Friday, January 16, 2009

Zona Pellucida

We think of dreams as fuzzy but there is always a precision to them: we may not know the make of the car my high school English teacher was driving to Vegas, but it was a very specific colour of green; it wasn't the current you running around and around the block but you circa 1995, wearing that red hoodie you wore that year. Zona Pellucida by 2boys.tv, on stage at Toronto's Buddies Theatre till Jan 24, is the kind of dream-as-machine concept that could only come out of Quebec. The soundtrack is the engine here, each syllable of silver screen divas demanding an exacting lip sync performance. Stephen Lawson does not struggle to keep up--the ease of the performance keeps it hypnotic--but he's merely a prop in the dream's forward momentum. There is a wolf/bear in pursuit. His growl is the only male sound. The rest is mouthed words from famous films (All About Eve, of course, and Suddenly Last Summer), which kinda funny, really, because the performance is so silent-movie, exagerated and mannered. Lawson moves from tableau to tableau that create mirrored worlds within worlds--one riff has him holding a dollhouse, the image of which is projected onto a screen, but the image contains a projection of his character, with whom he argues. By the end, the projectins and simulacrum pile on top of each other and you reach the point where you don't know if Lawson is actually on stage or not.

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