Five Faces for Evelyn Frost
Written by Guillaume Corbeil. Directed by Claude Poissant. In English until March 5, in French from March 21 until March 25 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street. CanadianStage.com or 416-368-3110.
A social media profile turned into a live stage performance is about as infuriating as it sounds.
Which is the point of Quebec playwright Guillaume Corbeil’s quick, one-act play Five Faces for Evelyn Frost, which comes to Toronto off a French-language production in Montreal.
Steven McCarthy has done an excellent job translating it for its English debut, changing out references to suit a Toronto audience. This co-production between Canadian Stage and Théâtre Français, and its cast of five young bilingual performers, will also feature a limited French-language run after its English production, with English surtitles.
But as director Claude Poissant makes clear in the program notes, Corbeil’s play is meant to antagonize and confront the audience into the ways in which friends become competitors, enhanced today by the modern phenomenon of fabricated online identities, and our own implications in that dynamic.
It certainly begins that way — five friends (Laurence Dauphinais, Stefii Didomenicantonio, Tara Nicodemo, Nico Racicot and Alex Weiner) enter and introduce themselves without saying their names, that’s not relevant information. What’s more important is the breakdown of a profile on Facebook or Tinder — age, physical features, birthday, relationship status. Then comes more curated information — motto, personal style, favourite food and music, interests.
Delivered in a deadpan style, each performer sounds like they’re robots answering a Proust Questionnaire. That evolves into an increasingly fast flurry of each actor’s cultural tastes, a laundry list of cultural products (films, books, and plays) that each one has consumed over their lifetime.
This early segment is where Corbeil’s conceit is at its strongest. The intense and rapid list of titles, a quick and surface-level way for each performer to assert their identity as totally unique from the others, ironically entices the audience to do a mental checklist at the same time.
Moments of recognition are humorous, like when one performer corrects another with the proper pronunciation of Gabriel García Márquez, or the way they each pair two contrasting musical artists they like as examples of how utterly complex they are as people and cultural connoisseurs. But as the performers start to show their discomfort physically, by pulsating in increasing speeds, so too does the audience get exhausted from the relentless stream of information and our base need to keep up with it.
This style of delivery remains as the characters move on to talk about an evening out, rifling through a gallery of photographs and moving more freely on the stage. Eventually, Five Faces for Evelyn Frost (Evelyn Frost being a partygoer that is admired for her beauty, but relatively absent from the self-aggrandizing antics of the performers and their friends in the photographs) delves into social causes, relationships, mental health, travel, the mundanity of everyday life, body functions and injuries — and ultimately, death.
The whole way through, the performers use each other to steal the spotlight, to bring the focus around to showing another equally interesting (to them) aspect of their personality and life. Poissant gets intriguing performances from his actors, each uniformly speaking with a mix of pride and boredom.
Though it starts with a bang, Five Faces for Evelyn Frost ultimately loses the plot towards the end, never really building on its initial idea but swapping out music tastes for other topics. Max-Otto Fauteux’s set design, with the stage covered in pieces of clothing that are eventually moved off to the side to reveal a mirror underneath, is conceptually clear (what are clothes but immediate visual clues to an identity that can be easily taken on and off) but underused.
Depending on how much time you spend thinking about or scrolling through social media platforms, Five Faces for Evelyn Frost can either be revealing or obvious, or even a bit condescending.
But as a piece of theatre that covers a topic that’s relatively well-trod as social isolation in the digital age, it’s one of the more innovative pieces around. Bring your friends—or tell them about the cool, Montreal avant-garde piece of performance you saw alone later.
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