REVIEW: Tarragon’s Craze lacks focus — that’s what makes it fun
iPhoto caption: Photo by Roya DelSol.
In Modern Times Stage Company’s The Caged Bird Sings, playwrights Rouvan Silogix, Ahad Lakhani, and Rafeh Mahmud took a scalpel to Rumi’s six-book poem The Masnavi. Though the June world premiere aimed to retain the spirit of the classic Persian epic, it made serious changes to the story, even layering on an all-new plot involving a pair of contemporary women.
Silogix and Mahmud’s latest work, Craze, co-produced by Tarragon Theatre and Modern Times in association with Theatre ARTaud, proves still looser in its approach to adaptation. Dialogue, projected scene titles, and the tagline on the Tarragon website frame the show as an homage to Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But there’s no Virgil-as-guide, Dante-as-protagonist, or ninth circle of hell, here — just a near-future Toronto mansion submerged in a torrent of vaguely infernal vibes.
Craze takes inspiration from a mish-mash of additional sources. The basic character dynamic parallels Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Late at night, a middle-aged woman named June (Lisa Ryder) informs her husband Renee (Ali Kazmi) that she’s invited over a charismatic young couple for drinks. In struts Selina (Louisa Zhu), a new employee at June’s advertising agency, and Richie (Kwaku Okyere), an up-and-coming heart surgeon. The polyamorous duo arrives ready for a night of networking, banter, flirtation, vomiting, Xanax, power outages, decades-old pistols going off, cloaked vagrants at the door… OK, yes, this is a wacky show.
But director Mike Payette knows it. His 80-minute Mainspace production has its foot on the gas from the beginning. The performances are fiery and unrelenting; while some Toronto productions that aim for a heightened, non-realistic style become incohesive because the actors don’t wholly buy in, that’s not the case here. The energy flows ceaselessly, with Okyere living in a particularly explosive realm.
More happens. AI makes an appearance in the form of Buddy, an Alexa-like voice assistant that malfunctions as soon as the stakes get high. There are also desert-bombing drones, sequences that rewind time, and moments of partial nudity. And the intertextuality keeps coming: The piece’s fragmented, out-of-control structure seems to borrow from Sarah Kane’s Crave, a fact hinted at by the play’s title (not unlike how Guillermo Verdecchia’s Feast, which I viewed in Winnipeg ahead of its Toronto premiere at Tarragon next April, puns on the name Faust). I haven’t even mentioned the presence of actor Augusto Bitter, who morphs into the piece’s emotional core after entering last.
Visually, too, the production engulfs. With a mock-Rothko hanging above a floor of garish marble, Christine Ting-Huan 挺歡 Urquhart’s busy living room set offers much to look at even before it rotates to reveal further locations. Electrofluorescent wire lines the windows, providing lighting designer Arun Srinivasan with a stylish, cutting-edge toy. And beyond the house’s walls, where a storm fiercely rages, sound designer Maddie Bautista peppers in echoes of people shouting, conjuring a dystopian atmosphere like something out of The Purge.
I imagine most critiques of Craze will employ the prefix “over,” as it could quite reasonably be labelled overwhelming, overstuffed, and several other such adjectives. (I can’t imagine watching a matinee of this show, with 7:30 p.m. even feeling a little early — its cocaine-rimmed aura resembles that of a so-bad-it’s-good midnight cult film.) But in my view, this commitment to excess feels entirely intentional, with every element of the production conspiring to pile on more and more. The show’s unfocused-ness is its focus. Idea, idea, idea; canto, canto, canto: as Craze’s inferno blazes, it transforms into an arcane blur of information. A frenzied test of endurance, it whips along like a social media feed on steroids, sprinting from image to image with wild, masculine bravado. Talk about hellish!
Craze runs at Tarragon Theatre until December 15. Tickets are available here.
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