Tarragon Theatre/Feast, written by Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Soheil Parsa, Main Space, Tarragon Theatre, closes Apr. 27. Tickets here.
Award-winning Canadian playwright Guillermo Verdecchia is a theatrical gadfly. He loves to provoke by putting his own spin on the major geo-political and social issues of the day, while making incisive observations on the human condition.
Take his latest play Feast, now playing at the Tarragon.
In two hours (sans an intermission), he touches on climate change, globalization, consumerism, family relationships, cultural and racial intersection, prepperism, wokeism, pseudoscience, obsession, surrealism, and Greek mythology.
Verdecchia, however, is not for all markets.
His sophisticated and satiric plays can be perceived by some as impenetrable or even boring. Nonetheless, if one is willing to go where Verdecchia leads, the intellectual journey he provides has its merits.
Feast has Verdecchia in unconventional mode — a non-linear narrative line, jumbled time and space frame, characters who break the fourth wall, and forays into surrealism.
There are, however, so many themes packed into the play that they obscure any emotional centre.
Story & Characters
The narrative, such as it is, is built around a troubled family.
Mark, the father (Rick Roberts) is some kind of consultant who is always travelling the world, which leads to a growing estrangement from his wife Julia (Tamsin Kelsey), daughter Isabel (Veronica Hortiguela), and a son we never meet.
Mark has an odd mania. In whatever city he’s in, he searches for real local food which can be as dangerous an enterprise as it is exotic. He also has developed a dissociative disorder which renders him to be increasingly erratic.
Yet, he also finds Starbucks wherever he goes.
Another obsessive family member is Isabel who is consumed by the disastrous impact of climate change and the resulting forced mass migration. She quits college to join an activist NGO in order to, in her words, save the world.
Isabel’s doom and gloom mantra begins to affect Julia, who starts to have nightmares. It leads her to become a prepper — someone who prepares themselves to be ready for any disaster or emergency, or perhaps, even the apocalypse.
The fourth character Chukuemeka (Tawiah M’Carthy) is a Nigerian hustler-cum-fixer who is living in Kenya. He is an enabler who happily searches out “authentic” meals for the damaged Mark who is living in his obsession. Emeka, as he’s called, has his own agenda that drives his character.
Kelsey, Hortiguela and MCarthy play other characters as needed, which seems to put even more focus on the single actor Mark.
The play is made up of a series of episodes which run from the curious to the bizarre. They detail scenes from the lives of these four characters, who are clearly designed to be the mouthpieces by which Verdecchia disseminates his thematic material.
The Production
Director Soheil Parsa has rightly approached Feast from a minimalist point of view. Presumably, it is his vision, working with set designer Kaitlin Hickey, that produced the striking glass walkway with sliding doors that dominates the back of the stage. Hickey has also produced the projections that transform this walkway into, for example, a hotel corridor.
The traffic flow of the play is a statement in itself.
Characters walk through these sliding doors to perform either in a scene or to give a monologue, and Hickey has provided the odd scenic piece as needed, like simple chairs or a table. In other words, nothing intrusive.
It is almost as if director Parsa wanted to give the illusion that the characters are released through these doors so they can do their duty, so to speak, and then brought back through the doors by some invisible control. Action does take place in the walkway and only involves Mark which makes its own metaphor.
This controlled artifice carries over in delivery.
Both Emeka and Julia, to various degrees, talk in a matter of fact, calculated manner. In contrast is the predictable passion of Isobel, Gen-Z as advertised.
One would think that Mark would be emotion on steroids, that he would inject the play with raw vibrancy but, instead, for the most part he is talking in a neutral voice that seems unaffected by his downward spiral.
Again, I presume that director Parsa has mandated medium cool for the actors to allow Verdecchia to take centre stage. This deliberate distancing of the audience means we concentrate on the playwright’s themes and ideas, rather than being caught up in the lives of the characters.
Even when Verdecchia includes a touching scene, it remains cool. At one point father and daughter are communicating by cell phone, each trying to say something important. Mark wants to tell Isobel that he is in rehab, and she wants to let him know that she has dropped out of school, but they are defeated by a faulty WIFI system that cuts off their words.
Incidentally Mark’s rehab facility is called The Centre for Avant-Garde Geography, which is Verdecchia’s satiric nod to pseudoscience.
Set & Sound
Designer Chris Malkowski lights the scenes, monologues, and activities in the walkway, with a bright glare, but he has the actors waiting to go on, so to speak, in dark shadows, just like in a play.
The ubiquitous Thomas Ryder Payne has come up with a sound score made up of effects — birds, traffic and the like. There is even a periodic menacing boom that seems to indicate Mark’s downward spiral.
Final Thoughts
At the beginning of the play, Mark and Julia are engaged in desultory conversation. Isobel comes out and tells the audience to look at her parents and their empty lives.
And thus, the scene is set.
This family and the world are falling apart together.
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