Poetry of Personal Hells has Varied Outcomes; The Bard Does Double Duty in Monologues of Such Creatures

Riffs on Shakespeare: Such creatures, La Comunion
Theatre passe muraille, Buddies in Bad Times
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All roads lead to Shakespeare. It's still a shock to find him signposting a pair of journeys as painful as those chronicled in Judith Thompson's Such Creatures, a play that juxtaposes two parallel monologues. One concerns Blandy, a Toronto teen who's been bounced from mother to father to school to foster home to street, and who is now facing a murderous girl gang who think she has disrespected them. At some point in her past she was one of three Hamlets in a school production, and though she at first rebelled against the idea, she found the lines speaking both to and for her. She came in on the closet scene with the queen (this must mean she got to do about half the play), which reminded her of all her rows with her mother and her mother's boyfriends; while the Ghost made her think of her own absentee dad. At some point, too, Blandy and her mom consulted a psychic whose unsatisfactory prophecies she dismissed with a withering "we defy augury." This, though the chronology is scrambled, presumably happened after her success as the great Dane.

In tandem with her, we have Sorele, an Auschwitz survivor, sent there as a young girl from Warsaw, where she had recently triumphed as Miranda in The Tempest. Shakespeare's words keep tripping off her tongue, too; at one point in her ordeal she even heard another inmate addressing her in the voice of Prospero -- in English apparently, with cultural cachet intact, though logic suggests that she would have played it in Polish or maybe Yiddish. Miranda's "brave new world" speech gives the play its title, though Sorele comes to feel that she and her companions were more like Caliban -- robbed of their identities, treated like brutes. Now, dying of cancer (nobody ever accused Thompson of being extravagantly cheerful), she's returned to the camp to settle her mental accounts.

Everybody thinks, and is entitled to think, that their own personal hell is the worst ever. But when two of them are placed side by side on the same stage, comparisons are inevitable; and to equate the Toronto streets with the death camps is frivolous going on obscene. It's the more uncomfortable because the Canadian story is probably better written, and certainly better acted, than the European one. Michaela Washburn feeds gutsily and wittily off the streetwise girl-talk that Thompson has provided for Blandy; I can't vouch for or against its authenticity but it certainly has flavour. (Blandy says that when she's drunk she feels extra, and initially dismisses being in a play as "too gay," by which she doesn't mean gay.)

Over in the other half of the evening, Maria Vacratsis tries hard to naturalize Sorele's storytelling, but the more she tries to break it up with pauses and underlinings, the more literary and artificial it sounds. She also, in Brian Quirt's production, has to deliver her first speech from a seat in the audience, making her, at least from my section of Theatre Passe Muraille's backspace, invisible; the same disregard for this tiny house's peculiar sightlines afflicts the closing tableau, a sort of defiant Pieta that finally brings the two characters together.

Defiance is what's supposed to link them. Sorele was involved in the rebellion that destroyed one of the Auschwitz crematoria, a story that Thompson unreels with an adroit sense of how to give and withhold information. She's also very efficient and, of course, effective at parcelling out the unceasing horrors. But the competence of the writing only makes its structure more offensive; when Blandy's voice is suddenly conscripted as that of a doomed prisoner, it cheapens both stories. Sorele is also given a couple of lines linking Auschwitz to Palestine, as in "the persecuted becomes the persecutor." This is the kind of glib equivalence of which Caryl Churchill's 7 Jewish Children was unjustly accused. Churchill, with extraordinary economy, took us inside the situation. Thompson has an omniscient narrator gesture at it.

La Comunion, written and directed by Beatriz Pizano, exposes a less familiar set of atrocities: the use of child soldiers by both sides, guerrillas and paramilitaries, in the endless conflict in Colombia. This is special-case theatre, in which the impact of the subject matter has to battle the earnest clumsiness with which it's presented. Long by current standards, it yet seems to end when it's still getting started. A guerrilla who was recruited at 11 and whose four years of travails we've been following in detail, escapes to Canada from where she manages to secure the release of a prize hostage. Just like that.