Lisa Ryder, Ali Kazmi and Augusto Bitter in “Craze”, Photo by Roya DelSol
Playwrights Rouvan Silogix and Rafeh Mahmud have a lot on their minds. So many ideas about the modern world—and the ancient one from which it sprang—rattle about Craze, a co-production from Tarragon Theatre, Modern Times Stage Company and Theatre ARTaud. The characters and situation they’ve devised are thought-provoking, even a little spicy, but the scenario as a whole failed to draw me in. Mike Payette’s hyper-stylized production really sells the fanciful blend of domestic comedy-drama, techno-thriller and lyrical meditation; though it all feels so synthetic, as if it is being fabricated, in real time, by the AI entity that inhabits the smart-home in which the story is set.
That AI’s name is Buddy, and he’s voiced with sultry, robotic panache by Augusto Bitter. He’s not particularly useful, especially as he’s glitching out from a power surge. There’s a storm raging outside, the thunder and lighting dramatically punctuating the snarky barbs that middle-aged couple, Renee (Ali Kazmi) and June (Lisa Ryder), launch at each other. It’s early in the morning after an industry soiree and June, in a bullying move, informs Renee that she’s invited a younger couple over for a nightcap and some action. Even before they show up, we recognize just how familiar this seems. So much has been lifted from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
This is the Twilight Zone version of George and Martha. Playfully tormenting Renee, June openly flirts with her ad agency underling Selina’s (Louisa Zhu) hubby, Richie (Kwaku Okyere), a buff surgeon—this story’s analogue for Nick and Honey. As the liquor flows, things get real. Race, racial fetishization, xenophobia, warrior bloodlines, military tech and humanity’s precarious future get tossed about in a series of pedantic conversations. Some mysterious knocks at the door add mystery and heightened tension.
Just like Albee’s classic, alcohol and emotional games eventually expose everyone’s hidden truth. Instead of grounding the angst in upper-middle class malaise, Silogix and Mahmud get very conceptual. It’s rather muddled and clunky, but undeniably ambitious. Remember George and Martha’s make-believe son and his devastating fate? Well, Augusto Bitter shows up in the flesh, a whimsical and haunting echo of that spectre in Albee’s seminal work. It’s here that Craze goes spectacularly off the rails, yet this wild trajectory finally succeeded in grabbing my attention.
Up until this point, I’d either been irritated by the tease of dialogue and dynamics from Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and wishing I was watching that instead or else bewildered by a series of bizarre developments that were hard to track. When Bitter arrived on the scene, with wide-eyed exuberance and guileless intensity, I was entirely sucked into his portrait of a curious, defiant, idealistic youth. One particularly harrowing scene transcends its awkward staging because of his emphatic performance.
The rest of the cast are capable actors I’ve found very compelling elsewhere; they’re left floundering here by material and direction that favour heightened intentionality over honesty. Though committed, their charisma is squandered on histrionics. We do eventually find some intriguing nuance in Kazmi and Ryder, but poor Zhu and Okyere, though frisky, remain ciphers.
And the backstory presented doesn’t really provide insightful context for earlier interactions, it just seems like these people were going through the motions of someone else’s play, which they were. Why is Woolf is being used as a template? I appreciated the subtler nods, like having Selina and Richie, when the smoke clears, exit into the dawn of a new day. And I get the mashing-up of old and new, but why Woolf specifically? Is it just that Silogix and Mahmud love it as much as I do?
Ting – Huan 挺歡 (Christine Urquhart)’s set—a modernist interior with glitzy, high-tech embellishments—rotates to offer some fun changes of perspective. Arun Srinivasan’s lighting disrupts the mundane wash with garish colour saturation to signal shifts in mood and reality. It’s all deliberately artificial and very striking. I wish I cared more.
Craze
running November 19 to December 15, 2024
Tarragon Theatre, Mainspace (30 Bridgman Ave)
running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Louisa Zhu, Augusto Bitter, Kwaku Okyere, Lisa Ryder and Ali Kazmi in “Craze”, Photo by Roya DelSol