THEATRE REVIEW:
QUEEN WEST PROJECT
R: 5/5;
THE TOY BOX
R: 3.5/5

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
17 SEPT 2012

Proprietors of a certain type of establishment figured out years ago that pairing a single dancer with a single patron was a sure-fire way to awaken passion. And now a group of theatre artists have discovered that if you take that particular equation out of smoke-filled and seedy back rooms of strip joints and make it a public event, the end result is not passion, but rather compassion instead.

The work is titled QUEEN WEST PROJECT, and, paired with another bit of theatrical rethinking inside the box, titled, appropriately enough THE TOY BOX, QUEEN WEST PROJECT launched Theatre Passe Muraille’s new season last week.

While THE TOY BOX takes the latest in theatrical technology and turns it into a creative playground for all ages in the TPM mainspace (it moves to City Hall this week), QUEEN WEST PROJECT finds its home further west, beginning in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and eventually embracing the storied street on which it sits as well as the park-like grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which, of course, in another incarnation as a mental hospital whispers another darker story from across Queen Street.

Where theatre is usually an experience shared with other audience members, QWP is an experience in isolation, equipping each audience member as it does with an iPod and a single dancer and only bringing performers and audience together at its very end, in a moment filled with exultant theatricality.

For the rest, writer-director Deborah Pearson and choreographer Allison Cummings team up with sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne and six wonderful dancers (Lucy Rupert, Viv Moore, Jolyane Langlois, Kevin A. Ormsby, Andrew Hartley and the wonderfully gamin Bill Coleman, who proved to me that he can coax squirrels out of trees and break hearts even while he makes them soar) to remind us in a most intimate way that while Toronto appears to have a problem with homelessness, what we really have is a problem with mental health and how we deal with those who are struggling to find it.

To do this, they provide a narration that is part history lesson, part political polemic and a lot of first-hand experience as each individual audience member finds him or her self on the street, attuned to a voice only he or she can hear, following a muse that seems all but invisible in this milieu. In three decades of theatre, this ranks, despite its brevity, as one of the most intimate and moving pieces of theatre this reviewer has ever experienced.

THE TOY BOX, meanwhile, as imagined by designers and creators Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates, offers another way to get involved in theatre, focusing as it does on “play” as something one does in the theatre as opposed to something one sees. Using everything from crayons and play-dough to the latest in green-screen technology, they create a laboratory where one is invited to dissect one’s imagination and discover what might be lurking there. In short, it’s a great place to unleash the theatre artist lurking within kids of all ages.