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This year, the University of Toronto Drama Coalition presented the 26th annual UofT Drama Festival, a competition which features student written, directed, and produced plays from across all three UofT campuses. The festival ran from February 8th-10th at Hart House Theatre. The Saturday lineup included plays presented by the UC Follies, the St. Michael’s College Troubadours, and, for the first time, an independent group, Friends From High School.
Pills and Mangoes
The first play of the evening was Pills and Mangoes, one of two plays that the UC Follies put on in this year’s festival. Written and directed by Hannah-Rae Sabyan, the play focuses on a young couple struggling with the pervasive effects of mental illness on their lives. Lucy (Nicole Karges) is an expressive, slightly type A “micromanager” that happily bounces around the apartment that she shares with her boyfriend Ben (Kirk Munroe). But Ben, who suffers from an unspecified mental illness, presumably an anxiety disorder, is unable to fully partake in what should otherwise be a picture of normalcy. This contrast in feeling is represented throughout the play; a piercing white noise and dim, blue-toned lights indicate that Ben is experiencing a depressive episode which he is unable to fully emerge out of when the lights return to normal and the day is supposed to carry on. There are, however, moments of high spirits with a fittingly awkward seduction scene that is light-hearted and amusing to watch.
The couple’s relationship becomes increasingly strained—Ben stops going to work and Lucy begins to resent that she spends all of her efforts trying to make him feel better without success. They also attend a friend’s party, where Ben has a panic attack and vomits all over the fruit platter. Sabyan’s play skillfully portrays the way mental illness manifests in traces of daily life; specifically, the irritability, the frustration, and the selfishness that can emerge when people find themselves in a situation that seems intractable. Pills and Mangoes, however, is not without its hope. The play ends with a poignant scene where Ben and Lucy share a mango as they make amends—it’s an ode to perseverance, in whatever form that may take.
Raining Petals
The next play was Raining Petals, written by Q-Nahm Park and directed by Park and Serina Keh. It takes place in the home of a Korean family that attempt to fit within conventions of Canadian life. The play’s opening scene depicts a young boy named Soo-hoo (Joanne Perez) contentedly playing video games after school. But Soo-hoo’s father Charles (Ben Liao Gormley) won’t have any of it—he punishes Soo-hoo for shirking his academic responsibilities, striking his legs until he bleeds and making him stand up against a wall with his arms raised for an extended period of time. It evidently pains Soo-hoo’s mother (Bailey Hoy) to see her son suffering in such an overt manner, and when her husband is absent, she rushes over to Soo-hoo to console him. But she is ultimately subservient to her husband’s tyranny, and dares not contradict him. Their household is governed by archaic conservatisms, such as Charles’s contention that “men are shepherds, and women are sheep, needing to be ruled.”
Soo-hoo’s sister Ji (Alison Jeon), an affable and bright-eyed teenager, offers a slight reprieve from the play’s tension: she attempts to share news of the boy she likes with her mother, but the conversation ends in an argument, with her mother insisting that she shouldn’t date anyone who isn’t Korean. Soo-hoo’s tutor Alex (Roark Smeathers) notices that he has been abused, leading to a heightened confrontation between him and Charles about cultural differences. There is additional violence, and the play escalates when Alex gets the police involved as a result of Charles’s abuse. Soo-hoo is left to make a choice that will be devastating either way: whether to lie to the police in order to keep his family together, or tell the truth about his father’s abuse at the risk of tearing his family apart.
For a play that deals with such sensitive topics, Raining Petals is strangely absolute—Charles is so unequivocally severe that one is left to wonder whether such a person could actually exist. Despite this, the play has moments that say something genuine about the immigrant experience. For example, Soo-hoo’s mother shares a memory of her first time ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s, despite being unable to speak English; Bailey Hoy performs this touching scene with such humorous aplomb that it highlights the tenacity required to get by as an immigrant in a foreign country.
The Rhythm Method
The last play of the evening was energetic and atypical. Written by Micaela Robertson and directed by William Dao, The Rhythm Method follows four sisters as they narrate their mutual upbringing in a series of interconnected monologues that jump around temporally. Most of the attention is on Happy (Taranjot Bamrah), who, contrary to her name, feels disconnected from her family and by extension, from the rest of the world around her. An episode of childhood bullying has left her feeling fractured, and consequently she struggles to organize her life in a meaningful way. Robertson’s screenplay is strong; moments of wordplay and witty intercessions by the sisters lend well to the unconventional format of the narrative. Also, stage space was used creatively in a way that nicely framed the play’s narrative movement. The cast used balloons to mark the space around them, and then popped them at a pivotal moment, which heightened the dramatic effect. Though the ending felt a bit disjointed, The Rhythm Method was a great play to end the festival on—it balances fun and serious subjects of familial love and unceasing efforts towards mutual understanding.
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