Review: Craze at Tarragon feels like a showy parade of the issues du jour | Canada Voices

• Craze
• Produced by: Tarragon Theatre and Modern Times Stage Company in association with Theatre ARTaud
• Written by: Rouvan Silogix and Rafeh Mahmud
• Directed by: Mike Payette
• Performers: Augusto Bitter, Ali Kazmi, Kwaku Okyere, Lisa Ryder, Louisa Zhu
• Venue: Tarragon Theatre
• Year: Until Dec. 15, 2024

Polycrisis is a term trotted around these days to describe the various disasters that have converged to threaten everything we hold dear. The world is heating up, the AI apocalypse is nigh, geo-political rifts are deepening, culture is being commodified, we’re sadder and lonelier than ever. Imagine you could take these issues and forge them into a metal bat or rod – nothing so long as to compromise the tool’s inertia – and proceed to poke, prod, badger and, ultimately, beat an audience with it for 80-odd minutes, leaving them dumbfounded, dizzy, defensive, distressed. That’s my best approximation of what it felt like to sit through Craze, which had its world premiere at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre on Wednesday night.

Craze summons a few timeless questions about theatre as a form. What is it about an unsuccessful play that can feel so deeply and aggressively personal – as though it were an assault on our time, an insult to our intelligence, an affront to our good taste? I shudder to imagine the pained grimace I wore by the final act, when the plot had devolved beyond reason or recognition, fight scenes erupted from inscrutable conflicts and characters mysteriously lost their sanity, their dignity, their shirts.

I wonder whether director Mike Payette and the playwriting team, brothers Rouvan Silogix and Rafeh Mahmud, would consider the above description to be more or less on point. Co-produced by Modern Times Stage Company in association with Theatre ARTaud, Craze almost explicitly references Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the interwar movement that strove for impact over sense-making. The idea was to create an assaultive sensory experience that would wake an audience from their complacent slumber and shock them into action. I’ll grant that Craze certainly checks the assault box.

Like Edward Albee’s boozy slugfest Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – which Craze is clearly conversant with – the set-up pits an older married couple against the younger couple they’ve invited for late-night drinks. In this rendering, the sexual undertones have taken centre stage. June (Lisa Ryder) has plotted a polyamorous orgy with her husband (Ali Kazmi) and their unassuming guests (Kwaku Okyere and Louisa Zhou), a plot that is thrown off course by intensifying racial tensions, an invasive AI assistant, a sudden blackout, a little gunfire and, of course, a stranger knocking at the door. The chaos that ensues blurs time and space, reality and memory, until the despairing characters are left staring out at us with glazed eyes, stricken by their own melodramatic antics, singing odd fragments of Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, apparently as stunned as we are.

Could better writing have saved this ambitious experiment? I’m not sure. Humour, or its semblance, is clearly meant to drive the action, but the jokes about race, marriage, privilege and selling-out are so heavy-handed and aggressive that we are more inclined to roll our eyes than laugh. Paired with contrived dialogue and wooden relationships, the actors are left floundering in a style no one seems to fully understand. You can’t help but feel sorry for Augusto Bitter, a skilled comedic actor who can be captivating with the right material. Here, in a role I won’t reveal for fear of spoiling an already-thin plot, he is left drowning in a hurricane.

Craze had me thinking of modern examples of assaultive theatre that have fared better. Take the work of Italian provocateur Romeo Castellucci. He has gone to scandalous extremes to get under the audience’s skin. His 2011 On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, about a son caring for his terminally ill father, involved filling the auditorium with the simulated smell of feces. There was layered symbolism in this choice; it not only triggered visceral feelings about death and sickness, but also spoke to larger themes of waste, decay and cultural incontinence. Moreover, it existed in a work of art that gave audiences room to think and feel once the air cleared.

Silogix and Mahmud leave us no room to do either. Craze feels like a showy parade of the issues du jour – a self-congratulating cavalcade of relevance. Don’t get me wrong, this criticism would be negligible if the material had been genuinely funny; we can all forgive a little showmanship if it’s in service of a great time. But it is discomfort that triggers our laughter here more often than real amusement. And while you’ve got to applaud the playwrights’ ambition for cramming so many topical subjects into one little play, you might be left wondering why you had to sit through it.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)