Theatre review: Alley Theatre's compelling #whatnow gets real about consent and harassment
Headphone verbatim technique brings humanity and authenticity to #MeToo, as part of Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival
Patrick Dodd, Emily Grace Brook, Siobhan Sloane-Seale, and Yvonne Wallace tell the stories that are fed to them via earbuds in the compelling #whatnow. Photo by Wendy D
Alley Theatre presents #whatnow at Russian Hall until November 7, as part of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival
WHEN WE TALK—especially when we’re recalling disturbing experiences or trauma—our speech patterns don’t follow a direct path, like a well-crafted script. We pause, we stammer, we change direction mid-sentence, we rewind to give context, and we stop to collect our thoughts with “uh”s and “um”s. Sometimes we even joke about the situation to alleviate the tension.
That’s part of why Alley Theatre’s engrossing new #whatnow feels so authentic. Codirectors Marisa Smith and Amber Funk Barton employ headphone verbatim theatre—a technique that goes one step beyond the verbatim theatre you’ve seen recently in shows like Brendan McLeod's riveting Remembrance Day solo Ridge or Frank and Zee Zee Theatre’s remarkable Trans Scripts, Part I: The Women. Instead of memorizing the real words of interview subjects, the actors here are actually fed the testimonials through ear buds—repeating the words along with every hesitation, throat-clearing, or falter.
The technique has the benefit of protecting the subject’s identity and staying completely true to not just what they are disclosing but also how they disclose it. In a show that is largely about consent, that faithfulness to these personal testimonials is important—doubly so, when you consider the larger context of a society that has long shown a reluctance to believe stories of harassment and sexual abuse. Especially when they diverge from stereotypes around who can be sexually harassed, or how. What about a man who’s paraplegic? What about a transgender sex worker?
Edited down from hours of interviews with dozens of subjects of different genders and backgrounds conducted by Smith, herself a survivor, #whatnow prompts you to consider stories far outside the mainstream #MeToo narrative—without ever diminishing white-cis-female-identifying experience. It’s compelling, paradigm-shifting stuff, digging sensitively into the complex, grey areas that are never going to receive the discussion they need via 280-word tweets.
Which brings us to yet more benefits of verbatim theatre that the creative team takes full advantage of here. In this piece, the demographic background of the actor doesn’t necessarily match that of the interviewee. In Smith’s device, we listen to each person’s story as a vignette, and only after we’ve made assumptions do we hear the person’s real gender, age, and ethnicity—along with such humanizing details as their love of strawberry shortcake, their hatred for cilantro, their weakness for video games, or their ability to mix a mean guacamole. Still, there’s sensitivity to the casting—for example, an Indigenous or Asian person embodies stories related to their race, or a person with a disability might take on the story of someone with a similar background.
Some of the recollections are shocking, but, to this show’s credit, never in a gratuitous way. Rather than relaying the exploitive details of assault, the stories centre on a lot of the small, wake-up moments that come to everyday people: the woman who hadn’t realized that no one had ever asked her for sexual consent before one sensitive partner did; the legal secretary who talks about having to brush off a lawyer’s increasingly lurid stories. We hear them weighing the realities of telling authorities, whether it’s a woman forcing herself to make the call to police from her daycare job, or a transgender person reflecting on why a juvenile facility cut their sentence short after an attack. We hear from the other side occasionally, too: one guy in his 40s is still coming to terms with the fact that he may have crossed a line with a girl when he was 17.
The cast—Sabrina Symington, Yvonne Wallace, Emily Grace Brook, Patrick Dodd, and Siobhan Sloane-Seale—is strong across the board in channelling these hard truths. Choreographer Barton makes the right sensitive choices, moving the actors subtly around the room, with chairs, capturing the emotion or tension of each scene but careful not to add anything that feels contrived.
The team is aware that the space in which we witness these confessionals has to be intimate and welcoming. When you enter the Russian Hall to see the piece, you can choose from an assortment of comfy couches, chairs by tables with candles on them, or reclining lawn chairs around the front of the floor-level stage. This emphasizes the fact that we are all in this together—and that these are real people confiding and trusting in us, in a safe place.
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