Jump!

Skydive takes physical theatre to soaring heights but the ’80s soundtrack almost kills the mood

WRITING HER OWN RULES: Langfelder

By NEIL BOYCE

So there’s a new sheriff in town—and for his first directing job at the Centaur in his first full season, new artistic director Roy Surette, with co-director Stephen Drover, has set out to impress. Canadian playwright Kevin Kerr’s Skydive is a striking, tech-heavy presentation—half-theatre, half jaw-dropping acrobatics—featuring two performers who fly over the stage for an hour-and-a-half.

The well travelled plot—really, a skimpy backdrop to the onstage action—is revealed in the course of a skydiving freefall gone wrong. As perception of time in an accident is stretched out, the story travels back and forth. Morgan, former frontman for ’80s cover band Hawk Rider and now an amateur therapist, decides to help his agoraphobic hermit of a brother Daniel by making him jump from an airplane to face his fears (played by Bob Frazer, Daniel delivers great lines such as, “I’m not OCD! I’m not OCD! I’m not OCD! .... oh, I had to say that three times.”).

The questionably skilled Morgan dubs his method Para-therapy while reciting new age-y dross like, “In a freefall, you don’t fear the fall, you feel the free...” But in coaching Daniel for the jump and exploring their past through lucid dreaming, a dangerous toy box of childhood memory gets opened, spilling out clues to their estrangement as adults.

A long boom is attached to the back of each actor, providing a nearly unlimited range of motion throughout the theatre space. A black-clad team of ninjas man the devices, sending actors soaring over the stage, shaking them like rag dolls, hovering them above the set, or keeping their feet a few disconcerting inches off the floor. It all makes for some fantastic blocking: actors deliver lines upside down or perpendicular to one another in space or—wild and disorienting to see—stand next to each another, then slowly lose gravity and drift away.

Aligned with the technical wizardry required for the show is the performance of James Sanders as Morgan, an actor and writer with a quadriplegic disability who was painstakingly fitted with a hidden, full-body brace. The result, choreographed by Sven Johansson for a boom arm device of his own creation, the “ES Dance Instrument,” gives an amazing range of motion and expression to the normally wheelchair-bound actor.

Delivery of lines vary from stand-up comical to the pitch of an improv performer in a salesman routine, with the occasional lovely turn of phrase: a freefall is described as “...soaring on the exhalation of God.”

Though appropriate, the bad ’80s soundtrack—including A Flock of Seagulls and Montreal’s own Corey Hart—begins to grate when they reach the Van Halen karaoke number. And I’m convinced that nobody needs to hear Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” anymore.

It’s a visual blast, but as the hilarious message on the Centaur Web site warns: “There will be non-toxic fog, coarse language and ’80s flashbacks during the performance.”

Supertramp nearly killed it for me.

SKYDIVE, TO DEC. 7 AT CENTAUR
THEATRE (453 ST-FRANÇOIS-XAVIER)
TICKETS: (514) 288-3161 OR
WWW.CENTAURTHEATRE.COM