Kayak
By Jordan Hall
Directed by Tommy Taylor
Presented by The Original Norwegian
Stage Manager: Gin Shulist
Producers: Julian DeZotti & Tara Yelland
Featuring Rosemary Dunsmore, Dienye Waboso & Daniel Briere
Runs until August 15 @ Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace
By Jen Handley
Kayak opens with a beautiful middle-aged woman in a tasteful blue-print dress, carefully pinned-up hair and a pearl necklace sitting in a MEC kayak, casually spreading Nutella on a graham cracker with a car key. The interesting thing is, she doesn’t begin by telling us about the disasters that led to her improbable situation, but about a conflict she had with her son’s ex-girlfriend. Here, and throughout the play, a retelling of the Ark parable, playwright Jordan Hall explores the way in which we argue with each other about what the “right” and “good” choice is, and allows the dystopian backdrop to speak for itself.
Hall isn’t the first person to draw a line between the Great Flood in Genesis and the contemporary threat of world-wide environmental destruction — even Pixar has been there and done that — but does reduce the struggle to everyday proportions in a way that doesn’t just discuss recycling and bicycling and the hundred-mile-diet. Instead, Hall creates a desperately lopsided struggle between Annie (Rosemary Dunsmore), a politically-apathetic mother, and Julie (Dienye Waboso), her son, Peter’s (Daniel Briere), activist girlfriend. Annie wants to keep him safe, and Julie wants him to do the right thing, even if it places him in danger.
Waboso’s Julie is full of drive and energy with which the reserved and accommodating Annie can’t hope to compete. Waboso is able to keep pushing Julie over the line of acceptable behaviour, but we know from the get-go that she’s right. Julie seems inexcusably mean when she screams that Annie is either “evil or stupid” after she, brimming with pride and good intentions, presents Peter with keys to a carefully-chosen environmentally-friendly SUV as a graduation present. But once we see her outside the context of her relationship to Annie and Peter, she stops seeming like a controlling daughter-in-law from hell and emerges as a misunderstood prophet burdened by a horrible vision of the future she cannot ignore. Standing on a ladder before a group of protesters, giving a genuinely horrifying retelling of the Noah parable, she seems to be channeling the suffering Annie will later witness. We see her haunted by the terrible images she alone knows are soon to be realized.
But if Julie is the exasperating hero, Annie is the villain in disguise. Hall also makes the interesting choice of placing the closest thing the play has to an evildoer in a situation where it is impossible to not be on her side. While continually posing the question of whether Annie’s Coke-drinking, flesh-eating, gas-consuming way of life is wrong, at the end of the day, she’s the only person left to root for. And Dunsmore manages to fulfill Annie’s rapidly shifting perspectives with an expert thoroughness that makes her both sympathetic and vulnerable to judgment.
By injecting all this human interest into the parable, Hall is able to make a political statement about the personal life. During a flashback sequence, when a young Peter recites the story of Noah’s Ark, and he credits Noah with reasoning “I haven’t done anything, and my family hasn’t done anything” to deserve destruction, it sounds like the same response I would have if someone told me that I was setting myself up for condemnation by an almighty judge by drinking soda and eating meat.
