I mentioned in my last post that I'd be writing about a play for an assignment, heads up this is that post.
The play is called Proud, written by Michael Healey who has envisioned a Canada where Stephen Harper's Conservative government won the majority back in 2011. Yes this is a play full of political satire from a time shortly before I was interested in politics. I can't say I was excited for it, but I will watch any art for art's sake.
I was sitting almost completely surrounded by classmates. We were all assigned to write about this play so of course there would be some people who might have wanted to record audio from the play to refer to later when writing.
To give you some context, we all had a few big assignments due early that day. There were a lot of worn out faces in the crowd that night.
At one point my classmate pulled out his cellphone, at the time I didn't notice, but what I did notice was a rolled up program swiping past my line of vision and swatting my arm.
"Tell him to get off his phone!" A woman in a teal coat two seats over hissed at me.
No please. No thank you. No excuse me. I'm sure she must have had to literally climb over my friend to get to me too. (She did, my friend confirmed she had a face full of this woman's torso.)
I first looked at my friend and saw his phone dimly lit covered by his hand. I'm not going to judge, but yeah, you probably shouldn't be on your phone during any performance.
You should also probably refrain from falling asleep and snoring during a performance too. I kept thinking there was a wonky fan in the room. My friend was the buffer between myself and the woman, didn't hear much of the play at all. She was pissed off thinking this would be a fail for her.
Despite the woman's snoring I was paying more attention to the colours in the show. As expected the actors wore pretty neutral colours (yes, red can be a neutral). The play took place in one room, an office full of wooden furniture, the only real colour in the room was on the rug. I have to talk about the set designers though, that flooring was painted to look like wood planks and they were painted in such a way that the brush strokes resembled wood grain. A detail I noticed when I left the theatre. There was also a kind of sub-set, completely in grey where a character from the future would be providing the effects of the action in the play. Not a lot of visual interest in the set despite the textures in the wood and pattern of the rug.
I typically don't see any plays besides ones on during festivals because I don't have a lot of time or money to spend at the theatre and if I do, I'm at the ballet or a concert. I also tend to stay away from political satire because the opinions can be biased, and honestly I don't get a lot of entertainment from politics.
I was disappointed in one of the characters, she was overtly sexualized from her first appearance. She was introduced as Jizz Bella and she asked the Prime Minister for a condom, she was loud too. It was like watching a republican construct a feminist character out of a dated stereotype, kind of painful to watch. She was redeemed by gaining depth as the play went on.
Bella and Harper discussed the play's theme of self reliance in a very on-the-nose way closer to the end, while her grown son had a scene by himself in the corner trying to paint out a dystopian future. I didn't have a problem with this but he seemed so isolated in the entire play. They could probably have cut him out, and maybe it wouldn't make a huge difference.
I went into the play with no expectations except one, that Harper would be portrayed like he is in comedy. Take a look at this video for an example. Yes, he does come off as a cold almost robotic person in media and the actors spoke about it afterwards. It was interesting hearing the actors discuss their approach to the characters, especially Ross McMillan (who played the Prime Minister) and how he stayed in character after the production's original run.
I'm really glad they decided to go a different route with the Harper character. McMillan really gave him a personality that kept my attention. I think it was because we don't really see much of his personality that I was intrigued by the play.
I do recommend Proud if it plays wherever you are, it was entertaining and very witty. I heard from a teacher that it was part of a trilogy. My interest was peaked enough to look it up, so that's another two productions added to my to-see list.
Have a great weekend! Let me know if you've seen any good plays recently. I want to add more titles to my list.
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