THEATRE REVIEW: YUKONSTYLE

Pictured: Grace
Lynn
Kung, François Klanfer









JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
21 OCT 2013
R: 3/5

TORONTO - There’s a problem with perching oneself on the cutting edge of something. Cutting edges, after all, are usually honed to an exquisite sharpness and theatre artists have learned that one wrong move while perching on the cutting edge of things can leave one bleeding on the stage. Case in point: Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre production of YUKONSTYLE, the second in a pair of plays by Quebecois playwright Sarah Berthiaume to grace this stage — The Flood Thereafter played this same space just before YUKONSTYLE began last week.

This time out, Ted Witzel directs, stepping into shoes filled by Ker Wells in the earlier production — the two comprising the inaugural cohort of the York University/Canadian Stage MFA in Stage Direction program. And at first blush, it must be conceded that Witzel has put together the livelier production of the two, for in spinning out the tale of four disparate characters brought together during the seemingly endless Yukon winter of 2007, while the equally endless Vancouver trial of pig farmer Robert Picton dominates the airwaves.

The trial has caught the attention of Garin (Ryan Cunningham), whose mother, a young First Nations’ woman like many of Picton’s victims, disappeared from the streets of Vancouver when he was only a child. Now, grown and living with Yuko, a young Japanese woman with problems of her own, played by Grace Lynn Kung, he pesters his alcoholic father, a displaced French Canadian played by François Klanfer, for information but the old man refuses to talk about Garin’s mother and her disappearance.

Then, one night, Yuko encounters Kate, an aspiring under-age Harajuku girl played by Kate Corbett, as unprepared for the Yukon winter as she is for the baby she’s carrying. Yuko promises Kate a place to stay for as long as she needs it, but the casually ignorant and blithely racist Kate proves to be trouble for the already-overwound Garin.

The playwright’s work is once again translated into English by Nadine Desrochers and once again emerges as an unwieldy mix of poetry and the prosaic — Kate at one point worries she might become “a Mama Burger squashed between two snowbanks” — and although lighting designer Bonnie Beecher and projection designer Cameron Davis conspire with the hardworking cast and director Witzel to impose a sense of order on Berthiaume’s fevered imaginings (or at least show them in their best light), in the end, they are undone by a play written more for radio or television than for the stage.

What is perhaps most ironic here is that while each of the cast members manages to shine for a few brief moments in this ‘cutting edge’ piece of theatre about alienated young people, it is left to the seasoned Klanfer, with his strong skill set and a commanding voice, to make things come briefly alive as his character is dying. They may all be perched on the cutting edge here, but only Klanfer succeeds in making us see flesh and blood.