THE ECO SHOW: AN ELEGY PREVIEWS FROM MAY 13, OPENS MAY 15 AND RUNS TO
JUNE 1. TUE-SAT 8PM; SUN 2PM (PWYC). $20-$25. BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES
THEATRE, 12 ALEXANDER. 416-975-8555.
Don’t mistake the title of The Eco Show. It’s not smugly enlightened theatre meant to congratulate its audience on their ever-greener lifestyles. It couldn’t be more different, actually. Bringing “eco” back to its etymological roots (it comes from the Greek oikos, or “house”), playwright-director Daniel Brooks (The Good Life, Insomnia) reads the disintegrating environment through the lives of a family — two parents, two children and a grandparent. The approach is sophisticated, drawing on classic avant-garde precedents like Chekhov, Ionesco and most noticeably Beckett (the father’s name is Hamm). The message is devastating, Brooks’ scenario — set in a near future choked by the crises we’re just beginning to face — calling into question the very possibility of contentment as we’ve come to know it.
Actor Fiona Highet plays Gwen, the mother in The Eco Show. She, along with all but one cast member, has been with the piece for about a year (it premiered last June at Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques), and is still perceptibly engaged with its knotty issues. A mother of two herself, Highet sees Gwen both as “a metaphorical earth [who] can no longer take the stress that is laid on her” and as a highly flawed individual, bound to circumstances that arise from her masochistic impulses to nurture a nagging, wheelchair-bound partner, his dying father and a pair of precocious, restless, home-schooled (and home-confined, due to the environment) children.
“Children are an expression of love and hope and I think that’s what’s so difficult for Gwen,” says Highet, clearly factoring her own motherhood into the equation. “But what’s the point in raising them or feeding them or keeping them from being sick if the Great Lakes are drying up and dying? Overpopulation is a reality. For me, I can live on those two levels at once, but I guess it’s a luxury to operate in that way. That’s the thing in the play: those levels have met up for Gwen — loving your kids and being nervous for the future in the same breath.”
The Eco Show addresses a complementary idea, which Brooks has openly acknowledged in previous interviews: the value of artists dedicating themselves to their artwork in the face of dwindling resources and impending catastrophe. The character of Joe, Gwen’s son, gives voice to such concerns, needling his father who continues to work persistently on his writing and occasionally spouts off about classical music: just whom does he think his future audience will be? Robots? Micro-organisms?
Highet cops to the ecological footprint of The Eco Show itself: the rigorous, six-day rehearsal schedule that necessitates takeout, cabs and the like; the bright lights that are on all day in the theatre during these rehearsals. It does indeed have a Beckettian flavour to it — all of this merde piling up because of good intentions, because of an impulsive, persistent need for happiness or enlightenment, or at least the promise of them.
“You keep moving forward,” says Highet. “Maybe you’ve had a child who’s going to see tremendous hardship and suffering as a consequence of things that even we knew were coming. Maybe they won’t even be able to afford to live the most basic way you and I do. This is a distinct possibility. But would it really be worth it not to have any? It would be capitulating, I think, and at complete odds with creativity and the human spirit.”