Alphabet Soup | The characters in Sarah Kane’s enigmatic Crave are known only as A, B, C, and M.
CRAVE
Directed by Sarah Van Tassel. Written by Sarah Kane. Starring Candace Berlinguette, Denny Demeria, Cody Porter, Marissa Wiffen. May 16-25. The Third Space (11516-103 Street). Tickets available through The Third Space (471-1586).
Even at a taut 45 minutes, Crave still feels exhausting. From start to finish, the penultimate work of the late British playwright Sarah Kane is an uncompromising barrage of suffering and heartbreak, and it never once eases up.
Crave features four characters—each one identified only by single letters of the alphabet—expressing their individual pain and struggling with how to deal with it, if at all. The question as to whether the four voices represent four individual characters or simply different facets of a deteriorating mind is never answered definitively, and Sarah Van Tassel’s direction lets both possibilities hang ambiguously in the air. The decision to dress the actors in matching hospital whites is clearly both a nod to the latter possibility, and a nod, perhaps, to the play’s oft-institutionalized author.
For the most part, Van Tassel opts for a more traditional narrative, dividing the four actors into two couples, but even these pairings start to blur, as the actors keep trading lines amongst themselves, an effective and subtle suggestion that the characters are less individual than they themselves might believe.
In many productions of Crave, the actors remain static and seated throughout the entire play, but Van Tassel lets her cast use all the space they have to work with. Her interlocutors sit, stand, walk, and chase one another around the stage in what amounts to a choreographed game of musical chairs. There is a balletic grace to their physical interactions which each other, which helps root the pathos of Kane’s cynical world in the personal.
But the heart of Crave is its script. Kane’s words are painful and poignant—the frequent quotes from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” do not seem out of place. Like her fellow modernist Samuel Beckett, Kane dispenses with narrative in favour of minimal, experimental monologues and broken images. The poetic dialogue is almost liturgical in rhythm, and can be simultaneously sadistic and tender, just like the characters themselves.
Candace Berlinguette and Cody Porter are believable as doomed lovers, and Porter is responsible for the production’s high point—his delivery of a Joycean monologue balances doe-eyed naïveté with a streak of fatalism and is the perfect foil to Berlinguette’s hysterics. Berlinguette has the most active role as the abused C, and conveys a sense of hopelessness so all-encompassing that it smothers the sliver of chance she has for happiness. Denny Demeria turns in a serviceable performance as B, an addict willing to be seduced by M, played by Marissa Wiffen, the only weak link of the four. Wiffen, whose character desperately desires a child as her biological clock runs out, lacks the authority to play a character who is supposed to be much older than Demeria.
Kane’s script provides no guidance to those who take on the task of performing it—no stage cues, no scenery descriptions—and yet Van Tassel manages to give a sense of direction to Kane’s directionless world, taking what on paper might seem more like poetry than a play and making it succeed as a piece of theatre.
Just don’t expect a cheery ride home.
