Play: Loving the Stranger

Loving the Stranger or how to recognize an invert (Ecce Homo Theatre, Dir: Alistair Newton)

SummerWorks Festival (Factory Theatre Mainstage). Friday, August 6, 2010.

Seeing as I'm going to be taking in some of the musical shows at the SummerWorks Festival, I figured I'd try and squeeze a couple plays in, too. I was going with A. to the Hidden Cameras show, and I told him to pick something for us to see before that. So I went into this without knowing a single thing about what I was going to see. Given A.'s preferences, it was no surprise that this turned out to be a musical, and given that he chose seats that were front row centre, no surprise that there was male nudity aplenty.¹

Mind you, Newton's play isn't just a song-and-dance T&A number. What it was, though, I was struggling a bit to put together as the play began, tying together several strands including an examination of Prussia's anti-sodomy laws, the Nazi party's institutionalization of homophobia in the face of the Wiemar Republic's permissiveness, an interview with an elderly ex-pat German artist living in Montréal. With a cameo from Michel Foucault thrown in for good measure, I was stuck for a bit trying to find the narrative element that tied them all together.

But although I don't know a lot about the stage, I do know a thing or two about documentaries — and as the play progressed, I realized that that was exactly what I was seeing. After the show, looking through the program, this was confirmed: "every line of text in this piece is culled from actual historical, documentary, or archival sources".

Which could be painfully dry. But through cross-cutting between interview re-enactments and political archaeology — and mixing that up with some catchy cabaret-inspired (or, maybe, Cabaret-inspired) musical numbers, the show is almost never dull. And further juxtaposing the past with up-to-the-minute commentary of the same struggle now (with a Proposition 8 thread running through things), the relevance of the past to the present was made clear.

There were a few technical problems with the show, including the loss of all of the lighting cues not long before showtime. Through the technical staff recovered admirably, there were a couple awkwardly-placed spots and too-bright moments were one could guess the crew were winging it. And, as with any acting done in accent, there's always the dreaded possibility of sliding into mere farce. There were a couple loose moments, but that never happened here. There were a couple moments during the songs where rapidly-flowing lines of clipped German enunciation plowed right through lyrics that would have gotten a laugh from the audience if they had a moment to keep up.

But those minor quibbles aside, the five-piece acting ensemble did a good job, with strong singing voices. Kimberly Persona should get special notice in this regard. And most interestingly of all, the whole thing came together with no small bit of emotional resonance. So: good entertainment, good songs, sublime buttocks — and something to think about afterwards.

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¹ No dangly bits, but there were, as A. instructed me to put in this review, "sublime buttocks". ("Make sure that goes in," he told me. "It'll get them some good crowds.")