Rachel Leslie and Ari Cohen in Wights | Photo by Dahlia Katz
I’m still reeling from Wights. With truly great writing, deftly performed, mere conversations can be a vise-grip. Language itself is scrutinized in Liz Appel’s playwriting debut, presented by Crow’s Theatre, so I’m compelled to interrogate my own lede: there is nothing “mere” about any of the conversations in this play. The text is dense, the tension high and its potent relevance feels like salt in our collective wound—another contentious reference that figures viscerally into the action here.
It is Halloween night, a week before the 2024 U.S. election, with a nation teetering precariously. Anita Knight (Rachel Leslie) urges her friends Bing (Richard Lee) and Celine (Sochi Fried) to critique her dissertation, a work she hopes will land her a coveted position at Yale University. These folks are academics who love to hear themselves talk, to spar with weaponized intellect. It’s hard to keep up, honestly, even before their indulgent jargon draws blood.
And yes, there will be blood. It is foreshadowed so forcefully, to deny us would be a travesty. Anita’s willful defence of the land acknowledgement that begins her spiel opens up a whole can of worms and, as everybody’s perspectives and very personhood are strained, semantics become a high stakes cage match.
Rachel’s husband Danny (Ari Cohen), a lawyer, shows up well into their heated debate and it isn’t long before Celine and Bing, succumbing to their own personal dysfunction, storm off into the vague yet palpably eerie night.
Though Fried and Lee are suitably compelling, it is Leslie and Cohen who electrify the air with their portrait of a relationship pushed to the brink. With precision, the dialogue dances elegantly through cultural and political landmines of race, justice, academia, power, privilege, and rhetoric. Their heated exchange seems like posturing at first, but festering trauma and resentments are unleashed. Her Blackness and his Whiteness are suddenly an urgent reality, one they haven’t properly owned yet, and their fiery confrontation forces them to trace it back to the birth of the nation and project it far into an imagined future.
Throughout it all, language as a construct looms larger and larger—words rife with oppressive and empowering potential—until the weight of it collapses in a harrowing climax that boldly jumps genres. The final jarring revelation does deflate the urgency a bit, though it re-contextualizes the scorching human drama we just witnessed in a way that allows us some distance to process it.
Appel doesn’t let her characters or the audience off the hook; we are all entrenched and complicit. Each flawed person here feels authentic and valuable, their conflicts are so agonizing because we can’t dismiss anyone here as perfectly right or wrong.
Director Chris Abraham’s assured staging balances two realities, allowing us time to warm to the characters and invest in their conflicts while simultaneously drawing our attention to some looming external force. Joshua Quinlan’s set fixes our attention on a central, luxurious kitchen island with alcoves in various corners that extend the space with realistic details. But something is… off.
I don’t want to spoil the impact of some really cool aesthetic choices and technical elements, especially their narrative purpose, but suffice it to say, components of this home manifest glitchy, almost supernatural otherness that will, in due time, be understood.
There are moments you might feel adrift in a roiling sea of argumentative, vulnerable and scathing words. There’s a lot of them. You have to focus. This play wants your full attention and it absolutely deserves it.
Wights
running January 7 to February 9, 2025
Streetcar Crowsnest, Guloien Theatre (345 Carlaw Avenue)
running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (including intermission)
Ari Cohen and Rachel Leslie in Wights | Photo by Dahlia Katz