Monster: thrilling and chilling with an earworm

25 Nov 2023 -

It's always a good sign when one comes out of a show humming, or even singing, the theme song or big number. Except that Monster isn't a musical and the jaunty melody reverberating in my head will now forever be spiced with darkness and irony. And awe. Awe because this production of Monster is just that worthy of superlatives. Richly comic, deeply disturbing and occasionally terrifying. Add in that familiar song that serves as a refrain, and Monster contains just about everything one could want from a night at the theatre.

Those who visit the theatre frequently or seriously, will be familiar with the playwright Daniel MacIvor (Let's Run Away, New Magic Valley Fun Town, Who Killed Spalding Gray?, Cake and Dirt, The Best Brothers, A Beautiful View, Arigato, Tokyo, His Greatness). Monster is one of the plays that, before this blog existed when I just went to the theatre to be dazzled, made MacIvor into as much of a household name as a Canadian theatrical legend can become. The solo plays that he and Daniel Brooks created were ground-breaking in form and content, and served as an international showcase for MacIvor's astonishing abilities as an actor. Since then, the techniques they developed, and the psychological depths they plumbed, have become part of the theatrical language. But actually seeing Monster still shocks with its sheer audacity and inventiveness. There is no point in trying to summarize a plot, the play within a play within a film within a monologue within etc is not dependent on surprise—I saw Monster years ago and was still delighted and upended being reacquainted with the twists and convolutions—but spoilers would be in poor taste.

MacIvor sets up a variation on a mystery, or a true crime podcast, that delves into a particularly horrific torture and murder. While delving into who, why and how, MacIvor writes inside the heads of all the characters. Examining motivation, guilt, and the human propensity, inclination?, to be monstrous. Underlying all is a searching examination of the fourth wall, theatre as an influence, and the difference between emotion and being manipulated into feeling emotion. But none of the thematic concerns matter as Monster rockets along. There are laughs, jump scares and that peculiar particular ecstatic frisson that occurs when the puzzle pieces lock into place. Our guide in this incarnation is Karl Ang (Cockroach, Lear) and he gives a virtuoso performance, the effort betrayed only by the sweat that begins to stain his shirt. He is commanding and confiding, then chilling and charming. He tells us initially, in near-rhyme rap-like couplets, of how he prefers to do selfish and evil rather than do any good, "Mine is my only concern." He then morphs into both halves of a bickering heterosexual couple, a young boy, an entire AA meeting, and several other characters, all revolving around the horrendous central murder which, it must be noted, is presented in a lurid manner that is as salaciously seductive and it is repellent. Which is one of the major points of Monster.

Ang is aided immeasurably by nimble lighting (each character has a a slightly different angle or colour tone to alter Ang's features) by Trevor Schwellnus and sound effects both subliminal and aggressive from stalwart sonic and musical genius Thomas Ryder Payne. How much this vision deviates from or builds upon—the text itself has been wittily and seamlessly updated—Brooks and MacIvor's original conception, is between director Soheil Parsa (The House of Bernardo Alba) and the powerful results on stage. The devil is in the details and, in a project this intimately collaborative, the credit must go to all. Ang not only modulates his voice and posture to create individual characterizations, a minimal physical tic is also given. The movements barely register until, in an astonishing moment set in a speeding car, a believable speeding car that has been conjured out of thin air, a character is silent during dialogue yet we are perfectly aware of who is reacting and why. The momentary awareness of just how skillfully and subtly we have been manipulated into another reality/realities, is thrilling and chilling in equal measures. And inspires, again, awe. I hope Burt Bachrach was as entertained, appalled and transported as this audience was.