Fiona Highet and Jakob Ehman in “Roberto Zucco”, Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
Written as he was dying of AIDS related complications, playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’ take on the allure of youthful and attractive Italian serial killer Roberto Succo is achingly romantic. Painting him as a charismatically brooding anti-hero, his violence is ennobled here as a pure and genuine reaction to oppressive social constructs. The play’s jaundiced view of society and acidic dialogue is meant to rattle bourgeois sensibilities, giving Roberto Zucco a very punk vibe. This aura is keenly felt in director ted witzel’s garish neo-noir production, which opens Buddies In Bad Times Theatre’s season.
Fixating on the telecast imagery of Succo ranting rebelliously from a prison rooftop and dangling from a powerline, Koltès inferred a kinship to queer rage and activism during the height of the AIDS epidemic. witzel (in his director’s note) and dramaturg Gislina Patterson (in their supplemental blog post) explain why they (in solidarity with Koltès) have embraced the Succo/Zucco story as quintessentially queer—not in terms of sexual orientation or gender identity, but as an expansive, anti-establishment ideation.
Unnoticed by guards preoccupied with their own inane banter, Roberto Zucco (Jakob Ehman) escapes from prison and drifts aimlessly through a dismal wasteland of a city where he encounters mostly cartoonish characters, each of them tormented and spewing their ghastly insights into the theatre air. There are some staged murders and a pervasively menacing ambiance, but most of the play’s runtime is devoted to gawking at absurdly abject representations of humanity as they monologue dementedly at us. Despite sporadic outbursts, Ehman has a subdued fierceness that grounds the episodic grotesquerie with a grim dissociation.
Samantha Brown, Fiona Highet, Daniel MacIvor, Kwaku Okyere and Oyin Oladejo—this chameleonic ensemble provides a disquieting, darkly funny backdrop of wretchedness. This is a world of disaffected civilians, callous cops, dysfunctional family and grimy underworld dealings. Though each portrayal is vivid, any shock and intrigue quickly give way to a bleak sameness.
The traditional family unit is under scrutiny here as an accumulation of individual resentments that fester into a toxic domestic stew. When a brother enthusiastically renounces his patriarchal role as his sister’s protector because she’s lost her virginity, his matter of fact declaration that she’s now “just a cunt” is appalling, sure, but it gradually loses its power as the one-note scene progresses. Many initially provocative scenes play out ad nauseam with the same diminishing returns.
witzel’s flamboyant Brechtian flourishes provide a poetic and propulsive audio-visual experience. The use of on-stage microphones is especially self-conscious. Opening with scrolling LED-display titles, scenes unfold in an abundance of billowing haze. Michelle Tracey’s modular set features panels that rotate or drop into place for each gloomy location defined by patched concrete and peeling wallpaper. With saturated colour and shaped streams, Logan Raju Cracknell’s lighting throws these drab textures into stunning relief.
Though it was often hard for me to give a flying fuck about the strained, abstracted caricatures, there are two very distinct, real people who stole my heart. In the first of two quaint, meeting on a bench scenes, MacIvor’s distinguished older gentleman happens upon Zucco in a creepy, vacant subway. As his yearning for the enigmatic young man becomes clear, Zucco basks in the attention and offers up cryptic small talk. The ambiguity of this interaction is poignant and chilling. Perhaps this man knows he’s facing a killer; he finds solace in the encounter, regardless of whether it leads to a tryst or a violent end.
A similar scene plays out with Highet’s witty and assertive middle-aged woman. As her elegant green dress and perfectly coifed hair proclaim, she’s an affluent and respectable wife and mother. As she flirts with the dangerous Zucco, testing the boundaries of her middle-class existence, we discover a deep well of discontent and an acute longing to disrupt her own status quo. This leads into to my absolute favourite scene—a truly unhinged bit of farce as the gun-wielding Zucco, holding the woman and her son hostage, has a standoff with police as nosy bystanders provide giddy repartee. Everyone is firing on all cylinders in this wildly tense and hilarious set piece.
The finale—which gives us a stylized rendering of the actual Succo’s precarious and acrobatic stunt—is a stirring, transcendent spectacle. You can almost see him as a symbol of hope and freedom. You really have to squint though, project so much meaning into the image, because he’s just a cypher here. And his real life counterpart was a heinous murderer and rapist. We do like them young and pretty though, don’t we? They make such sexy emblems for social commentary.
Roberto Zucco
running September 19 to October 5, 2024
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (12 Alexander St.)
running time: 95 minutes (no intermission)
Daniel MacIvor and Jakob Ehman in “Roberto Zucco” Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh