide between different times and places within seconds, balancing humour and unthinkable horror sometimes in the same sentence. Layne Coleman is both terrifying and vulnerable as the aging Mathias Todd, while Amy Rutherford skilfully moves between his daughter Julia and Redhill’s ex- wife as the play explores different iterations of violence, both political and personal, physical and emotional. By the end of the first act, there are so many balls in the air that it’s hard to imagine how they will all land.
Although Goodness is a play of ideas, it never gets bogged down in its own intellectual premise. The relationship between good and evil can be slippery and rather than taking a position, the play asks the audience into the heart of each archetypal character — the innocent and the slaughterer of innocents alike. Haunting vocal work that marries African, Middle Eastern and Hebrew traditions as well as captivating performances provide emotional footholds for the journey, but no absolution.
Despite its nearly flawless performances and breathtaking script, Goodness doesn’t end with easy answers to its central questions. Rather, its last silent moment sends the audience away with a sense of unease about what atrocities we might be capable of, given the right circumstances.