7 Stories: opaque windows on a befuddling comic world
by DREW ROWSOME -Photos by Scott Gorman
Despite there having been numerous productions since its award-winning début in 1989, I had never seen Morris Panych's 7 Stories, and was very excited to finally enjoy a classic of Canadian theatre. The Hart House production is finely staged and has moments of great hilarity, but leaves the audience in a state of gentle befuddlement rather than with any insight into the human condition.
That may be the point.
An everyman potential-suicide stands on a ledge. He is deep in thought but is constantly interrupted by the windows around him popping open to frame a series of self-absorbed neighbours. The various characters satirize and explore psychiatry, the acting profession, religion, alienation, death, and the usefulness of art. Each one is an absurd little playlet about the meaning of life and the only through line is that each is so caught up in their own little drama to ever question or engage with the everyman.
It is as if playwright Panych (Sextet) had a handful of ideas and jumbled them together hoping to tie them together with an emotional climax. The finale is spectacular and everyman Brian Haight is but fails to make an emotional connection, it fails to move. And it is interrupted by a gag apology in which another set of characters comment on the action so far. Their interpretations end with "weird" and that is probably the kindest word they use. Panych has just had them let him off the hook for having to craft a complete piece of theatre.
Of course surreal, absurdist meta-theatre doesn't have to follow any rules or make any sense beyond what the audience wants to bring to it. And the cast is game, diving into their multiple roles with gusto. There is some intriguing physical movement from Kevin Kashani as the ambiguous, sexually and in terms of his sanity, psychiatrist, and Kevin Forster (Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story) as the failed actor turned complacent gold digger. Kashani's fingers and eye lines are almost choreographed and Forster strikes pose after determined pose.
Nicole Hrgetic reacts to Scott Kuiper's fey and overly-sensitive artistic wannabe with a delicious riff on aesthetics in the funniest portion of 7 Stories. This is satire of the finest form. But 7 Stories never really recovers from a bad start with Scott Kuipers as a slick lawyer and Margarita Valderrama as a poet, who are having an affair with violent sexual overtones that are meant to be comic but that, in a post-Ghomeshi world, are just unpleasant.
When the cast locks into a farcical rhythm and the words fly, there are many laughs to be had, but the set, a row of windows lined along the ledge, gets the heartiest roar when the windows, deliberately or not, stick. Kuipers and Hrgetic get great slapstick out of the recalcitrant panes and if they were improvising, extra kudos.
I wish 7 Stories had inspired me to explore the questions, the human condition, more. But, again, that may be the point.
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