Don’t Look: at your cousin that way

The set is unapologetically messy with bits of paper and books scattered everywhere, random windows hanging upstage, rolling chairs crudely strapped together and there are a few too many awkward transitions, yet *Don’t Look* is a completely charming story about a moment of mild incest between two first cousins that spirals into half a lifetime of social impotence. It is presented as part of Toronto's "Next Stage Festival":http://www.fringetoronto.com/nstf/nstf_shows.html.

Playwrights Rebecca Applebaum and Daniel Sadavoy play Ariella and Daniel who in their early teenage years, get caught sharing their first kiss in Daniel’s basement, post-funeral, by their entire family. An extremely funny scene that has both actors, shirtless, listing off all the members of their family (there might have been about 50) who have made it to the basement to witness their shame including, of course, the Rabbi. The cousins are immediately physically separated from ever seeing each other again. Their parents then seal up that divide by filling their heads (as only a Jewish mother can) with images of “freak babies”, the supposed products of breeding within such a small gene pool.

This moment of humiliation and shame embeds itself so deep within each character that they grow into socially dysfunctional adults. While Daniel fears touch, Ariella fears her entire being and ends up creating for herself a whole other persona, named Melissa, whose diary entries become a vehicle for the unleashing of erotic, albeit fictional, adventures. Oddly each of the cousins seem stuck in a perpetual cycle of running away from that moment and also self-branding themselves as freaks. They continually confess to everyone they meet that they once kissed their cousin, thereby ensuring that they will never live the moment down.

The script does attempt to bring in some philosophical and scientific arguments, around the taboo of incest including the age old “we all descended from Adam and Eve making us all cousins” argument. Ultimately, the play doesn’t make an interesting or strong enough point for or against incest. In fact the whole moral question, is almost negated when the cousins, in a bit of cruel manifest destiny, fulfill their torturous teenage taunts of being “cousin fuckers”, coming full circle back to the “illicit” basement and having sex. This seems to cure the cousins of their desire for each other, turning the piece into an anthropological illustration of only wanting something because you can’t have it and not a matter of social or religious ethics or even a case of forbidden love, in the Shakespearean sonnet sort of way.

Although the scales of the story seem slightly off balance as the incendiary kiss plays more like an innocent case of pre-teen experimentation than a trigger to sociopathic behavior, Applebaum and Sadavoy have such great comedic chemistry in playing the cousins and all their various counterparts that this is easily forgivable. Daniel starts reluctantly dating an awkward girl whose grandparents are first cousins and Ariella finds a corporate guy who is far too excited by her pornographic writing. Despite the lack of real intellectual debate on this topic, I willing hopped on board for the absurdly funny ride of blowing things way out of proportion.

_The Steady State Theatre Project Presents Don't Look, by Daniel Sadavoy and Rebecca Applebaum, part of the Next Stage Festival. Directed by Maya Rabinovitch, featuring: Daniel Sadavoy and Rebecca Applebaum. For more information snog your way_ "here":http://www.fringetoronto.com/nstf/nstf_shows.html