The Presumptuous Ducks: quacked up

Billed as a multi-cultural comedy about a book launch that doesn’t go exactly as planned, this production did make me laugh, but left me less cheered than troubled.

A Writer publishes her first novel in English and methodically plans the initial book reading, even relying on cue-cards to lay out the major plot points. She doesn’t get far before mistakenly calling the protagonists ducks. “This book is about three friends,” she clarifies, “and no ducks!”

Is she nervous?

Or unbalanced?

Oh yeah, this is after The Duck squats on her mind. Amber-Kelly Mackereth wanders by in yellow tights and a feathered bill. Her physical comedy is excellent and, briefly, light-hearted.

In this two-person (er, one person, one duck) production, The Writer delivers a series of monologues, speaking for other characters in different times and places. Amanda Lee is excellent in her bursts of frantic exasperation. Maya Mohammadali’s script is demanding and unrelenting and not that funny despite the duck. Too often I didn’t know who I was watching. The Writer, the female character, someone else altogether. But the conflation of The Writer and her female character was entirely appropriate and added to the overall anxiety of their shared / mutual experience.

In the front row of her reading, The Writer eyes her publisher, the person responsible for cutting a chapter from her book: a chapter about ducks considered “pointless, confusing, unnecessary.” Oh yeah, and it’s too ethnic. Too female. Too sentimental. Too representative of the strife and trauma experienced by a woman who immigrated from a war-ravaged religious dictatorship. No, we certainly wouldn’t want to read about that. Instead we get a story about three friends — three men — who have laudatory goals of good governance but destroy the country through fundamentalism, oppression and violence. What does it say that a woman writes an allegory about the destructive forces of patriarchal institutions, and the chapter evoking the female body politic is axed?

Hence the duck.

The Writer’s psyche is haunted, disturbed and invalidated. A manifestation of trauma, loss and fear, the duck is lodged in her mind but is also drawn from real experience. At least that’s what I choose to believe; Mohammadali’s writing is not explicit, thought it delivers a good critique and some excellent lines, like when The Writer can only quack. She cracks. A flashback lit from below by a harsh white light (light design by Ilena Lee Cramer) added to the sense of crisis, but overall The Presumptuous Ducks was perplexing at times and complex the rest of the time.
 
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