Max Rubin in An Oak Tree, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
At the Aviary, a little performance space off the beaten track that’s nobody’s idea of a conventional theatre (except there’s a bar), something weird is happening. It’s magic and you have to be there to experience it.
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An Oak Tree, the latest from Theatre Yes, messes with your mind. You try to wrap your brain around it, good luck with that, and it slips out of those coils and grabs at your heart instead with questions about grief. That it does this right before your very eyes, with no pretence at concealment, says something about theatre itself — the transformation of actors into characters and a script into emotion. It’s a demo of the power of suggestion that goes beyond the temporary suspension of disbelief into questions that take the old arts/life mutual dependency for a spin. I’ve seen An Oak Tree before, on a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe long ago. And I can’t quite shake it.
An Oak Tree is, in effect, a test case for transformation and belief. The fascinating artifice of the 2004 play by the English theatre experimenter Tim Crouch is named after Michael Craig-Martin’s installation now in the National Gallery of Australia: a glass of water on a glass shelf, entitled “An Oak Tree.”
In the two-hander directed by Ruth Alexander, Max Rubin, who’s usually Theatre Yes’s resident director, is onstage in a sequinned showbiz vest, as a hypnotist. And opposite him is an actor — a different one every night — who has never before seen the play or the script. The showbiz hypnotist Rubin plays, who has an addled huckster vibe about him, has accidentally killed a 12-year-old girl in his car some months before. And the actor, the terrific Belinda Cornish on opening night, plays the bereaved father of the girl, who shows up one night at the hypnotist’s show and volunteers for the act. This requires a dramatic transformation in itself since Andy is a 46-year-old man with (we’re told) muddy shoes and grey hair.
The dynamic is unsettling: is the father looking for … confrontation? closure? confession of guilt? We don’t know yet. And what’s more we don’t know if the hypnotist knows yet.
Over and over, we are reminded, explicitly, that we are watching a play. It’s like taking the splintered shards of the so-called ‘fourth wall’ and juggling them to see what shape they take. Rubin keeps stepping outside his role as the hypnotist to be Rubin the actor in scenes with Cornish, or Rubin the stage manager giving directions, or feeding lines, to Cornish the actor playing Andy the grieving father, hypnotized into playing other characters. Did you follow that? I just re-read that last sentence, and I think I may need professional help or a rest cure in a sensory deprivation tank. “Say yes,” and Cornish does. “Please put the headphones on,” and Cornish does.
Sometimes the two pass the script between them, on a whispered cue or inaudible headphone instruction. Sometimes there’s a narrator: “the house began to fill with grief.” Sometimes the hypnotist is the grieving father’s desperate wife; sometimes Andy is the wife or the little girl. Sometimes the hypnotist and the father are talking to each other; sometimes one is directing the other (sotto voce, perhaps a little too sotto, on opening night); sometimes each is talking to the audience. “These are the last speeches of the play,” says the actor playing the hypnotist, introducing … the last speeches of the play.
The layers of sound, which escalate from whispers to mic’ed hucksterism, velvety hypnotist cues to a blast of Carmina Burana in Alexander’s production, are an invitation into the playbook of theatre, how the magic is created. That An Oak Tree does this while still asking the audience to believe in the magic is audacious, for sure, even brazen. That it’s moving, too, is unexpected.
An Oak Tree is a veritable fun house of mirrors. The strange audacity of it is there right from the start when the hypnotist says “I will never lie to you.” Which is of course a lie. He’s already lied about the “volunteers.” What’s amazing is our escalating emotional investment, amid the constant transformations of the characters, in the question of what on earth you do with a huge, unwieldy, intractable grief. Or guilt of roughly the same size. Is there an exit from the house of mirrors? Can a child be an oak tree?
Theatre says yes, and yes, according to An Oak Tree. Maybe theatre itself is a form of hypnosis. We can look at the tree and see a tree and a child, simultaneously. It’s a puzzle, this theatre magic. As the hypnotist says, in his introduction, “welcome to my hypnotic world. Give me a piece of your mind.”
Do that and you will be intrigued. Your mind will be bent a bit out of shape (for an indeterminate length of time, I’m finding). And, despite everything, your heart will be touched. Weird and wonderful.
REVIEW
An Oak Tree
Theatre: Theatre Yes
Written by: Tim Crouch
Directed by: Ruth Alexander
Starring: Max Rubin, with (in successive performances) Belinda Cornish, Mark Meer, Luc Tellier, Patricia Zentilli, Patricia Darbasie, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Oscar Derkx, Nikki Hulowski
Where: The Aviary, 9314 111 Ave.
Running: through Feb. 12
Tickets: theatreyes.com
