THEATRE REVIEW: DIVISADERO: A PERFORMANCE
10 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Mostly, theatre happens in the watching. So, to discuss DIVISADERO: A PERFORMANCE — a new work from Necessary Angel that opened Tuesday on Theatre Passe Muraille's mainstage — it might be wise to jettison conventional notions of theatre, radio plays and books-on-tape and look to the world of music instead.

For in the final analysis, this theatrical adaptation of novelist Michael Ondaatje's award-winning novel by the author (in concert with director Daniel Brooks and the company) defies most conventional theatrical definitions. And even while it flirts with being theatre for the ear, dismissing it as a mere radio play would be a dis-service both the play and audience.

Finally, DIVISADERO is to conventional theatre what a cantata is to an opera — the former shaped more for the ear, the latter for both ear and eye, both demanding, for maximum enjoyment, to be seen rather than merely heard. Relying primarily on the spoken word and on music to tell its story, like most radio plays, DIVISADERO nonetheless very carefully — occasionally almost self-conciously — plays to an inner ear informed by memory and emotion and all of the things of which great theatre is made, rather than any random vibrations of the tympanic membrane.

It tells the story of three siblings — Anna, played briefly as a girl by Aviva Philipp-Muller, and her adopted siblings, Claire, played by Liane Balaban and Coop, played by Justin John Rutledge — but it plays out largely in the memory of a mature Anna, played by Maggie Huculak. The cast is rounded out by Tom McCamus, in a variety of gambler's roles and Amy Rutherford as a wayward, tormented child in a woman's body. But even when characters other than Anna step to the fore to assume control of the narrative, there is precious little interaction between them in a story driven more by what they feeling and think than by what they say and do.

The tale itself centres around a single explosive event that proves to be a dividing line, or in Spanish, a divisadero, between the protaganist's almost careless childhoods and something much bigger and darker — a single stone hurled into the pool of their collective memory, creating ripples that still threaten to swamp each of them and pull them under. But memories, unless fleshed out to become memory plays, rarely make for compelling theatre — but to strip this tale, told by a masterful writer, of its language would be to peel away the pigment of an old master's painting merely to get to the sketch beneath.

So instead, Brooks creates a new kind of memory play, using a potent blend of almost inaudible speech and intrusive amplification to heighten intimacy, setting the story in his audience's memory instead of playing it out in the playwright's. Limited in terms of action, the cast's challenge comes in holding our attention with nothing but a combination of vocal skill and the power of the playwright's words.

In this, Huculak scores an understated triumph, creating a perfect 'writer's voice' — considered, dispassionate, articulate and just the tiniest bit affected — that flows out of her like golden honey. McCamus impresses too, in his ability to hold his audience spellbound, but for the rest, Brook's casting criteria is unclear.

Clearly, Rutledge is cast for musical abilities and, for a non-actor, turns in a strong performance, But while Rutherford has been cast, at least in part, for her physical attributes, Balaban's determination to fully inhabit Claire is undone by her failure to exhibit a disability important enough to be mentioned twice in the telling.

Of course, these things wouldn't be important in a radio play, but...