Pilot Automatique

There's something just so French about Nathalie Claude's one-woman, three-robot show Salon Automaton, which had its English-language debut at Buddies this week.

Claude's introductory monologue, with its polite bluster and assertive indirectness, has a Proustian quality, as does the very idea of a Friday night salon where the The Dandy Poet, The Cabaret Artist and The Drinking Patroness gather to entertaining their obliging hostess, who serves them champagne and cucumber sandwiches, whether they are able to eat it or not.

For the first hour of the two-hour production (which is about 30 or 40 minutes too long by my nodding-off measure; the original French version is apparently a bit shorter), this circuitousness is something of a theatrical strategy, a distraction from what the audience is seeing on stage. Which is an overeager woman talking to three seated robots, each with a moving mouth, a soothing voice and a set of proscribed movements which include emphatic gesturing but, alas, not eating. While the hostess chatters away--sometimes about human existence, sometimes about nothing particularly memorable--we're unsure whether she knows her company is spring-loaded, whether the guests themselves know they are robots or what kind of world has created this situation.

The reveal is slow, much too slow, and somewhat beside the point. The show has far less to say about the "why" of how humans find themselves turning to mechanical companions than "how," which is to say, with apprehension and naive optimism. When you've created an illusion designed to protect you from the vagaries of human behaviour, anything less than perfection might very well drive you bonkers.

The production works best when it's showing, not telling. We see Claude as all-too-human, blathering over-dramatically like a nervous hostess filling gaps in the conversation, so when the automatons (voiced by Clinton Walker, Moynan King and Leni Parker) offer up their scripted, banal cliches, they come as something of a relief. Their speech and motion are restricted, but fascinating nonetheless. They're playing to type because they have been created as types and there's theatrical pleasure in having our own perceptions of the world mirrored back to us, confirmed as accurate, even if that accuracy emerges out of our own manipulations.

Claude's core idea is a spot-on critique of our increasingly personal relationship with technology, even as it suffers from the very human trait of overkill.

Way to go Waawaate

I must admit, when I first interviewed Waawaate Fobister, I walked away somewhat distressed by the nagging feeling I had that his first solo show could all go very wrong. I mean, he was smart and had the wisdom of someone who had lived an interesting life in his 24 years. I knew that Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and his director/dramaturge Ed Roy had great confidence in him.

But really.

He was 24. He seemed like he was painfully shy. He seemed unsure of himself. He was going to be writing and performing a mainstage, full-length show based on a short personal (and traumatic) anecdote he had told on a youth performance stage. He was performing multiple characters, solo. He talked about making last-minute changes to things. Buddies was opening its season with something so untested? Really?

As I wrote up my piece for Eye Weekly, I wondered if too many expectations had been placed on somebody much too young and inexperienced--and what the fallout would be.

Boy, was my pessimism misplaced. Fobister's Agokwe took six Dora Mavor Moore Awards this week, teaching me never to underestimate what comes out of talent and hard, hard work.

Looking at the Sky

It's tricky reviewing Sky Gilbert if you have any sense at all of his career as a writer and theatre artist. In any production, his voice is always one of the most overwhelming factors. This time, you think, I'm going to focus on the performances or the set design or even the music, but no. You can't not dedicate the lion's share of a 300-word review to a voice that drives everything else. This time especially, Gavin Crawford so explictly channelled Gilbert, it was impossible to ignore it. Then there are Sky's writing habits: the fantastic one-liners and the wry observations floating along on a shaggy structure. For audiences who have seen Gilbert's work before, the most important information a review can give them is whether these two boxes--inscapable voice and whether it needs editing--are ticked or not. For newbies, I suppose they'll find out for themselves.

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.