It happens in Hollywood all the time. Suddenly, there are two blockbusters about asteroids hurtling toward Earth, two animated cartoons about insects, two biopics about Truman Capote.
But I wasn’t expecting to encounter two time-shifting, film noir-inspired dramas that deal with historical injustices to Asian Canadians in quick succession.
Set in Vancouver during the 1930s and 1980s, Mieko Ouchi’s Nisei Blue, which premiered last week at the Enbridge playRites Festival, is an intriguing companion piece to The Lady in the Red Dress, David Yee’s similarly styled play about the Chinese head tax recently nominated for a Governor-General’s Award. Perhaps, a whole new genre is afoot.
Here’s the plot of Nisei Blue: Homicide detective John (Duval Lang) has just retired from the force and celebrates by meeting his old partner, Bob (Grant Linneberg), in a Downtown Eastside dive for a drink.
At the beginning of John’s career, this bar was a Japanese jazz club called The Orchid and the area was known as Japantown. It was the focal point for one of his first cases – still unsolved – involving an underground explosion and the killing of a beautiful singer named Lily (Meilie Ng).
Now, almost half a century later, John wants to finally close the case with the help of Bob and a disfigured bartender from the old days named Fumi (Brenda Kamino). There’s just one problem: He’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s and his memories keep running away from him.
On Scott Reid’s atmospheric set – a pagoda that doubles as the Lions Gate Bridge – recent Siminovitch Prize nominee Ron Jenkins directs Nisei Blue with a flair for mysterious movement. Characters fall into voids, the dead come back to life and, in one frightening sequence, the internment of Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbor is represented by police smashing paper lanterns like pinatas.
The film-noir trappings of Nisei Blue prove problematic for playwright and performers, however. Ouchi has found a great voice for Bob – foul-mouthed, politically incorrect and very entertaining – that Linneberg matches with a large, loud performance, but elsewhere the dialogue comes across less as stylish than stilted, particularly as regards Sean Baek’s Tak, a wannabe gangster and the “yellow Bing Crosby” at the Orchid.
Any play that features jazz renditions of both These Foolish Things and Phil Collins’s Against All Odds has its appeal, but Nisei Blue crumbles as it lurches into the home stretch. In a series of speeches, the play’s political context is belaboured and the mysteries are explained rather than solved. It only completely jumps the shark, however, with its final twist. Lang’s John spends the last minutes of the show in a daze with a look of anguished bafflement on his face: Forget it, John, this is Japantown.
Nothing turns out to be what it seems in Morwyn Brebner’s Heartbreaker, either, the third new play to premiere at playRites last week.
In the office of Dr. Bilk (Christian Goutsis), during Toronto’s garbage strike, two very different patients are undergoing therapy, seemingly simultaneously: student Eve (Kira Bradley) and newspaper reporter Ellen (Lindsay Burns).
Eve is there because she can’t finish her dissertation, while Ellen cranks out copy every day and has other, more hidden problems. Eve can’t stop talking, mainly about her unhealthy obsession with her new neighbours, while Ellen speaks less and less until eventually she simply sits and reads Moby-Dick during her sessions.
Dr. Bilk – his surname is one he assumed to convince patients, through reverse psychology, that they aren’t wasting their money on therapy – becomes obsessed with Ellen and increasingly uninterested in Eve. Soon, they all end up escaping the trash-ridden city for a small, lakeside cabin, along with Eve’s fabulist father (Duval Lang), who is supposed to be under house arrest, and her sister, Helen (Jamie Konchak).
The quirky world Brebner has created follows its own off-kilter logic and is filled with whip-smart philosophical dialogue, which the characters speak mostly past one another. At the cabin, Ellen ends up revealing the reasons for her depression before exiting with a gun, while Eve takes off with her family on a surreal motorized dock to discover the truth about her mother.
In her playwright’s note, Brebner writes that she wrote Heartbreaker while reading the late David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page epic Infinite Jest. I only wish she had adopted Wallace’s signature footnotes, because as the play became increasingly unmoored, I completely lost the plot. The words sparkle, the laughs are frequent and the play has an appealing enigmatic quality to it in Vanessa Porteous’s sharp, well-acted production, but I didn’t understand it at all.
The Enbridge playRites Festival continues until March 6.
