Review: (Toronto / Theatre) Watching Glory Die

(photo by Wendy D.)

A story of isolation, desperation, and confinement where no one is left untouched. 
by Keely Kwok

Judith Thompson’s Watching Glory Die is a wake up call shouting to its viewers: do you see? Do you even know? 

The play was inspired by events surrounding the death of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old girl who asphyxiated herself while her prison guards stood, waited, and watched. Thompson plays a young girl named Glory (based on Ashley), her adoptive mother Rosellen, and a correctional officer named Gail. As the sole actress in the show, Thompson swiftly flits in and out of these three women and delivers three distinctly different powerful performances. 

Glory is the most alienating to watch. She has been an inmate for five years, ever since a minor offence of throwing crab apples at the mailman saw her sent to a correctional facility at 14 years old. Video of Glory protesting, pleading, just pulsing, is projected onto the walls of her sterile white isolation cell. Thompson moves about the space, folding herself into the corner, rolling around on the ground, and flipping off the camera like a caged animal. The worst is when she mimes being seized by the straightjacket and helmet they make her wear so she can’t even move her head. Thompson layers Glory with an exasperating sense of desperation and loss of innocence alongside and in between a fierce, youthful rebelliousness. Glory is more than just an inmate. She is a person. 

Review: (Toronto) Pacamambo

 L-R Amy Keating, Karen Robinson  (photo by Jeremy Mimnagh)

Why?

by Jason Booker

Partway through the English language premiere of Wadji Mouawad’s Pacamambo, after having heard the young protagonist and her grandmother speak in rapturous tones about “the road to Pacamambo” for what felt like the tenth or twelfth time, it occurred to me that this was not a piece of theatre set before the audience. It was a travel pitch for a place where people ignore racial lines to become one, escaping into some hippy-dippy heaven, that sounded so much more appealing than the seats in these cramped quarters. And when the seating is set up as a runway – half the audience facing the other with actors wedged into a narrow space in between – it became apparent there were a few audience members with similar thoughts.

Welcome to the Canadian Rep Theatre, founded in the fallout of Ken Gass’s firing from Factory Theatre. This is their inauspicious debut.