Manly banter

>> Telegraph from Departure Bay's monologues send a weak signal

by AMY BARRATT

Leah Vineberg is doing important work. Her latest piece of documentary theatre (text drawn directly from interviews with real people) is a study of eight contemporary men, all of whom are in some way living on the margins of society. They are thieves, alcoholics, drug addicts and homeless men, and Vineberg believes they have important messages for the rest of us--scratchy dispatches (hence the title) from the other side of "normal."

Telegraph from Departure Bay is on to something, but unfortunately in the production currently playing at the Monument-National, that something has not yet been realized. In its current form, the play is just too short to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. There are eight characters on stage telling their stories in interwoven monologues. The show runs a brief 70 minutes. Allowing for a few recorded excerpts and silences, that gives each character maybe eight minutes to speak. No wonder we come away feeling we don't know any of them.

Vineberg obviously feels very strongly about these characters, but in doling out the Coles Notes on them, she has prevented the audience from sharing her enthusiasm. If it's going to keep all of these characters, Telegraph from Departure Bay needs to be opened way up.

Ana Cappelluto (set) and Robin A. Paterson (lighting) have created a wonderful mindscape through which the actors move in their own orbits--occasionally locking eyes, but never speaking with another character. The problem is that although it looks great, the design doesn't really help us understand what's going on. Because the text denies us some basic information about the characters, like where they live and what they do (with a few exceptions), a more realistic design would have helped us out.

Vineberg is trying to move us away from our need to define a person by his occupation. I get that. But if a guy gets up and starts telling me about his rotten childhood but never gets around to telling me where he is now, it's not satisfying. The work would be much more powerful if we were given a snapshot of a character off the bat and were allowed to make our inevitable judgments. Then we could work backwards to find out how he got there.

The play's own press material acknowledges that for the purposes of theatre, we need to label people. It talks of a cast featuring "a cop, a business man, a stripper, an ex-bank robber and a street kid." I could say with certainly which actor played three of those five roles, but I couldn't swear to the rest. If somebody's a street kid, would it be so terrible to put him on a street corner and throw in some traffic sounds? Again, there's something to be said for keeping an audience off balance, but that's not the same thing as keeping them asking "What's going on?" for the length of a representation.

By all accounts, Vineberg is one of those special people who can see beyond the physical, taking the halt and the lame into her heart. That made her the ideal person to collect these stories, but she needs to rethink her packaging of them if she wants them to resonate with the fearful, judgmental masses. That said, some funding body should definitely help her go further with this project, because she really is on to something.

Telegraph From Departure Bay, to March 17 at Théâtre du Maurier, Monument-National, 8:30pm, $22, 871-2224