Remember
not so long ago praying to the theatre gods for something different
to grace the local stage? Well those prayers have been answered via
a dandy offering called Zen and the Art of
Experiencing Theatre on now in conjunction with the 13th
annual Toronto Fringe Festival.
Playwright
Kwan Ho Tse is no partisan of conventional entertainment. The
storytelling rapscallion’s table turning approach to theatre
requires the cast to sit back and observe the audience rather than
the other way around.
There
are sighs and stares o’ plenty during the initial 15 minutes of
the show as the actors (us) can’t quite be sure what the
audience (them) is prepared to do. The silence is eventually broken
by a burst of laughter before an undesirable villain calling all the
shots disrupts the evening.
He’s
an exiled theatre director (James Gangl) who has resorted to selling hot dogs at
the base of the CN Tower to make ends meet. What’s more is
that he appears to be making some sort of creative comeback. The
director has issues with his art being hijacked and refuses to allow
his “prized actors” to be corrupted by the “slutty
audience.” This hard line methodology leads to an audience
revolt leaving 13 empty chairs to litter the stage.
Severed
limbs, Hershey Kiss battles, bouncing beach ball, and a cockroach so
big that city health officials would surely condemn the venue space
of Factory Theatre accentuate the absurdity of Zen and the
Art of Experiencing Theatre. Just when you think the laughs are
over, up springs a head bopping, foot stomping, and hand clapping
Stevie Wonder interlude.
What
Kwan Ho Tse has churned out is a playfully imaginative
experiment in theatre for his cast that sparkles with every
unforeseen revolve of the script. He has a keen sense of wit but
what the production really needs is more edge. Barricading himself
in a darkened cellar for 12 hours with a bottle of tequila to see
what kind of hallucinatory material he can come up with is the next
logical step on his artistic path.
Fringeheads
unite! Audience participation isn’t mandatory but it certainly
is fun.
