Liz Appel’s Wights at Crow’s Toronto Fly Slams the Framing Ferociously – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Toronto Theatre Review: Crow’s Wights

By Ross

I often have wondered what kind of madness overcame the United States last year. A type of diseased mind that allowed itself to vote for and elect a convicted felon, white supremacist rapist into the highest office of the United States. It’s the fodder for fiction writers, one could say if it didn’t really happen in the real world when a country would allow such a monstrous person to become the President, and a system would accept him as a viable candidate and leader. Yet somehow it did, and somewhere inside the shower of judicially crafted, intelligently organized, and expertly unpacked words that flow endlessly from every single one of these characters’ minds and mouths, an outbreak of epic confusion and dread live and bleeds forth into our stressed-out souls. At first, we hear the political landscape hint drop casually in the first Act, quickly, making us wonder if the play was written in a time before. But this smart, sharp new play, Wights, quickly defines itself as ever-so current, and maybe a bit ahead of our time and place, making us lean in with abject curiosity about what this production has in store for us, and what it wants us to really see and take in.

As written with a clarity of thought and process by Liz Appel, Wights, the new Canadian play getting its world premiere at Crow’s Theatre, Toronto, digs into an exhibitionist tone of naturalness that emulates forth to every corner of the wide room where it has been expertly staged with fascinating determination. It’s a wordie head trip of culturally defining ideas and tense coherent levels of acknowledgment, both land and otherwise, surging forth like a violent assumption. It’s hard to keep up with the precious and exact detailings of the words thrown, chewed on, and digested by those in the room, much like the only remaining food item (salad) on the table.

This word salad of a play, drenched with intersectional intentions overflows the debate floor stage, double-locking itself in for safety and protection. Does it actually feel safer inside the space that is ignited to the highest visual order by set and props designer Joshua Quinlan (Stratford’s Casey and Diana), lighting designer Imogen Wilson (Crow’s Uncle Vanya), sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne (Crow’s Theatre’s Bad Roads), and video designer Nathan Bruce (Charles St. Video’s After The Flood) all working together with such great effect? The garden variety reframing, defining a particular. space and time, is lit from beneath like a projected thought process and exhibit description. It’s captivating and invigorating, albeit not utilized nearly enough for full expansion of thought. Yet the desire for those to be seen, as directed with a focused force by Chris Abraham (Stratford’s Much Ado About Nothing; Crow’s Rosmersholm), can’t even begin to explain the layers of ferocious projection and fly-slamming engagement that this play is attempting to push forward into the light of day.

Appel (Snow; Moonshine) ignites the social satire formulation with an onslaught of reframed rethinking, centering itself around racist systems and institutionalized constructs, and the blood battles that need to happen and are asked for. It’s Halloween night, 2024. The U.S. election is one week away, and two couples gather together to help the brilliantly ambitious academic, Anita, forcibly portrayed by Rachel Leslie (Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), prepare for a contentious job interview at Yale. Dressed in perfect formulations of solidness reflecting power dynamics and status designed solidly by Ming Wong (Crow’s The Wrong Bashir), Anita has her statement prepared for delivery, and wants to practice on her friends, Celine and Bing, captivatingly portrayed by Sochi Fried (Shaw’s Candida) and Richard Lee (NAC/Shaw’s Snow in Midsummer), in hopes that they will aggressively point out any problems and inconsistencies in the speech she will be delivering to a committee the following day.

It’s tense from basically the first sentence read forth, with disagreements of positioning and acknowledgments springing forward like wildfire before she even gets into the meat of the matter. Her lawyer husband, Danny, dynamically portrayed by a very good Ari Cohen (Coal Mine’s Infinite Life), arrives late to the debatable party, where precious talking-in-code and all the jargon associated with such stances are beginning to escalate the confrontations. The tension is Punch & Judy high, with the differences between being a performative asshole and a real one starting to become blurred in ways no one in that room could have imagined earlier.

Likeability is not the question here, as the monologues unravel in dynamic huge presentations of purposeful, overly thought-out portrayals, that sometimes overwhelm the air in the room. The aggressiveness starts to infect the dynamics with their passionate, precious, and exacting ideas almost beating us down to the ground with their grandiose confrontations. It’s a whole lot to take in, these precise reframings; sometimes becoming almost too much to digest. As the clock ticks closer and closer to striking midnight in the house that Anita grew up in, and lost to a stepmother, the dark unraveling sends shock waves across that dynamic floor, and even if lost in the words and stances, the air is charged with electricity.

“Could you help me stabilize the base?” he asks, after a betrayal of epic proportions is revealed and a whole heap of salt is poured into the wound; a wound that is cut open on more than just the one violent undoing. Is that the beginning of the monolithic end, when the core infection of humanity’s way of thinking unravels before us spreading like a virus or the plague? Those dark monsters lurking outside are metaphorically coming in from the dark corners of our society, entering like they belong, and unable to acknowledge how privilege got them there. Is this the beginning of a racially driven, misogynistic divide apocalypse stepping into the space in a slow reveal of time and place? Is this the result of a wound infection spreading through society and our thought patterns, showcasing itself like artifacts in a display glass case? We can’t help but wonder where this profiling and acts of privilege are taking us as violent dread starts to take over the room especially after several decisions are made in unforgivable manners.

This biting and confounding social satire, approximately 2 hours and 35 minutes in length including intermission, strides forward with exhilarating energy and a tense invitation to embrace wordy monologues of epic proportions. Wights is unconventional in its convention, and powerfully demanding to be seen for all its complexities and processes, delivered by an excellent engaged cast that never backs down. We watch in discomfort and engagement, as we bear witness to marriages and friendships become infected by the wounds spread to our very being, threatening our ways of thinking and connecting as profoundly as to the fate of humanity itself.