Saudade

Don’t let Theatre Plexus’ simple setup fool you. Saudade will leave you twitching in your seat, wanting to chug cheap liquor and hang out the window of a fast car, hollering the lyrics to some catchy anthemic song.

At first glance, the small space at Granville Island’s Arts Umbrella seems improvised, hastily thrown together -- two glaringly-bright overhead projectors, a small ghetto blaster, blank sheets hung from the walls. Cramped school desks and low benches form the audience seating. The audience’s knees bend like heron legs as they shuffle their feet and try to find a comfortable position to sit in and a suitable place to rest their hands. It is awkward, uncomfortable, restless.

This -- this is high school. Where the body is ungainly and  uncooperative, where nothing fits.

Erica is a restless and defiant, passionate and unfocussed teen. Driven by hormones and the need to find meaning amidst the confusion and expectations of sexuality and coming-of-age life choices, she is hellbent on…on…something. I kept expecting her to scream. Or smash something.

Writer and actor Caitlin McCarthy is brilliant. From her defiant glare to her restless slumped shoulders, she settles so easily into the role of teenager Erica that I caught myself wondering if she perhaps actually were merely seventeen. McCarthy snaps between portraying Erica and peripheral characters seamlessly, pulling off challenging scenes such as classroom confrontations and hallway conversations with ease.

Clad in simple denim shorts and plain white T-shirt, she foregoes costume changes, instead using the subtleties of posture, gestures, and cadence of speech to convey the oversexed biology teacher’s eccentric philosophizing, the guidance counsellor’s frustratingly chirpy vapidness, and the well-heeled but creepy vice principal’s boiling-below-the-surface secrets.

I generally dislike audience-participation pieces; when watching a show, I prefer to be entertained rather than part of the entertainment. Here, however, the audience is integrated into the show subtly -- they are addressed as Erica’s beloved (or rather, resented) classmates, friends, and boyfriend. The small task which audience members are requested to do before the show is integrated into a later scene smoothly, cleverly, and anonymously, slipping audience members into the role of nervous school kids anxiously waiting to see if their contribution will be picked.

Saudade is worth going to see for the poetry of words alone. The use of language in the characters’ monologues is beautiful and riddled with between-the-lines and beneath-the-surface references and allusions. An intellectual intrigued by metaphors and hidden meanings would have a grand time analyzing this script with its subtle personifications of the archetypes of Freudian psychology.

Given the age spread of potential audience members, I would have liked to have seen a few simple plastic chairs added to the audience seating, as the low wooden benches and cramped school desks could prove unduly problematic for those with bad backs or trick knees.The show is powerful, fast-paced, and rich in detail; it would be a shame for anyone to miss parts of it due to being distracted by aches and discomfort.

Like many teenage stories, Erica’s journalled journey through her final year of high school ends with an ill-advised choice, a sharp-tongued surprise, the kind of decision made by someone who is clever and angry and only theoretically aware of the ramifications of their actions. But by this point in the story, we shudder and grin, sympathize and reconsider, remembering our own youth and frustrated drives to leave some mark of our own on the uncooperative world around us.