Any Night - a bit of a crush really

How exciting to leave a performance feeling energized and smitten, only to become embroiled in a long and animated show-inspired debate in the parking lot. Standing over the gleaming, rain spattered bulk of my mother’s car, watching for the meter maid, I couldn’t resist picking my (probably smarter) friend’s brain.

After this evening’s performance of Any Night, I walked out into the no longer torrential Toronto night with words like “wow” and “creepy” on my mind and a general sense of satisfaction in my being, feeling pleased and smirking over the whole shebang. So what’s the debate?

Any Night is a really good show. Under Ron Jenkins direction, it couldn’t be tighter. It’s very well performed and I have to confess now to having a crush on not one but both of the performers, despite (because of? despite?) the extreme creepy-/nuttiness of their characters (what? I can have a crush on both of them). The production is rich with strikingly theatrical moments and electric visual images. In terms of design, I like what’s been happening in the Theatre Passe Muraille mainspace this festival – this piece and another of my favourites, If We Were Birds, make effective use of the tremendous height with tall, suspended set elements. And did I mention that Any Night is creepy?

The first few minutes, oh the first few minutes, are especially awesome and ominous. A woman sleeps on a bed, framed by long gauzy curtains. A hooded man circles her, climbing a beautiful small staircase, which we soon learn is mobile, into the curtains’ frame and then stepping down, his upturned palms spouting flames. The woman wakes, or not, in alarm, and dances, or not, violently on the bed. All to Marilyn Manson’s cover of Sweet Dreams. Foreshadow, foreshadow.

Medina Hahn is Anna, a dancer/choreographer/waitress who suffers from night terrors, smashing windows and dancing in her sleep. Daniel Arnold is Patrick, the upstairs neighbour and superintendent of sorts who oversees her unraveling. The piece explores illusion and reality, sleeping and waking, love and violation, mirrors and walls.

It seems to me that there’s a promise in the first few gripping moments of Any Night: it’s a highly theatrical promise of great sophistication and deeply skewed perception. What I ended up debating in the parking lot is whether or not the script (which is new and, it sounds like, still evolving) follows through as fully as it could on the really exciting promise it sets up in its first moments.

First of all, there’s this: a story in which the protagonist isn’t in control of her very active sleeping self and in which she is often asleep is a story with a built-in unreliable point of view – one that naturally calls into question what the heckity heck is actually going on… And off the top of Any Night it’s clear that something isn’t right. I can’t be seeing the whole picture, can I, because I start by seeing what Anna does. She’s smart and all, but there’s something she’s not understanding, and are we sure that she’s awake? I’m ever so suspicious and trying to sniff out the truth. Yay to suspense.

And yay to the second promise: theatre is different from film! The vivid sleeping and waking, or not, sequences are ever so nicely painted with movement, rolling staircases and excellent sound, and Anna’s state of awareness seems at first always to be called into question. Themes are important. Dreams are alive.

So does Any Night leave me wanting something?

What’s really going on – the plot, if you will – stays a mystery for some time. But sooner or later the pieces start to fall into place. And what’s maybe too bad is that, as they do, it becomes clear that we’re no longer seeing the story through the veil of anyone’s warped perception. The theatrical starts to fade in favour of a more filmic plotline (this is my smarter friend’s theory – let it be said that he’s both a screenwriter and a playwright and given to observing what he’s most conscious of in his own work… because everything’s about him), and the audience’s point of view shifts to our own. We are, though it takes some time to realize it, seeing exactly what there is to be seen, and the disturbing confusion of our experience dissipates. The dream haze lifts. Our unreliable protagonist achieves certainty. An answer to the puzzle is proposed, and I think I’m supposed to believe in it, but I’m left with the feeling that there have been clues and themes woven into the fabric of the play that suggest there could have been more to the story.

There’s also a lingering “why?” when it comes to Patrick, whom we see either as Anna does or voyeuristically from our own point of view, but about whom we end up learning mostly that he’s well, not what he appears to be. I sense a contradiction in these versions of Patrick – at the moment he feels like two different people, not the same man seen with different eyes. I mean, when he’s nice, he’s really, really nice (hello crush!). Or does the fact that he doesn’t trigger any alarm bells just say something about me? This disparity could be entirely appropriate if one Patrick is a dream man and one is a real man, but that doesn’t seem to be where Any Night takes us.

What I’d like to make clear is that I wouldn’t have bothered to wonder any of the above if I hadn’t liked what’s already there so much. Many seeds have been planted, and I don’t know that I would have realized that I wanted anything more if Any Night hadn’t been so close to giving it to me. (This, by the way, is also my theory on directors’ notes.)

Any Night is a gripping experience, skillfully executed by talented performers, with innovative and adventurous theatrical moments that spring from a compelling premise. If it’s still evolving, I would like to see the next incarnation please.

Any Night Written and performed by Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn; Directed by Ron Jenkins; Presented by Dual Minds. At the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace as part of the 2008 SummerWorks Festival. Final show: August 16, 10:30pm. For more information click on the word here.