From the minute you walk up two narrow flights of stairs and enter a 15-by-24 desolate urban squat near Yonge and Gerrard, you know you’re in for something different-and begin to wonder exactly what it is that you’re in for.
A rough room decorated with overflowing ashtrays, cracking plaster, littered Genesee beer cans, a stained mattress, smoke-encrusted walls-a grunge you can almost smell-is the 25-member audience’s first impression of Blackbird, the second play (and second ‘environmental production,’ or a play set in an unusual venue other than the typical theatre) from young local company Crate Productions. Upon entering the flat, you half-expect the door to slam shut behind you and hear the clank of the lock, a re-enactment of a haunting scene from a Hollywood horror flick or the like.
But that doesn’t happen. Instead, the intimate audience sits down and becomes voyeurs to two lost and fascinating souls inside their gritty flat on Canal Street in New York City. This chillingly realistic environment creates an engaging theatrical journey, transforming you into a “fly on the wall” as witness to the script and the actors’ ability to blur the lines between fiction and reality, love and despair, sobriety and hallucination.
Kate Meehan and Chris Reynolds, the up-and-comers behind the two-year-old Crate Productions, spread their wings in this, their second effort (last year’s Dora Award-nominated show Tape took place in a room at the Gladstone Hotel)-they strive to engage the viewer as voyeur. In experimenting with the idea of “found theatre,” there is no raked seating, no curtain, no dimming of the house lights, but only the visceral experience that comes from such an experiment in realism in such intimate confines.
Award-winning playwright Adam Rapp presents a tragic and harrowing tale of two lives caught in despair and love, trying to find comfort in whatever they can. The script reveals the guttural and emotional truths of two undesirables that come to life through mature material and coarse language. With Blackbird, there can only be two reactions: you either love it or are turned off by it. And yes, it’s one of those plays that leave you thinking about it an hour later, or even a day afterward.
Froggy, played by Meehan, was once a stripper long ago and is currently living with her boyfriend Baylis, a veteran of the first Gulf War. With her disturbing past (which surfaces throughout the production), Froggy yearns for love in harsh realities. Needless to say, she’s an embryonic junkie who has just been diagnosed with hepatitis. And she calls herself ‘The Snow Lion,’ a fitting name considering her tenuous grasp on reality.
Reynolds’ controlling, sterile Baylis is a man who smokes like a fiend, bats his girlfriend around to “keep her in line,” and craps his pants, an ailment caused from being in the war. He doesn’t look like a skid nor does he have the dodgy look of a junkie, but he does have that poverty-stricken, hopeless air about him that drives his character. Regardless of the script’s vulgarity, he succeeds in attaining the audience’s sympathy, because here we have a man who asks his girlfriend to call him ‘Fuckface’ rather than ‘Dickless’ because of his sensitivity to his sterility.
Meehan and Reynolds offer stellar performances. They can’t hide anything from the audience, since they are usually at arm’s length from those watching. Meehan’s glazed eyes keep you entranced, while Reynolds’ pained voice chills your spine. There’s a rawness, a purposeful shock value to the language, and yet Meehan and Reynolds make the audience see the characters as loving and vulnerable.
Needless to say, once you’re in Blackbird’s world, it’s difficult to leave. That is, if you ever really do. Blackbird will affect you-make you think and feel, and be truly moved. Now, if you can experience all that in a desolate urban flat on Yonge Street, then why would you ever want to return to an orthodox theatre?
