Vica Pelivan in This Is Not Me | Photo by Barry McCluskey
Presented by Pink Banana Theatre
The second show I caught at Fringe featuring a cow, This Is Not Me takes its time to pull you into its wrenching world. Creator Vica Pelivan’s solo show is set in a veterinary school in Zagreb, Croatia, where she portrays Marinka, a socially awkward first-year student. Fuelled by her desire to help animals, her deep empathy is inflamed by a connection she forges with a captive elderly cow she names Millie, whose deteriorating health and institutional lack of care drives her to radical action.
The emotive power of this piece really blindsided me. Stories about animal-human relationships tap directly into my sensibilities, but the cumulative effect of Pelivan’s portrait here is truly astonishing. She gives Marinka an offbeat energy that’s immediately endearing and establishes a tense incongruity between her sensitivity and the school’s pragmatic attitudes, which have clearly fostered a culture of dissociative negligence. That chasm widens as her relationship to Millie intensifies.
Their bond is exceptionally well developed. It isn’t an instantaneous success; though the intuitive spark is there early on, the first few interactions are stilted, with Marinka’s persistence gradually earning Millie’s trust. An early jarring scene in which her tentative gesture of liberation results, not in gratitude, but a frightening, manic episode that traumatizes both. In her writing, Pelivan finds such simple and abject language to convey worsening wounds and infections that go untreated. This body horror and institutional indifference culminates in a truly awful scene of violation that had me wanting to curl up under my seat.
Director Ganesh Thava’s impressionistic staging focuses our attention on Millie’s confinement. A pathway lined with chain stanchions leads to a stool draped in brown fabric. Sebastian Cattrysse’s abstraction of a cow is a brilliant piece of scenic design, the textures and folds of the fabric provide enough traction for our imaginations to conjure Millie, especially under Pelivan’s gestures of gentle affection. Sparing, considered textures of sound (Erik Richards) and light (Rian Tran) further define and contrast Marinka’s headspace with the institutional disinterest that closes in on her.
All of this culminates in a stirring catharsis, its impact so great because of the care taken to develop the story with such care.
