Summerfest Daily Report - Thursday, August 9

By Jon Kaplan

As you hang out at any of the SummerWorks venues waiting for a show, or travel from one theatre to another, it's hard not to think about smog and other forms of air pollution. Sure, it's increased by the high temperatures - Toronto broke all records yesterday - but that bad air is there whether the thermometer hits 20 or 35.

No surprise that a lot of the problem is caused by cars, as we've been told for years.

And it's totally fitting that one of this year's SummerWorks shows, Autogeddon, tackles the problem with such carefully fueled drama. Initially an illustrated book by British writer/performer/environmental activist Heathcote Williams - another of his works, Whale Nation, was a Fringe hit several years ago - the material is adapted and performed by Steven Bush, one of the stalwarts of 70s theatre in the city.

We haven't seen Bush onstage recently - he's been teaching at the U of T most recently, and he spent much of the 80s running groups like Ottawa's GCTC and Toronto's Mixed Company. But earlier he was a regular in new productions by George F. Walker and much of his own work had a political bent, like the text-and-movement Life On The Line, which he co-wrote with musician Allen Booth.

Autogeddon, shaped by Bush with associate artist Richard Payne, looks at the myriad ways cars affect our life, mostly in a negative fashion. But the piece is far different from an expected rant. It's literate, clever, and swerves from topic to topic and character to character the way an SUV would navigate a treacherous mountain road. It begins with a mention of the first car, invented by Benz and run on alcohol - much like, adds Bush, many of today's drivers. Seventeen million have been killed by auto accidents, and the number is climbing.

But as the show goes on to point out, the automobile is actually at our planet's gridlock zero in economic terms, and, by extension, social and political terms. Oil, car parts and petroleum fuel so many other industries, directly and indirectly, that attitudes toward their production affect us all on a number of levels.

The central image of the piece fancifully draws on a space visitor who, looking down on earth, sees automobiles as the central life form on the planet, injected with little units of energy - humans - who fuel it and then are ejected later when their power supply is used up.

Booth is expert at creating dozens of dramatic roles, sometimes in a single line, as he explores the subtext of car commercials, sings his way through a variety of pop songs about "prosthetic tin cans" and exemplifies the Detroit warlords who set themselves against so-called eco-wimps.

If at times it seems overdone, we still haven't learned the lesson, have we? How often do cars on the highway slow down to partake in the "fast-food, car-crash roadshow?" How many of us know - or are - the people whose road mantra is "me before you?"

Autogeddon is a show that Bush has toured to homes around the GTA. Since it's a solo show with no set or props, it would work quite well in that kind of intimate setting, and probably has even more impact with a small house. There certainly wasn't a small house at Bush's first show last weekend. The audience included a number of theatre people who began their careers in the 70s with Bush, such as Clare Coulter, as well as activist Tooker Gomberg. David Suzuki, announced Payne at the beginning, sent his regrets.