REVIEW: The Born-Again Crow is an ardent ode to unproductivity
iPhoto caption: Photo of Tara Sky by Jeremy Mimnagh. Set design by Shannon Lea Doyle, costume design by Asa Benally, lighting design by Hailey Verbonac.
Demolish a pyramid of soup cans. Ignite the magazine aisle. Smother a coworker in rice flour. Affix raw steak to an office door. Of these very fun ways to quit a job at Real Canadian Superstore, I can’t pick a favourite.
Neither could Beth (Tara Sky), the young Indigenous protagonist of Caleigh Crow’s Governor General’s Award-winning drama There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow. She performed those rebellious deeds after her manager refused to give her a one-dollar raise. Now, she’s unemployed, back at the suburban home of her retired mother Francine (Cheri Maracle).
In The Born-Again Crow’s vision of contemporary society, capitalism is a force so constraining that only violence has the power to alter the course of an average citizen’s life. Produced by Native Earth Performing Arts and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in the latter’s Chamber space, director Jessica Carmichael’s 100-minute Toronto premiere staging trucks along with the passionate force of an early-2000s emo rock hit, imbuing Crow’s systemic critique with rousing, playful life.
The Born-Again Crow unfolds primarily in Francine’s backyard. She’s fitted the space with a pair of large bird feeders in the hope that Beth will spend time decompressing outside. Despite initial skepticism and the distraction of fuckboy-next-door Tanner (Dan Mousseau), Beth becomes wholly dedicated to the local birds. She attracts the patronage of several dozen crows, who begin to leave small gifts on the feeder: a rusty screw, a shard of glass, earrings.
This flock produces noise and dirt, enraging the neighbourhood homeowners’ association: “Property value is dropping, my car is covered in shit… Cease and desist!” demands Jim, their gruff leader (also Mousseau). The irresponsible social media reporting of gossipmonger Jane Lafontaine (Mousseau again) exacerbates this mistreatment. All the while, a nonchalant talking crow (Madison Walsh) appears. When Beth asks her if every crow can speak, the bird’s response is divinely mysterious: “I’m the only one that talks to you.”
Sky’s Beth plucks one string: angst. Until the play’s surreal, Matthew Rankin-esque climax, the character doesn’t experience her emotions so much as spell them out in chunky red marker. This heightened approach often harmonizes with the play’s off-kilter dialogue, as well as the performance of Maracle, whose neurotic Francine moves around the stage in frantic, uptight fashion, punctuating jokes with awkwardly loud exclamations of “Ha!”
Carmichael captures the emotional distance between the two characters by frequently placing them on opposite sides of Shannon Lea Doyle’s wide backyard set; conversely, Tanner and the crow tend to get disarmingly close to Beth. While the show really soars once it fully abandons verisimilitude, these earlier, character-focused scenes serve to ground the eventual mayhem. (The scene transitions are expressionistic throughout, and I sometimes found them distractingly dance-like, as when, for no apparent reason, Maracle makes a drawn-out display of transforming back into Francine after playing a silent bird.)
Joining a suite of recent women-led Toronto theatre productions deconstructing the concept of work — including Veronica Hortigüela and Annie Luján’s MONKS, Lester Trips’ Honey I’m Home, and Rosamund Small’s Performance Review — The Born-Again Crow begs to be read through the lens of productivity. By abandoning wage labour to feed birds, Beth is performing a quietly subversive act — and she’s vilified for it. The play moreover underlines the glorious unproductivity of nature, with Beth at one point proclaiming that “if you can’t be happy living as a lark, or an otter, or a porcupine, you’ve already lost what makes living worthwhile. You are born, you live, and you bear witness to the greatest miracle ever devised. That’s the gift.” Maybe we should all spend more time squawking and defecating on Audis.
Or making plays. While, in script form, The Born-Again Crow already serves as a worthy rallying cry for young working people, Carmichael’s ecstatic production seems to me to double as a statement about theatre’s own responsibility to get angry, make a mess, and — like Beth in the supermarket — feel really fucking real.
The Born-Again Crow runs at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre until March 29. Tickets are available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.
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