THEATRE REVIEW: La COMUNION 16 Jan'10 Rating: 3 out of 5

Playwright half right
Pizano too content to tell of horrors of war at expense of audience feeling those horrors

By JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
16 Jan '10


TORONTO - In her latest work, La Comunion, playwright Beatriz Pizano sets herself tasks that, upon reflection, make the labours Hercules faced seem like a cakewalk.

In creating a work to complete a trilogy that also includes For Sale and Madre, Pizano returned to her native Colombia and opened up her heart to stories that would surely make a statue weep, centred as they are around the lives and deaths of Colombia's child soldiers -- young children recruited and heartlessly transformed into all-but-mindless lethal weapons, who are then aimed squarely at the hearts of all who oppose their masters.

To collect those stories, Pizano and her team worked with an array of Colombian youth, some survivors of the ongoing conflicts of the nation's half century of violent unrest, others at risk of being drawn into it.

But that was just the start.

Having collected those stories, each and every one of them no doubt a heartbreaker, Pizano then set herself the task of distilling all of them into a single play -- a play that would not only bring those stories to a wider world here in Canada but would also honour the trust those children had placed in the playwright.

La Comunion, the product of all that labour, opened on the stage of Buddies in Bad Times Thursday, a production of Aluna Theatre.

And it certainly honours the children who put their trust and their stories in Pizano's hands. If it accomplishes nothing else, La Comunion opens windows into worlds and horrors that were heretofore unimaginable, and while it may only briefly make us a little less comfortable in our comfortable world, it's almost certain to make us a little more grateful for that comfort.

But during its 21/2-hour span, it also opens up a debate on the obligations of the playwright.

The obligation that Pizano and her collaborators obviously feel to those tragic children is easy to understand, but what's harder to understand is the proper way to meet those obligations.

Certainly, in sharing their stories, those children placed an obligation on Pizano's team, but in the final analysis, the playwright's primary obligation is to her audience, which must not only be informed by those stories, but engaged, even immersed in them as well -- and La Comunion, for all its strengths, spends too much time and effort on the former and not nearly enough on the latter.

At its heart, La Comunion is really the story of a single child -- the young Magdalena (Zarrin Darnell-Martin) who, at age 11, trades deprivation and abuse in her village for soldiering and is soon immersed in its horror. But memories of her past linger, and after a friendship develops between her and one of her colleagues, Magdalena -- now known as Pantera -- begins to question the "truths" with which she has been indoctrinated.

When disaster finally separates her from her unit, Magdalena ends up in Canada and only then finds the courage to face her past and contemplate the future that has been scarred by it.

While Pizano, who also directs, has assembled a fine cast -- Micheline Calvert, Carlos Gonzalez-Vio, Rosa Laborde and Michel Polak to name a few -- and backed them up with strong technical support -- Trevor Schwellnus simple set is gorgeous, his sometimes muddy lighting a little less so -- she's too often content to tell us (sometimes repeatedly) of the horror, rather than making us feel it.

And finally, that was her final task -- one that could only be achieved, one suspects, by putting her obligation to her audience ahead of her obligation to her subjects, which is, in the end, the best way for a playwright to honour both.