Wayne Burns & Izzi Nagel, Artwork by Izzi Nagel | Photo by Mark Kreder
Presented by Leroy Street Theatre & Dresser Drawer Productions
While experiencing theatre, I seldom consciously ask myself “What’s the point?” It’s such a reductive, diminishing, unimaginative question. Even in the most outlandish, elliptical, baffling narratives, I can usually intuit my way through to my own satisfaction. And there is plenty of compelling material in Little One, a chilling two-hander by Hannah Moscovitch. She knows how to conjure a lurid, provocative scenario. When faced with subject matter or execution that try my patience, I always consider if I’m simply being challenged. Now, even after some processing, I’m still very much uncertain what I am ultimately meant to take away from this nasty, sporadically stunning little play.
Aaron (Wayne Burns) is our point of view character, dragging us with him through the muck (which seems full of broken shards of glass) as he remembers his childhood and adolescence with adopted sister, Claire (Izzi Nagel). Aaron’s considered well-adjusted enough to ignore as their parents try to foster a supportive environment for the deeply disturbed Claire. He describes her as a monster and he’s not wrong. Though her humanity is very real, it is monstrous, warped into a grotesque, dangerous shape by early trauma.
Both of their lives are hellish. Hers, because she simple cannot properly exist in the world without hurting and destroying; and his, because their parents have forced him to accept and endure her relentless taunting and threatening and stabbing and sexual predation. The situation, in a word, is nuts. And I hate them—the parents, I really do. They are ineffectual charlatans and I hated their pretentious virtue signalling masquerading as empathy—as Moscovitch expects me to, I imagine.
The neighbours who exist adjacent to their lives—a schlubby tech guy and his mail order bride from Vietnam—are also suffering. Their story rattles about on the periphery here and eventually ties in more directly. There is an ominous quality to all this, an ambiguity and deep dread that makes it all feel like a nightmarish fable.
The performances have acute urgency. Nagel is a shrill scream, an exposed nerve, an embodiment of ruinous chaos. By contrast, Burns is an acquiescent whisper, a sore and throbbing bruise of man-child, the trajectory of his life skewed by her awful pull. Together, Burns and Nagel are consistently grounded, authentic and entirely riveting. And I was pretty fully on-board until the abject intensity of it all started to flatten out. There is no reprieve here. No character is experiencing anything coming close to joy or even comfort. And I eventually just went sort of numb.
There are some ominously whimsical elements in director Alice Fox Lundy’s eerie, agonized yet not quite comprehensively purposeful production. We open on a bit of shadow play that helps establish that fable-like quality I mentioned and Chin Palipanes’s design elements (sound and light) create some moody textures. Those baleful thumps have an almost haunted house vibe, lending some supportive atmosphere to the unconventional venue. I’m not convinced the environment here—the floor of a commercial building—works well enough in their favour.
