Rational or not, I can’t escape the feeling that Chicago is going down the tubes (not at all helped by the absolute inability of the U.S. to come to grips with its gun mania – which even trickles a bit up into Toronto and Vancouver – thank goodness it is so much harder to get handguns here in Canada or it would be even worse*). But to get back to the TTC, Tuesday I was on the streetcar and two young guys snuck on around Broadview. They were travelling separately for most of the trip but then one came back to where the other one was sitting and they got into the most bizarre conversation about how the one didn't think he was dressed well and why didn't the other guy help him pick out better clothes, then they continued to pick at each other and squabble, including something about one taking a magic marker to the other with the rejoinder that he didn't know how to spell (with "I know how to spell A-hole" thrown back in his face), and then ultimately devolving into one arguing that he had definitely seen the other in a porn film. Nonetheless, even though I thought it was extremely childish to drag the entire bus into their little drama, I never felt personally threatened.
After they finally got off at Church, one man spoke up and said that he wanted to make it clear they didn't represent or define him, as a gay man. Another guy said it was like a comedy routine, and the gay man said, no it was all too real. But it did feel almost like a live-action Derek and Clive (though slightly less profane) or even Bottom, though the violence was more implied than overt.
What’s sort of interesting (and sad) is that leaving aside whether gay club kids are really acting out these sadomasochistic routines “for reals,” violence seems to have increased in Toronto’s poorer neighbourhoods. I was here in the 90s and visited a couple of them and things seemed so much safer relative to low-income neighbourhoods in the states. But I'm not as sure I would say the same thing today.
This is the long way around to George Walker’s Escape from Happiness, which I saw last weekend. It is set in Toronto’s East End (which is basically where we live, though I think the family might live just a bit further east) and features violence and a kidnapping and a bit of police corruption and mild brutality and a former cop claiming that there were unimaginable levels of vice in his own neighbourhood. It is just so hard for me to square that with the Toronto I knew in the early 90s (when the plays in the East End Trilogy were written), but Walker lived over that way (and was ultimately pushed out of Toronto by rising housing prices and gentrification). Maybe it is that when people look for something (vice and degradation) it is there, but it is just as easy to focus on more positive aspects of Toronto. (My mother often asked why I focused so exclusively on negative things. I don’t have any answer other than I want things to be better and thus look at what is “wrong.” Interestingly I actually do focus on the negatives slightly less in Toronto, certainly relative to my time in Chicago.)
I had gotten confused and thought that Escape from Happiness was somehow linked to Suburban Motel. I actually had this totally bizarre mental picture where we would see the unlikely cop pair in other settings in other plays (in Suburban Motel). So here they get a bit involved, but in another play they would just be listening to wiretaps or what have you. Anyway, it wasn't that way at all (although there are a pair of male cops that show up in two of the Suburban Motel plays). Escape from Happiness is part of an East End Trilogy, however. The main family members, esp. Junior and Gail and her sisters, turn up in each one. They are more strictly chronological, however, than the plays in Suburban Motel, which are all contemporaneous, that is happening at roughly the same time in the late 90s. Escape from Happiness is the last of the three. One of them (Criminals in Love), focusing on Junior and Gail, doesn’t sound so interesting, but Better Living where Tom (Gail’s father) has just left the family sounds promising. It would definitely have been better to watch the plays in order, but I might still watch it as a kind of prequel if it comes back through Toronto any time soon. (As it happens, I had only seen one Walker play before -- Theatre Mir did Beautiful City in Chicago, though to be honest I thought it was kind of a silly play.)
I thought they (Alumnae) did a good job of Escape from Happiness, particularly the really loopy Mary Ann and the tough-as-nails eldest sister Elizabeth. I didn’t like the mother, Nora, very much (the character and her motivations – I thought the actress playing her was fine). As I said, there was a lot of somewhat cartoony violence and an awful lot of crime and corruption for one Toronto neighbourhood. (I would be much more willing to accept this happening in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side where the political leaders have been too much taken in by liberal ideology and liberal guilt and just let drug deals happen in plain sight along with the stolen merchandise being sold openly on the streets there.) There’s not a whole lot else I can say about the play that won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. To some extent, the plot feels drawn more from movies about corrupt cops and crime-ridden neighbourhoods than anything Walker would have actually seen (I suppose I don’t know this for a fact, but it is how it feels) and that has to do with how to sustain the plot and pacing of a play once violence it introduced (just before the intermission, though in fact Junior is coping with a bad beating he has received just prior to the curtain rising on Act I. I did find the junior cop (Diane) to be sort of sexy and this is reinforced at the end when she goes off the rails a bit. (I believe this actress was in the Hart House production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), again reminding myself what a drag it was to have just missed it.) I think it would be quite interesting to see the family in slightly less fraught circumstances or at least with less violence and fewer guns, so I will try to catch abc one of these days.
It certainly was a very creditable production by Alumnae Theatre Company, and I’ll try to see what else they do next season (the rest of this season isn’t as gripping). I believe they have done other Walker plays (though maybe it would just be too depressing to find out that they had done the rest in this East End cycle). The cycle taken as a whole reminds me a fair bit of this production I saw in Chicago. It was Curious Theatre doing Beau O’Reilly's The Madelyn Trilogy. As they so frequently do, Beau O'Reilly played one of the parts and may have directed. I don't think Jenny Magnus was in this, but I may have been mistaken. It was super ambitious theatre on a shoestring, which I just love about Chicago off-Loop theatre. You have a bit of this in Toronto, but not as much. I saw all three parts on one weekend in the small studio at the Athenaeum Building. I have seen so much cool stuff there and actually hope to go to a show there tomorrow. It just so caters to my interest in small but ambitious (and perhaps a bit struggling?) theatre companies, though there are many other places I have seen great shoestring productions.
Still, I don’t know about these super ambitious trilogies. It’s awfully hard for the audience either way. How many people can really commit to seeing three plays in one weekend or at most over two? (Yes, I am glad that I was able to see Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia this way, and it was glorious, but it still shuts out a huge percentage of the audience. No one in my circles would commit to parting with that much of their time!) And if the company doesn't produce it all at once, and they stretch it out over a few years (which is what I will be forced to do with the Walker plays) then how can the audience remember the connections between characters and what transpired? I actually had thought that my play Corporate Codes of Conduct would function best as two separate plays, but I don’t have the pull of a Kushner or a Stoppard, and I will at best get one play produced, so I have to shave it down more and make it fit into the 2 act play framework. I think there is something to be said for letting it all hang out in two plays versus being forced to tighten up and wrestle the material down to one play. Anyway, these thoughts are inspiring me to take another look at my own plays and try to commit to another rewrite and then see if there are any aspiring companies in Toronto that just might be interested...
* As before, just note that I am not interested in a debate on gun control here and will not be publishing pro-gun comments.
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