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BREATH[e] Designed and Directed by Steve Lucas The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West Thursday, April 25 - Saturday, May 18, 2002 ONLY! Review by Robert Cushman, National Post - April 29, 2002 Steve Lucas, one of the best and most ubiquitous stage designers in Toronto, has now turned to direction. He has declared himself to be uncomfortable directing actors -- a trait he shares with some other designers-turned-directors, and also with some directors who have never been designers at all. Unlike them, he has followed through on the logic of his convictions and has come up with a piece employing no visible human bodies at all. It offers us 30 largely hypnotic minutes composed entirely of sound and light. This makes Lucas even more radical than Edward Gordon Craig, the harmless but extremely influential English eccentric who, in the early years of the 20th century, was proclaiming the supremacy of the director and the liberating importance of electric light. He thought actors would get in the way of his vision and proposed replacing them with life-sized puppets -- what he called übermarionettes. (It never happened.) So at least he wanted simulated people -- characters of a kind. Lucas's soundtrack (designed by Steve Gordon Marsh) comprises the insistent sound of a human heartbeat, much amplified and presumably multi-tracked, and the more subtly modulated sound of human breath. (The credit for the latter reads, "Breathing -- Jane Miller." Miller is an actress, so Lucas has had to compromise to that extent. But of course she isn't there; her contribution, too, is on tape.) What we see on stage is a cloudscape, or maybe a fogscape; anyway, it's composed of drifting smoke, variously lit. It's contained within a receding series of proscenium arches, though we don't see them at first. When they are revealed, the sharply enhanced sense of a third dimension is a real coup. The audience sit in rows, in a kind of enlarged jury box; it only holds 27 of us, but then the show is given four times nightly. It takes its shape -- I merely repeat what I'm told -- from Tantric philosophy; the program accordingly lists seven states of the mind and body, known as chakras. As a synopsis I found this less than helpful, but I acknowledge that the piece has a structure; I could feel it, even if I couldn't explain it. Lucas knows what he's doing, imaginatively as well as technically, and his sights and sounds give considerable pleasure. I'm not sure he succeeds in his professed intention of putting the audience in a trance -- I'm not even sure that would be desirable -- but I did find my mind pleasantly drifting, sometimes concentrating on what was unfolding before me, sometimes thinking about other things entirely. This, admittedly, is what happens to me at many more conventional plays, but it's nice to know that on this occasion, the author has budgeted for it. I see that I have tripped into defining BREATH[e], at least implicitly, as a play. Let's see: Nearly 50 years ago, Kenneth Tynan, in one of my favourite pieces of theatre criticism, assessed the groundbreaking credentials of a new and plotless play called Waiting for Godot. He said Samuel Beckett was proposing a criterion for drama more fundamental "than any in the books: A play ... is a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored." He didn't say it was the only way, though of course not all the others would involve being, or even having, an audience. And, even if you're just thinking of time spent in theatres, you have to concede that the Greeks and Elizabethans, who did most of the formative work here, watched their plays in daylight. Still, it's an appealing definition, though in one crucial way Beckett himself backtracked from it almost immediately. His subsequent plays all lasted less than two hours -- substantially less in many cases, to the point that when Tynan asked him to contribute to the erotic revue Oh Calcutta!, Beckett responded with a 30-second sketch in which an unseen person was heard to breathe, first in, then out. He called this little joke Breath, and it seems to have been the partial inspiration for Lucas's more serious piece. It's more serious because he has actually put it on and it works. It works well enough to wreak severe damage on another definition, one that I read in a British theatre magazine and have lived by for decades. It said that almost everything in the theatre could be dispensed with -- "even the play, if necessary" -- except for actors. Now Lucas has done without them as well -- and still produced a dramatic spectacle that involves the audience. (We wanted to applaud at the end, but weren't sure how, or whom.) He has done it, wisely, in miniature; and he may not need to do it again. For most practical purposes, the old battered definitions will serve; a battery of plays without actors would prove very boring very fast. This one has the feel of a demonstration, an exercise, but a beautiful one. It is subtitled, in bashfully small print, "a sensual experience." I would substitute "sensuous" for "sensual" and recommend it highly. |