Summerfest Daily Report - Friday, August 3

By Jon Kaplan

It wasn't quite flies or locusts, but the opening of SummerWorks coincided with a plague of insects that hit Toronto and prompted some people to suggest comparisons to the Old Testament plagues in Egypt and others to make joking references to the beginning of the New Testament's Apocalypse.

It was actually an infestation of green aphids, which because of the hot summer weather had multiplied inordinately, and which, apparently sensing a major storm about to come, swarmed to find cover. It lasted several hours, from about 5 pm to about 7:30 pm, and everyone in the SummerWorks area around King and Bathurst was scurrying around with hands, Kleenex and anything else they could use to cover their mouths, eyes and noses.

Well, let doom-sayers refer to Biblical comparisons. I like to think about the aphid swarm more in terms of large-scale sports or festival events, beneficent rather than maleficent. You know all those white doves that are released on the first day of a marathon of some sort, or a celebratory outdoor event? I see all those millions of little aphids as couriers from the theatre gods to remind Torontonians about the start of an exciting festival.

Well, OK, maybe I'm pushing it. But 14 of the 39 SummerWorks shows opened last night, and if attendance was smaller than hoped for at some of the venues, others like Mike McFaden's Flight 198, Michael Valliant-Saunders' The Wait Room and Gordon Portman's S&M* had good houses.

The best piece I saw the first day was Robin Fulford's Five Fingers, staged in the Cameron House, home to VideoCabaret's revival of its wacky Canadian history series The History Of The Village Of The Small Huts.

A two-hander about the deteriorating relationship between husband and wife Tuck and Anna, the piece centres narratively and emotionally on a slap that the overwrought Tuck delivers to his wife. I've seen the piece in an earlier two-act version with a different cast and director. Then it was staged environmentally, in a house with an audience of about 15, with the characters watching each other through doors and windows and a sense of domesticity had an added ring of truth.

In the theatre version, the piece takes a little longer to connect with the audience, but once it does it's a powerful piece of drama. Fulford's poetic writing uses details of daily life to suggest emotional undercurrents between Tuck and Anna, who pull further and further apart as the action progresses. We get a quick view of their meeting and attraction and the pressures of their lives before the fateful slap; what happens from there has an air of inevitability.

The title Five Fingers also refers to the slap, and Fulford foreshadows the central scene by Tuck's comparison of his hand in his pocket to an animal, possibly lying in await to attack. This is the same hand that's undressed Anna and caressed her; with the slap, it's as if the hand and its five fingers has a life of its own. Anna watches it approach her almost in slow motion, thinking of it as "a strange wave goodbye."

The playwright's always had a theatrical fascination with the source of male violence; earlier works like Steel Kiss, Gulag and Dark Song look at the nature/nurture controversy. Here he's given Tuck a number of moments to reflect on anger, force and the thoughtless destruction of frogs the character finds common in other male friends. These little philosophical soliloquies point toward Tuck's slap, which is as shocking to him as it is to Anna and the audience.

Fulford is skillful at juxtaposing moments from past and present to comment on the action, and director Mark Cassidy plays up these moments well. Sarah Neville is a sympathetic Anna, who can't understand the aggression that's emerged from the man she's loved, while Gord Rand's Tuck combines little-boy seduction, blame, charm and hurt as he tries to win his wife back physically and emotionally.

Five Fingers is a well-planned and thought-out show on a number of levels. That includes collaborator Wendy White's set design, focused on a trio of sheer red hanging panels. Like Fulford's script, which weaves together the mundane and the emotionally suggestive, the panels function in a number of way. Tuck uses one as a towel to dry his hands - washing is a key image in the production - and later, recalling a sensual and happier past, he thrusts his face into another panel as though it were one of Anna's dresses.