THEATRE REVIEW:
WOULD YOU SAY THE NAME OF THIS PLAY? (NGGRFG)
24 NOV/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 4/5

Pictured: Berend McKenzie


TORONTO - They're called mixed messages and we've been broadcasting them into our schools for years.

Consider: In literature classes around the world, teachers espouse the incredible power of words, teaching the works of Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Leacock and the entire literary pantheon — artists all, each capable of using a single word so that it cuts like a rapier or tickles like a feather. Then, the bell rings and we send those same kids out into the playground, and when the inevitable teasing starts — kids being kids — we simply tell 'em words can never hurt them.

So it's nothing if not refreshing to see Young People's Theatre wading into the fray, offering a temporary performance home to theatre artist Berend McKenzie and his one-man show, titled WOULD YOU SAY THE NAME OF THIS PLAY? (NGGRFG)

Now, when it comes to the wounding power of words, McKenzie might be considered a bit of an expert. African-Canadian and gay, he was adopted as an infant and raised in an otherwise white family in small town Alberta, where apparently people had no problem buying the vowels to complete the bracketed part of his play's title — not that Alberta has the market cornered on bigotry.

In a series of often highly personal yet unflinching vignettes, McKenzie assumes the persona of a kid named Buddy and then proceeds to tell us about his troubled life. Although, over the course of the next hour, we will get to know Buddy as an innocent and delightful child and as a troubled and often conflicted adult, we first meet him in the middle, a student in junior high, eager to fit in with the special-ed students with whom he spends his days.

To that end, he's set his sights on dating the toughest girl in his class, in the belief that having her on his arm will not only give him "street cred," but silence the whispered slurs, inspired by his flamboyant behaviour. But once he lands a date with his dream girl, he makes a series of bad choices, culminating in a same-sex tryst in the bushes. Things go dreadfully off track and he moves from existing on the fringes of acceptance to being a total outcast. From there, Buddy leads us through numerous episodes in his life where his colour and/or his 'gayness' is used to define and disparage him, whether its being diagnosed as "lazy" by a small-town doctor or being mocked and worse for his passion for skipping and his pink skipping rope.

But while Buddy quickly recognizes that the names other people call him are wrong, it takes him longer to learn that in allowing those words to define him — by internalizing the pain of hearing them hurled at him like missiles — he has compounded the problem. His struggles with the demons that attach themselves to him in his troubled childhood form a major part of the show and underline the fact that words, carelessly used, can create deep wounds prone to fester.

As a writer and as a performer, under the co-direction of Allen MacInnis and Tanisha Taitt, McKenzie proves utterly fearless and unflinchingly honest, his comedic chops honed, no doubt, by years spent as an outcast attempting to disarm things with a laugh. But while he uses that charm to maximum effect — his fey rapper is indeed a thing of beauty — he weaves in enough moments of emotional truth that his target audience (14 and up) will know that words are indeed a powerful weapon to be used with care.