Raw power

>> Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? hits the stage with savage intensity; I, Claudia explores the tumultuous pre-teen years

PASSING THE TIME: Brett Watson and Lina Roessler

by NEIL BOYCE

Trevor Ferguson’s Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? is theatre as a fist: a kind of raw, punk production that hides the subtlety underneath.

Following a New York run in 2006, the play makes its Montreal debut, where Ferguson conceived the story expressly for actors Brett Watson and Lina Roessler.

The play starts some time after Ricky meets Adrienne at his hated mother’s funeral, where the two hurled themselves at each other. The young lovers then discover they are actually—oops—half-siblings.

Ferguson’s play echoes Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love; we’re voyeurs to a couple in the throes of an obsessive, incestuous relationship. They toy with one another—sometimes sweetly, sometimes corrosively—while skirting the truth of who they are and why they are together.

But Ferguson takes the volatile premise in a different direction. For the lovers holed up in a trashed Parisian flat, the edgy games they play are everything: “We have to do something to pass the time,” says Adrienne.

So with word puzzles, truth-or-dare and ecstatic recitations of Ricky’s beloved Nietzsche, they keep up their need for a fix: a constant jolt to remind them they are alive; a noise to drown the pain of their damaged pasts.

They have been planning to kill themselves for days, but still they keep at it, Adrienne warning Ricky that she’s yet to reveal her darkest secret, “What is down deep in the cold, icy waters you know nothing about.”

Guy Sprung’s direction keeps us off balance, allowing us to think we know what we’re dealing with before pulling out the rug.

The two actors seem born for the roles—as they wrestle for dominance, their slight turns from playful to cruel, the heart-rending way in which Roessler breaks down—it all rings true. Roessler and Watson’s bold and risky choices make it work.

Spoiling the ending would be unforgivable, but there is room for Sprung to ratchet the tension further, taking it as far as it can go, making the denouement snap like a hangman’s rope.

It’s a challenging and oddly full-of-life creation, showing what can be done with a crack script, imaginative direction and a finely-tuned pair of actors.

At the Segal’s cozy new Studio theatre, Leah Cherniak directs Montreal actor Michelle Polak in Toronto playwright Kristen Thomson’s award-winning I, Claudia.

Using masks for her multiple roles, Polak switches between a 12-year-old girl, her grandfather, Daddy’s new irritating girlfriend, and the school janitor as she delves into the hurt and confusion of a young girl’s overturned life.

Mainly set in the school boiler room, Polak puts great energy into the story she narrates—and for a time, it’s enough. Cherniak transitions the characters cleverly with costumes stashed all over the stage.

However, the fairly uncomplicated story of pre-teen angst over parental divorce is a mite thin for its 90-plus minutes. Sufficient for a great Fringe show, surely, but one wonders when it will come together. The payoff is there, if overwrought, but arrives a little late to matter.

“I am not as happy as I seem to be,” says Claudia at one point. Girl, I know just what you mean.

I, Claudia, to April 13 at the Segal Centre
Studio (5170 côte-Ste Catherine)
(514) 739-7944, or www.segalcentre.org
Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?
to March 30 at Théâtre La Chapelle
(3700 St-Dominique)
Tickets/info: (514) 843-7738,
or billetterie@lachapelle.org