WODL Festival 2019 # 5: Nervy, Incisive Theatre Piece

The Western Ontario Drama League (WODL) Festival is an annual 

celebration of community theatre in South-western Ontario.  

This year's Festival is co-hosted by the Guelph Little Theatre

and the Elmira Theatre Company.

The adjudicator for the Festival is Maja Ardal.

GIRLS LIKE THAT

by Evan Placey
Directed by Henri Canino
Presented by Theatre Sarnia

For sheer chutzpah and energy, there's never been a production remotely like this at any theatre festival I've ever attended.

Girls Like That was commissioned as a piece which could be readily performed in simple environments like school gymnasiums.  Director Henri Canino has re-visioned the piece as a stunning circus of contemporary technical wizardry, a high-energy show with production values such as one might expect to see in a million-dollar production at a top-flight professional theatre.

Nor is all this technical flash a substitute for solid dramatic values.  Indeed, it heightens the power of the play with gripping aptness to the worlds of the characters.

The set consisted of a dozen or so wooden boxes of varying heights and sizes, easily moved around, and a solid backdrop.  The backdrop presented a plain white or off-white surface, with slight protruding sections on the top and side segments which appeared like bricks.  The central flatter section proved to house a set of six school lockers, which had interiors of six different colours.  Around the proscenium and in the ceiling of the auditorium were hung a series of square chrome-metal cages (like pet cages), cube-shaped, each suspended by one corner.

The lighting design was paramount to the feel of the show, with brilliantly-coloured LED lights shining downwards through a smoke haze, making the stage look for all the world like the stage at a rock festival.  The back wall became a projection screen for flashing horizontal bars of coloured light, changing second by second, and looking like the effect of a streaming video that's jammed up.  Some of these strobing projections were powerful enough to induce discomfort in some audience members. 

All of the cast used cheek microphones, highlighting the tech-wise, rock-concert vibe of the show.  So did the ear-covering headphones which all of them pulled on during the scene changes, and a few other passages of the play, drawing attention to the isolation which technology often induces in us.

The ensemble work in this show was every bit as stunning as the visual aspect.  The critical aspect of ensemble was highlighted in the programme with a simple list of actors' names -- and no mention at all of any character names.  Chloe Brescia, Julie Cushman, Tayler Hartwick, Kyra Knight, Hala Miller, Cassandra Lynn Smith, and Emma Van Barneveld formed a powerhouse team.  All seven contributed equally to the power and energy of the show, and the strong sense of teamwork among them was palpable to the audience.

The language consists of many short speeches, longer choral or intercut passages, phrase fragments tossed from one actor to another, and the like.  The directorial concept of "snapping up cues" takes on incredible importance in this kind of script, and the cast came through in spades.

The story focuses on a group of girls who are admitted, at age 5, to an exclusive school called St. Helen's, which takes in just 20 students and keeps them in the same class with each other throughout their school years.  Although the main action takes place in their teenage years, earlier scenes where they announce in unison, "We are ____ years old" are intercut from time to time.  So are other scenes from much earlier historic periods, showing women coping with male perceptions of them and their roles, and the relevance of these scenes is revealed only at the end.

The dramatic trigger is the day when a nude photo of one of the group is posted on social media, and rapidly shared throughout the entire school and beyond.  The girl, not accidentally called "Scarlett," has always been a bit of an outsider in the group.  Complete ostracism is swift and unrelenting.  From here on, the group dynamics escalate the pressure on Scarlett, even though each girl has moments in which she expresses uneasiness at the maltreatment or says "I didn't do it."  

All these shades of age, emotions, private fears and public agreements, are vividly brought to life in six very different ways by the six actors portraying the "in" group.  

The actor portraying the ostracized Scarlett has to demonstrate her anguish through long periods of silence and stillness, and occasional speeches as brief as a single word.  While the other six busily chattered away, she created her own powerful character portrait through the most minimal means.

The dramatic turning point comes when Scarlett vanishes, and after two days a body is found in the river.  As gripping as the group dramatics had been, the company makes the unravelling of the group in the face of this crisis more fascinating still -- as a group of six became six individuals, pulling away from each other, with each one desperately seeking some kind of absolution for herself.

But Scarlett reappears (the body in the river was not hers), with her completed report on her family's female ancestry.  We now learn that the older stories we saw depicted happened to her great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother in turn.  With devastating power and disarming simplicity of language, Scarlett sums up the entirety of her report by stating that the terrible ways men used for so long to judge and demean women are now being used by women to judge and demean each other.  She then tells her erstwhile "friends" with cold scorn that she looks forward to ignoring them at their reunion years in the future, and says that she will forget them but they will always remember her.

After this scene, I felt that the remaining portion of the script became overly repetitive.  The play's energy began to flag a bit as a result of this script weakness.  The reunion finally came, though, and sure enough, the girls were all wondering if "she" would come.  Scarlett's prophecy that they would remember her was fulfilled with a vengeance.

Right before the curtain, there was one unclear moment.  The actor who exclusively portrayed Scarlett throughout the show dashed in with a big grin on her face to join her classmates in a final group hug.  Had she remembered and/or forgiven them?  Was she representing someone else now?  Was this just a setup for a lively curtain call (which did follow shortly)?  I couldn't tell.

This play was an incredible experience -- from the technical mastery and dazzling effects to the wonderful esprit de corps of the company and the terrific energy maintained throughout, it was spectacular.

But what really made it incredible for me was the nonstop series of tangential thoughts and ideas and reflections that the show kept triggering in my mind for almost the entire length -- reflections on what it means to be part of a group, what it means to be an individual, what it takes to drive people to treat others with such incredible disdain and disregard, and what it feels like to separate yourself from the mob and realize that you, as an individual, have to bear your share of the guilt.  I'll be remembering this performance for a long time indeed.