Ken Gass, founding artistic director of Canadian Rep Theatre (and of Factory Theatre), has launched the company’s revival at The Citadel (304 Parliament St, south of Dundas) with the English language premiere of Quebec playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Pacamambo (translated by Shelley Tepperman and directed by Gass), a show “for audiences aged 9 to 99.” Upon the death of her grandmother, angry 11-year-old Julie decides to wait with her dog, and the corpse, and “force Death to come and explain himself.”
Mouawad (Officer of the Order of Canada, National Theatre School graduate, Governor General’s Award winner) wrote the play Incendies, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film and is one of the best-told stories in any medium in recent years. He wrote Pacamambo with a young audience in mind, but it is likely to appeal to anyone interested in considering a youth’s perspective on death.
The audience enters the 72-seat space, featuring tiers of seats divided by a narrow, un-elevated performance area. All four actresses are already in place, dormant but in character, on the brightly lit off-white hospital room set, but it is the quiet yet oppressive thuds, twangs and clattering sounds that plant the first seeds in your pre-show consciousness (original music and sound design by Wayne Kelso). The set is suitably sterile, neutral, and less than welcoming, as one might expect of a room in a psychiatric hospital or a place to confront Death (set design by Marian Wihak). Unfortunately, sightlines often caused actors to be out of view for at least some audience members, especially as a lot of action happens low on the ground.
An exasperated psychiatrist (Karen Robinson, recently seen in The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble at Factory) has spent two months trying to understand why Julie (Amy Keating) hid for three weeks with her grandmother’s dead body. Julie shouts at her, “You’ve got it all wrong!” and complains, “Your obsession with facts is extremely annoying.” Robinson, not as dispassionate as you might like your child’s psychiatrist to be, nicely conveys the frustration of an adult confounded by the child’s uncompromising metaphysical account of the moon leading her grandmother away to Pacamambo, a place of “universal empathy,” and of the girl’s own tête-à-tête with Death.
Julie’s sidekick, her dog Growl, is played with trademark conviction by Michelle Polak (The Sacrifice Zone, Theatre Gargantua). Nothing is overdone; she is playing a character who just happens to be a dog. Along with her accurate canine movement and behaviour, Polak’s vocalizations are so effective that one of her excited yelps had me looking around for an actual animal. It is not disconcerting that the dog speaks to Julie, and even converses with the dead grandmother (Kyra Harper, recently seen in Farther West, Soulpepper Theatre). The only thing that challenged my suspension of disbelief was the admittedly difficult characterisation of a mature 11-year-old played by an adult. Julie’s dialogue is believable—one particularly plausible exchange occurs when wise young Julie tells the psychiatrist, “I can tell by your eyes you haven’t figured out your life yet”—but despite her energetic performance (which comes across intellectually), Keating didn’t completely draw me in emotionally.
Mouawad’s mythical all-ages story, in which characters explore death and life, and question what is “normal” and what is “reality,” is an auspicious choice of show to re-establish Canadian Rep Theatre’s focus on innovation and diversity in presenting contemporary Canadian theatre. Coming up next, works by Judith Thompson and George F. Walker.
$24-36. Canadian Rep Theatre's Pacamambo, at The Citadel, runs until Feb. 2
Evan Andrew Mackay is a Toronto playwright and humorist who writes about culture and social justice.
