Enormity, Girl, And The Earthquake In Her Lungs is a new play by Chelsea Woolley that has the unfortunate feature of being incomprehensible to me. There are, no doubt, people who know what the title and the play mean but unfortunately, I am not one of them.
The play has seven performers, one of whom is a young girl that appears briefly near the end. The rest are in the playing area of the new Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Center almost throughout the 90-minute production.
The play opens in a bare room that has only an unmade bed in it and a young woman standing beside it. She stumbles as she tries to say, “I’m OK.” She persists at it and tells herself to focus. She is clearly not well. Five actors appear on stage and they engage with her. We realize that they are creatures of her imagination or her fears and perhaps her demons or maybe her angels. We will watch the unwell women engage with them for the rest of performance. As far as I could tell, Woolley wants us to see the inside of the woman’s head with her serious emotional problems played by the five actors. I decide, for no particularly good reason, that they are her demons. You can think of them as her angels or both.
That is a tall order and the cast is called upon to perform rigorous and athletic, I dare say, demonic feats as they deal with the issues troubling the woman.
She has escaped to a shelter for abused women and does not want to see
anyone. Her demons/angels are loud, and aggressive
as they move or run or dance around her and speak most frequently in unison.
They do not always speak in coherent sentences; they interrupt each other and their
presence is at times incoherent. After all they are the woman’s demons/angels.
We understand at least implicitly that they are trying to help her but not everything is clear amid the physical activity, the rapid speaking and the delivery of lines in unison.
The woman does not say much about what has happened to her because she is cut off in mid-sentence. But near the end she tells us that she was abused by her parents and her basketball coach. We do see a basketball on the stage but no details about what she suffered are given.
Wolley is completely evasive and elusive and the play suggests what the woman has suffered in the vaguest way. But watching the five women or the inside of a troubled woman for almost ninety minutes proves too much.
The protagonist is identified in the program as VIC played by Vivien Endicott-Douglas. The rest of the actors seem to have names in the play but I could not tell who played what. They are are Marta Armstrong, Liz Der, Philippa Domville, Noa Furlong, Bria McLaughlin, Sofía Rodríguez, Emerjade Simms.
The small playing area of the Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre was lit brightly and there are images projected on the white wall by lighting designer Raha Javanfar but I can’t say that they illuminated the play. The bed of the opening scene is converted into an image of a bathtub which was used to abuse, perhaps torment, the young woman presumably as a child. The child is shown in the bed being read to a story, the way all children should recall and experience their childhood.
__________________________
Enormity, Girl, And The Earthquake In Her Lungs by Chelsea Woolley, in a production by Nightwood Theatre and Tarragon Theatre, opened on September 17 and will run until October 5, 2025, at the Nancy and Ed Jackman Performance Centre, 877 Yonge St. Toronto, Ontario.
No comments:
Post a Comment