by AMY BARRATT

It’s not often that a piece of theatre gets as big a rise out of me as Trans-Théâtre’s Babel. When I left Espace GO last Thursday night, I was close to shedding tears of rage. But then, that’s a pretty normal reaction to getting fucked over.

The whole “Babel experience” begins long before we’re herded—and I choose the term advisedly—into the house. The lobby is inhabited by several anonymous figures in white jumpsuits and hoods wearing surgical masks. With vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs, they circulate through the crowd waving their hoses at people to “de-germ” them. There’s also a nearly nude woman (she wears a pair of briefs) strolling through the crowd encouraging people to stick post-it notes to her, labelling the parts of her body. It gets the crowd’s attention, but meanwhile 8 o’clock has come and gone and we’re already starting to feel abused. I don’t know that this is the state of mind you want an audience to be in before a show.

Another job of the de-germing crew is to go around the lobby and stick bar codes onto select audience members. As it turns out, these are the folks who will get to sit during the performance. The rest will stand on three sides of the playing area watching the action through a chain-link fence reminiscent of, at best, a batting cage, at worst, Guantanamo Bay. We’ve been warned before entering not to make ourselves too comfortable—no chance of that—and that if we want to leave, too bad, we can’t. Note to Brigitte Poupart and company: when they say that art should make the spectator “uncomfortable,” they don’t necessarily mean literally. This show simply substitutes physical discomfort for any kind of thought-provoking content.

The title obviously refers to the Biblical story in which man’s hubris in trying to build a tower to reach the heavens is punished by God making all the workers on the structure speak different languages. The project falls apart because of the resulting inability to communicate. Babel also deals with the building of a tower. Babel City, a mock-up of which we can admire in the lobby, is a 700-storey, cone-shaped structure designed to house 1.6-million people in a carefully controlled environment that they would never need—or presumably want—to leave.

The biggest part of the play—and I use the term generously—is taken up by an interview with the “architexte” of Babel City conducted by a nincompoop who doesn’t understand any of the interviewee’s answers, whether they are delivered in French, English or Spanish. The interviewer himself speaks “Americo-français,” basically French peppered with anglicisms and English syntax. There’s the language theme.

Babel is a multimedia show, with constant projections onto the back wall I couldn’t really see standing off to the side, and a soundtrack of white noise that could give Marlee Matlin a headache.

I’m often bored by theatre, and fairly frequently cheesed off at having wasted however many minutes of my life watching it, but for something to make me hate it as much as I hated Babel… well there’s a perverse kind of accomplishment in that.

The upside? It’s only about an hour long. Only a masochist, however, would shell out $25 for a ticket. :

Babel, to Nov. 2 at Espace GO
(4890 St-Laurent), 845-4890

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