Sassy Sonnets: “this” is a kiss

Sassy Sonnets is on stage courtesy of the newly formed International Storytelling Company (ISC)  at the Havana Theatre.

For those not in the know, the Havana Theatre sits behind a restaurant on Commercial Drive and ISC provides a quick bite of theatre sauced with some of the most beautiful love poetry in English.  By turns goofy, witty, and moving, the show uses the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a precise, energetic physicality to portray the vagaries of a marriage and a hot love affair.  Never prissy or reverential, it is true to the mix of boldness and polish of the sonnets themselves—and it also makes something new and contemporary out of these words.  The actors (Alex Goldie, Andrew Ferguson, Jaime Chrest, Rachel Scott, and Marcell Reintemeister) shake, pop, sizzle, and persuade. The show continues through Sunday and plays at 9 p.m. for just under an hour, so dinner + Sassy Sonnets would make a quirky amuse-bouche of a Valentine’s date.

The characters are designated by costume details (a tie, a hairband) that are exchanged among the actors.  This device (familiar from cabaret theatre, melodrama —“I’ll pay the rent”— and one-person shows) allows five actors to play the three main characters (or aspects of their psyches) at different times and makes for a more allusive and non-linear experience.  Personally, I didn’t exactly follow the narrative, but this didn’t mar my experience of the show, as each scene elaborated the themes of love, angst, desire, and corporeal vitality and fragility in various and engaging ways.  

Particularly hilarious are two juxtaposed vignettes.  In one, the sonnet that begins “when forty winters shall besiege thy brow, and dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,” becomes a beauty consultation between two women that ends with the purchase of some face cream, while in the other, an earnest therapist (a deadpan Alex Goldie) keeps summarizing the sonnet (“Weary with toil”) spoken in bits by his patient, “shrinking” the language into deflationary summaries.  The therapist concludes by asking, “Mr. Spear, who are you thinking about?” — a question that scholars and students have pondered for centuries, and that the sonnets court. (Making narratives out of the sonnets is another perennial activity.)  In another scene, “sin of self love” becomes a gleeful Facebook interaction, with four of the actors embodying the internet.  

But then sonnet 135, which on the face of it is a back-handed and bawdy parody of a seduction argument, is repurposed as a struggle for self acceptance in which the speaker asks if his desires are all right: “shall will in others seem right gracious/and in my will no fair acceptance shine?”  And when the disenchanted husband speaks “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” directly to the misprized lady, with lots of pauses, we feel her loss and pain.  

When the opening procreation sonnet was spoken by a woman (the exuberant and precise Rachel Scott), I was worried that the performance was going to limit the sonnets to a heterosexual narrative.  But I needn’t have worried: among other choices that bring out the homoerotic desire represented in Shakespeare’s sonnets in fresh ways, the kissing pilgrims sonnet from Romeo and Juliet is shared out between two men (as is, more conventionally, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”).  The kissing sonnet is later repeated in the mind of the wife, spoken by a gleefully demonic Jaime Chrest and another actor.  And in “Shall I compare thee,” the “this” of “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee” is a kiss—a nice rereading of the last line of this famous sonnet that honours the sonnets’ concern with the preservation of the lover’s physical, erotic self.

Lively, accessible, fresh theatre.  Go see it.

For more information on Sassy Sonnets go here.