Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.
By Liz Nicholls,
In Tough Guy, an exhilarating new play by Hayley Moorhouse, a queer up-and-coming filmmaker tries to justify turning their camera on their friends, survivors of a shooting in queer nightclub mere days before, and reeling from the death of one of their circle.
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Emerson (Autumn Strom) has arrived back home too late for the funeral (“I lost track of time”). Their artistic concept, in progress, is a film capture of “queer joy,” something visceral and powerful (also words in the Emerson lexicon). They’re arguing for the idea of art, self-expression, the compelling need to put the queer story out there in the world and thereby restore “agency” to the queer experience. And their friends, shattered in various ways, aren’t buying.
They accuse Emerson variously of pretentiousness, of “trauma porn,” of putting career and “a vanity project” ahead of friendship. They have no patience with phrases like “an unmistakeable fragility,” or Emerson’s argument that the concept is more “a reflection, a meditation” than a documentary. “But who is it for?” demands Ella (Michelle Diaz).
It takes a tough guy of a playwright, one with chutzpah and wit, to enfold this acidic kind of artistic self-reflection into her own play, and invite us to consider it. Tough Guy is brave that way, with its multiple frames and angled mirror reflections of friends splintered by trauma. And the production, directed and choreographed by Brett Dahl, premiering in the Fringe Theatre season, explodes onstage, no holds barred. It’s riveting, a sensational barrage of visceral (I know, that word, right?) movement, a pounding Kena León score that’s nightclub fabulous and rib-rattling — and acting from a five-member cast who don’t just inhabit the characters but live them.
Jasmine Hopfe in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson
They all process horror and grief in their own way, starting with Strom as the filmmaker character who brings their own complicated trans history to their filmic exploration of queer joy. There’s Quinn (Jasmine Hopfe), who’s the reason there’s a punching bag centre-stage in Lieke den Bakker’s set design, strikingly lighted to invoke both a nightclub and a boxing ring. In a flashing, thrashing world, Quinn is a taciturn boxer, who communicates with blows not words. “You wanted to talk,” they say to Emerson, landing a punch on the bag. “This is me talking.”
Ella (Diaz) habitually takes the teaching-moment outreach position. “I don’t have time to be traumatized,” they say. “People are counting on me…. How can we make change if we don’t step outside our echo chamber?” Ella is the one who sets up the memorial wall, the one who takes the trouble or the risk to post on social media, who’s a bit conciliatory about the conservative, religious parents who signally failed to even mention the queerness of their murdered daughter Jamie (Mel Bahniuk) at the funeral.
“They’re old-school,” says Ella, much to the outrage of the sardonic Sutton (Marguerite Lawler), the wiseass of the bunch, who survived the shooting with a gunshot wound.
Marguerite Lawler and Michelle Diaz in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson
And since Moorhouse’s play flips back and forth between the present and assorted, incremental moments in the pre-event past, Jamie is a presence, both alive and dead, in Tough Guy. They’re only a year out of the closet, “a baby queer,” as they say, a new and happy addition to the circle of friends we see — in Emerson’s queer joy footage dancing the night away at the fateful club Aria, or just hanging out, camera-free, making each other laugh in the garage with the punching bag.
Rage and humour are rarely stage roommates; here they’re in bed together. “Being sad all the time, it’s the most lesbian thing you can do,” says one of the characters, and it’s a big laugh line.
How tough do you have to be to be authentically queer in a stressful world of homophobic and transphobic violence, where a queer club is targeted by a shooter and then the memorial wall in honour of the victims gets graphically vandalized? How tough do you have to be to not go it alone? To admit need, as a way to not be paralyzed at a moment that seems to freeze time? The characters are in motion, trying to find that out.
Moorhouse’s intertwined dialogue, which dispenses with narration and exposition, is muscular, staccato, and believable. And the performances are inflammatory.
REVIEW
Tough Guy
Theatre: Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre
Written and produced by: Hayley Moorhouse
Directed by: Brett Dahl
Starring: Mel Bahniuk, Michelle Diaz, Jasmine Hopfe, Marguerite Lawler, Autumn Strom
Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: through Nov. 8
Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca
