“To a Flame” Sets Gothic Horror Ablaze with Women, Shadows and Silence – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Toronto Theatre Review: Nightwood and 1s1 Theatre turn an ancestral home into a Gothic world shaped by patriarchy.

By Ross

The three women are already there, standing in the shadows, smiling and staring out at us as though they have been waiting for this moment to tell their tale. Thunder and lightning seemingly jolt them into action, pushing them forward with an electric, erratic physicality, while cellist Beth Silver’s live music deepens the sense that something is approaching. In these opening moments of 1s1 Theatre and Nightwood Theatre’s To a Flame, directed and choreographed with intensity and deliberation by Josette Bushell-Mingo, the three women seem to become part of the storm itself before one of them asks into the night air, “Do I look like a silent woman?” The question seems almost accusatory in the moment, yet the answer becomes increasingly complicated as these three women reveal the damaged world that has bound them together in a sisterhood of captivity.

This is an ancestral home, we are told, and hanging on the wall is a black jacket and top hat, a physical symbol of the man whose presence seems to inhabit every corner of the house even when he is nowhere to be seen. Around it, Laura Warren’s expert projection design builds an astonishing Gothic environment, layering detailed interiors, images, symbols and repetitions onto Jung-Hye Kim’s aggressively stark set and detailed costumes. The effect is dreamlike and deeply unsettling, as though the house itself is remembering things that the women have been forced to suppress. The approximately 80-minute performance, presented without intermission, gives that sensory world an unusually concentrated intensity.

Playwright Erin Shields (Ransacking Troy) gives the Gothic imagery a distinctly unsettling intelligence, turning language itself into an instrument of control. The words used to describe these women become labels, diagnoses and judgements, allowing the man they call ‘Father‘ to define their identities while claiming to rescue them. Deaf performer and English-to-ASL translator Dawn Jani Birley, alongside Nickeshia Garrick and Juliana Monk, inhabit this damaged world with phenomenal physical commitment, their movements carrying information alongside their words and creating a dynamic bilingual performance in spoken English and American Sign Language. The simultaneous use of ASL and English is not simply a translation device. It becomes part of the rhythm and energy of the production, constantly shifting how we watch, listen, and understand.

These women have each been brought to this house by unbearable circumstances, rescued, they are told, by the man they call ‘Father‘. Yet the labels attached to them begin to reveal the deeper problem. They are treated as deficient, troubled children of desperate women whose histories have supposedly placed them in need of a saviour. Garrick’s Harriet is called brutish. Another, Birley’s Madeline, is silent. The third, Monk’s Fanny, remains suspended in a more uncertain space, her place within this strange family continually shifting. What gradually emerges is a disturbing portrait of patriarchy disguised as protection, with ‘Father‘ positioning himself as the authority capable of diagnosing what is wrong with these women while controlling the environment in which their supposed deficiencies are defined and attacked.

And yet, within that confinement, the three women have created something that looks remarkably like family. They come together one at a time, hugging, moving as one, communicating for one another while teaching each other how to do that more effectively. They seem to fly together like the moths that inhabit the attic, drawn toward one another for warmth and survival while remaining trapped within the reach of the father figure downstairs. The movement and choreography by Bushell-Mingo (Swan Theatre/NAC’s Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood) give that relationship an almost ritual quality, while André du Toit’s lighting continually reshapes the space around them. Shadows deepen, boundaries shift, and the women seem to occupy a world of their own before the atmosphere begins to close around them.

The production’s visual imagination is extraordinary, particularly when the projections begin layering interiors with ideas, symbols, and repeated images until the distinction between physical space and psychological space becomes increasingly unstable. When we are told, “This is where we were when you arrived,” the house begins to look like a gallery of judgement, memories, and wounds. Father searches for the unseen problem that made Fanny what she is, looking deeper and deeper for some physical source of her suffering. Perhaps the problem is not inside her at all, Harriet begins to ask. Perhaps it is inside the man who has spent so much time searching for what he believes is wrong with her. That reversal turns the act of investigation back toward the person who has claimed the authority to conduct it, and in that shift, the horrors become vivid.

The sensory intensity can occasionally work against that clarity. The movement circles relentlessly around the square playing space as the projections continue to layer images upon images. The lighting shifts the atmosphere, and Silver’s cello vibrations keep the production humming with unease, but at times, the accumulation becomes hypnotic rather than fully captivating, and the middle section loses some of the narrative momentum established so powerfully at the beginning. The metaphors also become somewhat heavy in the projected air, with the production circling its ideas of horror, patriarchy, confinement, and damage so insistently that the story itself can become obscured beneath the imagery. Yet the three performers, Birley, Garrick and Monk, remain compelling through those stretches. Their physicality and unity give the production a pulse even when the narrative temporarily feels caught up in its own atmosphere.

Then the tension begins to climb again. Something is scratching, banging, and screeching its way into the night, and the shadow figure that eventually appears outside the door sends the production plunging back into its Gothic fever dream. The horror becomes impossible to ignore, almost tactile, with the sound, projections, lighting, and movement suddenly converging around the women and the house that has held them. Composer and co-sound designer Deanna H. Choi and co-sound designer Jenna Geen deepen the Gothic tension, while the visual work by Warren, Kim and du Toit escalates the final encounter with a disturbing, destructive precision. The ending is carefully contained, allowing the accumulated images, relationships and questions to converge with a force that makes the patience demanded by the middle worthwhile.

The deepest power of To a Flame lies in the women who have been told they are damaged by the ‘father‘ who overshadows them all. Despite the man who claims to have saved them, Birley, Garrick and Monk bring extraordinary physical and emotional commitment to the family these women have built together. In that unity, the production finds connection in a language that exists in words, movement, silence, signs, music, and the haunted architecture surrounding them. The question asked at the beginning, “Do I look like a silent woman?”, takes on an entirely different weight after everything these women have revealed. Their silence has never meant an absence of thought, desire, anger, or knowledge. It has been imposed upon them, interpreted for them, and used to tell them who they are. These three moths, drawn toward one another for warmth and survival, remain dangerously close to the flame that has shaped their captivity. To a Flame sets that silence ablaze against a house that seems determined to hold them down. When the voices, bodies, images, and ghosts finally collide, the result is a Gothic thriller that grips the throat and refuses to let go.