The Particulars: the devil is in the comic details
18 Oct 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz and Alexis McKeown

Gordon is an average man with an average job and an average, if regimented, lifestyle. He cares about the environment, tends to his garden, is house proud and a church-goer, and works hard to be inconspicuous but to fit in at work. Our only clue that there is more going on, is that he makes his entrance accompanied by a minor maelstrom of ghostly dancers clad and veiled in semi-transparent white robes. The devil is in the details, in The Particulars.

The Particulars has a similar structure to playwright/director Matthew MacKenzie's transcendent Bear. Gordon narrates in the third person while choreography by Alida Kendell swirls around him, commenting on his narration and sometimes interacting with it. The monologue is very, very funny. Until it isn't and events have become a descent into madness and surrealism. The only analogy I can think if is an early Daniel MacIvor incarnated by Emo Philips retelling The Amityville Horror in the style of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Accompanied by a chorus of dancers culled from Giselle.

MacKenzie gently vivisects the foibles of the determinedly woke, and those of a small town, as we go through Gordon's daily routine. And slowly, inexorably, that routine is disrupted by forces beyond Gordon's control. Simon Bracken, who plays Gordon/the narrator, is initially mild-mannered and hunky in a nerd-who-does-yoga way. The photos provided for this piece, are from a previous production and the Gordon I saw was not wearing a talk show host suit, but rather an open bathrobe over a tighty whities dance belt. Instead of a vaudevillian master of ceremonies, he is vulnerable and frazzled, caught in a moment that he would never want seen. A quite different effect.

Bracken speaks bombastically in rich stentorian tones, giving each detail and anecdote equal weight, while also twisting with erratic, exquisite comic timing, Shatner-esque pauses and emphasis. As if the story is just flooding out as he recalls it. Except for the times that words are happening in his head and, his mouth twitches and mouths words we do not hear, cannot be allowed to escape. It is a bravura idiosyncratic grandstand of a performance. And, I repeat, very, very funny. Until it isn't.

The dancers, including Laura Ebata of Bear and Femmes du Feu, are mysterious in their anonymity beneath the layers of wispy fabric. They are called to turn emotions, natural creatures from chickadees to marauding ants to feral cats, and a shattering state of mind, and do so with grace and mystic fluidity. Only Richard Lee Hsi, the lone male, is unmasked near the finale and it is an important clue. Or is it?

At about the halfway mark there is a bit of information that reframes all that has come before. The humour, we have been laughing at Gordon's privileged plight, gains a melancholic edge and deepens with our empathy. The way the details, the particulars, are parcelled out is masterful and the climax is a shocker. Intellectually and logically it is a leap, emotionally it is devastating and powerful. And open to interpretation. One races back through the narrative and, I suspect, makes connections depending on one's own existence with its own set of particulars. Framed in my context as a gay man, it was gut-wrenching.

What resonated was that an assumption I made was proven to be very wrong. Just like our assumptions about the people around us are often disastrously wrong. Rushing to judgement, dismissive or actively mocking, doesn't take into account that we know nothing about someone else's circumstances or history. What begins as a slick stand-up - Bracken makes a point of our seeing him hit his marks for the very evocative lighting and often pauses impatiently while the bombastic horror film score catches up - turns into an emotionally cathartic exploration of an intense personal state of pain. Great fun with a tasty kick.