Human Animals: living the apocalypse from the inside out
7 Mar 2019

by Drew Rowsome -

People can get used to terrible things. Very quickly. If they have to.
It doesn’t take much for things to start to fall apart.

Birds are gathering in intimidating flocks. And dying. Or flinging themselves into windows. The raccoons and foxes are rabid. Or dying. Mr Marmalade the cat is missing. Nature seems to have run amok. The government, and a chemical company, react swiftly, setting green spaces aflame. "It's a pity about the parks and the pets but it's for the common good," says a character. "They can do whatever they want if it makes people feel safe," says another.

Playing out at a breakneck pace, scenes are staccato punctuation amid an ambiguous storyline, Human Animals is an apocalyptic horror show seen from the inside. The confusion and fear felt by the characters is, through a clever and immersive set and lighting design by Nick Blais, becomes the audience's own emotional state. The already claustrophobic St Matthew's Clubhouse shrinks as the playing spaces narrow tighter and tighter. Human Animals becomes a cross between theatre and a dark ride.

Stef Smith's play, this is a North American premiere, is an anthropomorphic riff on Martin Niemöller's poem "First they came . . ." told through several sets of relationships that all eventually dovetail. Aviva Armour-Ostroff and the resonant-voiced Carlos González-Vío are a couple about to celebrate an anniversary and while still lusting after each other, the union is fragile. More so when he attempts to nurse an injured pigeon back to health. A grieving widow played by the brittle and charming Deborah Drakeford drinks  to forget in the company of her gay bff Ryan Hollyman (Macbeth). When alcohol is not enough, exacerbated by the arrival of her estranged daughter Arlen Aguayo Stewart, she begins taking Mr Marmalade's prozac.

The gay bff has also begun an intense flirtation with the confident and slickly handsome Andre Sills, who happens to run the chemical company. The company where Armour-Ostroff's character works. The relationships and their meaning are revealed in short scenes set in multiple locations in and around the stage in the round. The dialogues are heightened reality and more than occasionally obtuse, so director Christopher Stanton (They Say He Fell) wisely has the scene changes so tightly choreographed that they overlap. The pace is that of a thriller. 

We are never given time to assess the validity of the roiling emotions - the relationship between Hollyman and Sills is suspect to say the least though the pair make it plausible - and the cast is so committed and in continual close-up, so the melodrama plays as fact. When the horrific action happening outside the walls is described, they are dropped in tiny, casual bombshells and are all the more horrifying for it. When the horror literally invades the walls, it happens in jump scares that are vividly effective. The cast never leaves, silently watching, waiting and internally debating, while the duo in the light fight, feint or flirt - the exact Greek chorus function we the audience are serving. Disbelief suspended, indictment complete.

The fever pitch continues for an intense 90 minutes before an epilogue that is too heavy-handed for even this creative crew to pull off. But the point is made eloquently and there are images - the penguin cave, a pincushion, a fox bite, a child's stuffed toy - that haunt, not only visually but thematically. Setting Human Animals in St Matthew's Clubhouse gives it an eerie unreal reality, a stolidity. Even the extreme cold - one couldn't help but wince in empathy whenever an actor had to brave one of the exterior entrances - added an isolation so crucial to the genre and to the experience of the characters. I'm sure I'm not the only audience member who left nervously checking over my shoulder for glowing-eyed raccoons or goons with flame throwers.