Festival buzz is a funny thing. You get to this point, a week or so into the fest, a lot of reviews have been written, and you wonder sometimes: is the buzz that some shows are getting really deserved? Are they really the best ones out there, or are they just the ones that’ve done the best job getting known?
I wonder. Because it seems like the two consensus “buzz” pieces of SummerWorks right now are Greenland and The Middle Place. I’m seeing Greenland on Saturday, their last show, and I’m fortunate to have tickets. I saw The Middle Place yesterday in a packed house at the Passe Muraille mainspace. Did I like it? Sure. But I’ve seen three plays since then, and definitely enjoyed two of them more and the third is close, and none of them are getting the same kind of buzz.
I guess The Middle Place is a show that speaks to a lot of people. For a couple of years now, Project: Humanity has been teaching theatre workshops at a homeless shelter in the GTA. Playwright Andrew Kushnir (who’s name I know from something I saw in Edmonton but can’t remember what it was and it’s REALLY bugging me) sat down with various youths from the shelter and filmed interviews with them. The Middle Place is a presentation of some of those stories, with four actors onstage and one offstage, asking questions and prompting the homeless kids.
It’s all quite technically good. The stories are, as you might imagine, all kinds of sad, and in some cases inspiring and sweet. The onstage actors are all quite talented, and easily portray the youths of all different backgrounds and the shelter’s caseworkers too. Going from one story to the next is seamless, and each actor does a nice job making characters and voices distinct enough that it’s easy enough to recall them when they come up again, even though the four actors never leave the stage and there are no costume changes or anything.
But it all comes across as very clinical to me. If you like the sound of seeing a documentary film that has kids from a homeless shelter telling their stories, you’ll probably like this. And it’s not that I don’t like that kind of thing, it’s more that…well, this is theatre, not film. If Kushnir had done a documentary movie instead of a play it would look and sound and feel very similar, just with more faces. This play feels like a direct translation from that nonexistent movie, presenting the interviews as close to how they look on film as possible, even with the limitation of using just four actors. It’s like The Middle Place is a show stripped of a lot of things you can do on film and not on stage, but because it’s trying to ape documentary so closely it doesn’t really take advantage of things you can do on stage that you can’t on film.
And while in a lot of ways it’s a technical accomplishment (I wouldn’t have imagined it was possible to approximate documentary film onstage so precisely before seeing this show), The Middle Place is just an ok piece of theatre.
The Middle Place has one show left at SummerWorks: August 15 (Saturday) at 10:30. See the SummerWorks website for schedule and ticket details.