James Karas
As you enter the
Berkeley Street Downstairs Theatre for the performance of Five Faces for Evelyn Frost
you see the stage covered with clothes. Three young women and two men walk on
stage and greet the audience politely. They tell us things about themselves.
When they were born, their taste in clothes, their motto and mundane bits like
that.
They pick up the
pace of their speaking until they speak so quickly you can barely understand
what they are saying. They slow down and launch into a long segment of telling us
what “I like,” what “I’ve seen,” what “I’ve read.” Everything about these
people is me, me, me and they address the audience directly almost all the time.
Their tastes and the breadth of their musical
and literary knowledge is breathtaking and I admit that most of the names they
dropped are unknown to me.
Most of them go
to a bar and the same type of dialogue continues but the emphasis changes on
social media postings. All of them describe what they did, the pictures they
took and, it seems, the pictures they posted. This is today’s youth living on
Facebook and Twitter?
Playwright
Guillaume Corbeil skilfully constructs the narrative from the selfish and perhaps
silly narrative of the young people telling us about the great time they are having
and leads us into darker developments. What appear as minor chinks develop into
serious issues as their lives begin to unravel or perhaps simply encounter reality?
The mother who has Alzheimer’s disease, the sex, the drugs, the crimes, the
degradation, all come to them. They lead to the ultimate tragedy for youth. I
will not tell you what it is for fear of spoiling it for you.
Most of the
dialogue consists of short sentences and as the play gains momentum the “I” and
“me” style achieves poetic substance. By the end I felt that the play is a
requiem for youth.
Evelyn Frost of
the title only appears as the photograph of a young, beautiful black woman whom
the characters see in the club that they go to. She seems to have everything
until we are told she suffers from leukemia. There may be more to her and about
her but in the speed at which the play moves I may well have missed it.
The five actors
are Laurence Dauphinais, Steffi Didomenicantonio, Tara Nicodemo, Nico Racicot
and Alex Weiner and they deserve special praise as does director Claude
Poissant. The cast is on stage for the full seventy-five minutes’ duration and
they must go through a large number of lines and a variety of emotions.
Outstanding work. Kudos to Poissant for bringing out the best in a play that
must look pretty bland on the page.
The set by
Max-Otto Fauteux consists of the stage covered with clothes and a screen where
photos of the characters in various poses as if on Facebook are projected.
This is a
Canadian Stage and Théâtre Français de Toronto production which is being done
in English and French by the same cast.
The whole thing
is an amazing feat.
______
Five
Faces for Evelyn Frost by Guillaume Corbeil opened on February 16 and will run in English until March 5 2017. It
will be performed in French (Cing Visages pour Evelyne
Frost) from March 21 to 25, 2017 with English surtitles at the Berkeley
Street Downstairs Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto, Ont. www.canstage.com, http://theatrefrancais.com/
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