Hell is other people

Tableau d’Hôte opens a house of horrors with
the bleak but powerful Lion in the Streets

NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH:
Charley Hausknost, George Bekiaris and Saro Saroyan

By NEIL BOYCE

Take the child’s opening words to heart: “Don’t be scared.”

Judith Thompson’s 1990 play Lion in the Streets offers a bleak picture of our world: the central character is a ghost, a murdered nine-year-old girl named Isobel who wanders a Toronto neighbourhood 17 years after her death.

She’s searching for her killer by observing the lives of her neighbours, and what a group they are—from the pack mentality of the playground, to the hells of suburbia, to the mind of a child killer. The interconnected tableaus of the play are a Bosch painting come to life: an array of evil from petty to monstrous. It begins with surface conflicts—the common day-to-day cruelties we inflict upon one another—before diving deep into dark, obsessive themes.

Mike Payette directs a large and lively 19-actor cast in the Tableau d’Hôte production that features a black-clad kind of Greek chorus. Moving around the peripheries of the stage, their voices and shifting poses reinforce Thompson’s raw story and cutting dialogue.

At the dumpy MainLine space, a giant sandbox filled with black dirt contains the actors and coats them, smudging faces, knees and elbows with grime: the characters in this story wear their sins.

We see plump, cheerful Sue (Catherine Lemieux) stripped of her clothes and dignity as she tries to win back an unfaithful husband at a party. “Nothing we do is private,” she accuses. She consoles herself with the hope that his colon cancer will return and she will care for him “until his lips turn black.”

Ten-year-old Charley Hausknost as Isobel is a brave casting choice that pays off. Holding her own among experienced actors, the girl adds tremendous poignancy to the play when she asks, “who gonna take me home?”

Marianne Smiley is great as the iconic suburban Laura: a fussy, uptight housewife who channels life’s dissatisfactions through the dreary minutiae of daycare menu planning, railing that sugar addiction in a child inevitably leads to the “next generation’s crack addict.”

Liz Burns’s Joanne knows she’s dying of bone cancer and imagines a perfect, Ophelia-like death before being dragged back to reality by “friend” Rhonda (Tamara Brown), who finds her illness distasteful.

Sherry and Eddie (Annie Murphy and Kristian Hodko) are an insanely dysfunctional engaged couple. She had been raped and he still obsesses over it, demanding she describe her assault again and again, “or the wedding is off!” He is transfixed—and she gets off—as they revisit this ritual before returning to picking out china patterns.

Shiong-En Chan unhinges the production in a shocking performance as Scarlett, a woman with severe cerebral palsy. She twitches and writhes in the dirt as she ecstatically describes a mysterious midnight lover who appears at the foot of her bed, getting more and more worked up until, disgusted, her homecare worker Christine (Stefanie Buxton) kicks the crap out of her.

Lucie Monsarrat’s terrific sound design supports the difficult material as winds howl and heartbeats pulse with rising tension.

At the end, Isobel confronts Ben (played by writer-director Joel Fishbane), a pathetic ex-con and scrounger, a perfect embodiment of the idea that abuse begets abuse. It rests, mercifully, on a note of forgiveness.

It’s a fascinating production with imaginative direction and strong performances all around. Payette modulates the piece just this side of overwhelming the audience—but it’s a show that actor and audience alike are glad to wash off of themselves when it’s over.

LION IN THE STREETS, TO NOV. 2 AT
MAINLINE THEATRE (3997 ST-LAURENT).
INFO/TICKETS: (514) 848-9696