Meta-theatre

Mike Czuba’s new play
I Am I swallows its own tale

TWO MEN BECOME ONE:
George Bekiaris, Patricia McKenzie, Tristan Lalla

by NEIL BOYCE

All in all, Mike Czuba’s I Am I was a night of playwright therapy, I suppose. The show at Players’ Theatre began promisingly enough when three actors sprinted on stage and launched into a scene.

George Bekiaris and Tristan Lalla are Man #1 and Man #2, but really are two sides of one guy. Bekiaris is the awkward, analytical, low self-confidence dude who always says the wrong thing to the girl, while Lalla is his smooth, predatory, alpha male counterpart.

As they confront Sonya (Patricia McKenzie), the story repeats and recycles, spinning off in all directions from a single moment: a pick-up scene in a bar. He (and the other he) beats himself up over how he blew his chance with the lovely Sonya, while she never ceases to be astonished at the cluelessness of men.

Actors step in and out of the play, address the audience, discuss scenes, remind themselves and us that we are, in fact, in a theatre and that there is a story to be told and a crowd to entertain.

It could have been a wild, fractured look at the conventions of the genre. Certainly, director Larry Lamont kept the volume high and the pace blinding, but he’s substituted high caloric output for sharp writing and purposeful direction.

What’s the play about? The three characters offer their opinions: It’s about “what do men want nowadays?” Or it’s a look at sexual politics in the modern era. Or, as Sonya/McKenzie says as she stops the show to chat with the sound designer and dish on one of her co-stars, “I had to do something because he was fucking the whole thing up!”

And as they struggled to finish in some fashion, the cast turned to the audience for help. What followed tells a lot about the size of the English Montreal theatre community, when both people who got pulled into the story were actors themselves (who some thought were planted intentionally). McKenzie “forgets her lines” at one point, and actor Marianne Smiley, who happened to be in the front row, was brought on to coach her, scratching her head at the confused story and adding some blessed comic relief. Later, Paul Van Dyck (Paradise Lost), another front row victim, was given the script and asked to help them finish off the play. Turning to a point near the end, he gasped, “The page is blank.”

While the stuttering progress of this non-story went on, guitarist Tai Timbers stood atop a heap of papier-mâché strawberries to one side of the stage and played a live soundtrack—I kid you not.

The actors’ repeated refrains of “Why are we here?” and “What are we doing here?” point out the thorny problem at the heart of Czuba’s story and Lamont’s direction—one which was never solved: while it’s great to talk about the nature of theatre and examine its stock clichés and overused markers, at some point you have to actually do a production. There must be something there besides a hodge-podge of endlessly self-referential meta-theatre. For self-psychoanalysis, I’d have been better off staying home and catching up on the second season of In Treatment.

I AM I UNTIL JULY 24 AT PLAYERS’
THEATRE (3480 MCTAVISH)