Natalia Bushnik and Robin Luckwaldt in The Bathtub Girls (Photo by Dan Norman)
Inspired by a real life case, Kairos Theatre presents The Bathtub Girls, a highly physical piece that tells the story of how two high school girls—new European immigrants to a Canadian suburb—are driven to matricide. As their single mother, isolated and depressed, escapes into alcoholic oblivion, they are left to fend for themselves and find increasingly destructive coping mechanisms of their own. Eventually, they decide to end her misery and their own by drowning her in a bathtub.
Alternating between naturalistic dialogue, emotionally detached narration, and stylized movement, writer/performers Natalia Bushnik and Robin Luckwaldt, tell this sad tale of one family’s disastrous immigrant experience. The choreography, full of jarring and convulsive movements, is both sensual and repulsive, perfectly capturing their fraught attempts at social integration. They claw violently at themselves, each other and the world around them.
Social integration and the immigrant experience are the thematic core of The Bathtub Girls. Watching these three women struggle with their identities, we witness small, happy successes and their final, dreadful failure. As their mother numbs her pain with alcohol, the sisters take to cannabis. On stage, the air is hazy, reflecting their almost constant, desperate intoxication. Draped between them is gauzy fabric that serves as a multi-purpose prop. Pulled, stretched and twisted between them, it is an ethereal tether.
Switching from hesitant, Slavic-accented English to a more confident, North American cadence, their voices are always shifting. At first, I thought that the accents were dropped specifically for the narration, but quickly realized this wasn’t so. Instead of serving as a formal storytelling device, I think this fluctuation is meant to disconcert us, leave us—like these girls—unmoored and floundering.
Waleed Ansari‘s lighting is moody. A circle of light sits centre stage, an ominous ring—hypnotic, seductive and distressing. Four lights, low down in each corner of the stage, provide an unsettling strobe effect as the flash rapidly around the two performers, throwing them into and out of relief from the surrounding darkness.
Phoebe Wang‘s richly textured sound design takes us from atmospheric drones and haunted, chattering voices to rapturous religious music. Sometimes it’s more subtle, but I found the moments of intense sonic intrusion the most emotionally affective.
There is little joy here, but there is some comfort to be found as the girls connect, ever so briefly, to each other and fellow classmates. Any sense of community they find, though, seems random and precarious. These youthful connections are quickly disturbed and distorted.
We are meant to empathize with the sisters and, for the most part, I did. There are eerie patches in the narrative where I felt alienated and repulsed by them. One moment, their mother’s murder seems a harrowing weight upon their psyches—understanding it as a tragic though necessary act of mercy. Then suddenly, giggling maniacally, they’d betray a cruel pleasure in the act. Though contradictory, these shifting attitudes do seem an authentic depiction of trauma and confusion.
There are some vacuous pockets in the story that are more frustrating. The mother’s decent into catastrophic disfunction seems rather quick and unexplained. I can appreciate that her ordeal is seen through the eyes of the daughters who are not privy to her inner life, but I think some more specific and tangible details could have made her plight more emotionally satisfying.
As the piece draws to a close, we are asked to come to our own conclusions regarding the moral significance of their actions. How do we feel about them being a part of society? How do we respond to unconventional forms of mercy or justice? Though many intriguing questions linger in my mind, the enduring resonance of The Bathtub Girls is its expressive physicality and visceral intensity.
Runs from May 21 to June 1, 2019
At The Assembly Theatre (1479 Queen St. W.)
Visit show page for tickets and info