When Soulpepper Theatre’s summer season was announced a few months ago, I knew I’d have to make it down to the Distillery to catch something. The lineup this summer has been characterized by narratives of intense inter-familial drama, gritty social undercurrents, sexual jealousies, introspective monologues and complex passions — in short, just my kind of thing.
Last week, I went to see Judith Thompson’s White Biting Dog, at least in part because that play promised to tell the story of a suicidal lawyer who, while on the verge of leaping off the Prince Edward Viaduct, is halted in his tracks by the words of a small white dog which tells him how to shake off his malaise. Thompson, one of Canada’s most lauded playwrights, is known for her dark and forthright portrayal of human nature and the powerful symbolism in her work, so I was curious to experience a Thompsonian interpretation of the disillusioned legal professional. I expected shocking, sophisticated insight into the world of law, dark-lit stage figures sitting amidst hundreds of white paper pages, tormented souls lamenting misplaced passions, emotionally charged pronouncements on the profession’s lofty ideals and dramatic daily realities.
White Biting Dog was actually none of that.
The world of law figures into the drama very peripherally, and Thompson does not concern herself with it at all, except to point to it as a somewhat clichéd symbol of spiritual oppression. Suicidal lawyer Cape (Mike Ross) could have been assigned just about any profession. What the play does concern itself with, and I’d say rather masterfully, is something much more abstract and universal: a family fractured by the toxic narcissism of some of its members, depressive, self-destructive attitudes being passed on through the generations like heirlooms.
One of the play’s absolutely brilliant strengths is the tender, raw, intensely intimate power dynamic between Cape and his dying father (Joseph Ziegler), and the multifaceted character that is Cape’s mother, the hyper-sexualized cougar Lomia (Fiona Reid). Thompson’s dynamic script, Nancy Polk’s gutsy direction and the high-calibre acting give the production exceptional energy; speech emerges clean and guttural, sets change quickly and seamlessly and the unfolding of the scenes is dramatically punctuated by Cape’s hand drum rhythms and songs, which serve as an excellent prelude to the impending drama, and sometimes, doom. Also thrilling is the weaving in of absurdist and magic realist elements — from the dog that speaks, to the character Pony, who transcends life-death boundaries by appearing to her father in spirit in the middle of a movie theatre projection room.
The second act, however, witnesses the tightly woven, highly charged narrative of the first unravel into a chaos that takes an hour to fully unfold. Characters descend into postmodern states of nothingness by way of lengthy, self-indulgent, stream-of-consciousness monologues. The audience is left to comb through largely incomprehensible exchanges, random Oedipal and sadomasochistic pronouncements, and ultimately, a narrative too splintered by its excesses. The same kind of maddening authorial self-indulgence has made me put down certain poetry in the past, and leave postmodern novels unfinished.
I can’t bring myself to full-heartedly recommend White Biting Dog, but I recommend it nonetheless, with an important caveat: go for the rawness of the language, the thrilling quality of the acting, the dynamism and intimacy of the interactions, the electrifying drama. But be warned that this is no neatly folded narrative, and that, as the late art critic Carole Corbeil famously warned, Thompson’s characters “say everything.”
What: Soulpepper’s production of White Biting Dog by Judith Thompson
When: in repertory until October 1, 2011
Where: Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Mill Street, Building 49 in the Distillery District.
How: Tickets range from $31.65 to $67.81, available online, in person or by phone (416-866-8666). Ticket sales end 90 minutes prior to performance.
Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann
Maria Gergin is a Toronto articling student. Her column, Leisure Aid, appears every other Friday here at lawandstyle.ca.