Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope offers hope for the future
4 Mar 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Alexander Antonijevic

The exuberant cast erupts from the heart of the audience, scampers across a runway to the stage and for the next close-to-three hours, they morph characters, races, genders and ages while maintaining a distinct thread unique to themselves. As a showcase for theatre's current crop of talent, Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope is a rousing success. Conceptually that is where it works best as well. All of the talent is young and not that far removed from wherever they studied, whether it be a high school drama classroom (the ostensible focus of Towards Youth), an institution of higher dramatic learning, or the stages of hard knocks.

Towards Youth is a "documentary play" and in this case it boils down to a power-point presentation with live accompaniment. Playwright/director Andrew Kushnir (The Gay Heritage Project, Wormwood, Cock) travelled the world with Dr Kathleen Gallagher to document her research project exploring the impact of high school drama classes on the students. The students confront problems specific to them, but universal to all, through the art of theatre and self-expression. It is a lengthy list with racism, gay rights, female subjection, poverty, the refugee crisis and Brexit all glancingly touched on.

When we see the work created - a student playlet about the refugee crisis using a kewpie doll and a suitcase is riveting and heartbreaking - Towards Youth soars as theatre. Form folds into function when a British student finds strength in her drama class to confront government cutbacks eloquently in contrast to an elderly racist pro-Brexit cab driver. The point is made emphatically and movingly. But far too often we are told what the effect is or, worse, told that the classroom exercise was incredible but "we can't re-create it and that just kills me." "Documentary" one, "theatre" zero.

Stand-ins for Gallagher (Liisa Repo-Martell, What a Young Wife Ought to Know) and Kushnir (Emilio Vieira) function as narrators and while that adds coherence it distracts from the emotional heart of the experience. What these youth are living and doing is visceral and difficult, the academics are, well, academic, busily searching for and parsing meaning and translating it for the audience. The nadir is when a visit to China skips over a debate about same-sex marriage and a son's conflict with his mother to concentrate on the Kushnir character's bravery in eating stinky tofu. Illustrating the mis-step with a giant selfie jars the audience completely out of the theatre portion of the proceedings.

Any of the astounding cast - Adrin Bunco, Amaka Umeh (The Wolves, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, James and the Giant Peach, This is for You Anna, Sister Act, Jesus Christ Superstar), Jessica Greenberg (Cock), Loretta Yu, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom, Black Boys), Tim Dowler-Coltman and Zorana Sadiq - would have, and briefly are when offered, capable of delivering monologues or scenes that would raise the theatrical temperature and provide intentional sub-text as well as text. Several of the short monologues are in the languages of the schools visited, and if the actors can adopt not just accents but entire speeches in foreign languages, make them natural and clear, it would have been extraordinary to hear from them instead of about them.

Considerable technological expertise has been brought to bear with projections and films of the actual students interviewed and observed, or to draw focus to an important speech. Oddly there are no surtitles which would have trimmed the translations from an already overlong show. Sadiq's no-nonsense Indian teacher pulls humour out of despair with some welcome quips but that doesn't occur until the two hour mark, and Jackman-Torkoff is forced to utilize his limber physical presence in an interpretive dance attempt to add visual interest to another of Gallagher's lectures. A ruthless edit, the addition of theatrical imagination or a re-focus will make Towards Youth a powerful play. Or, in this form, it is a intriguing presentation of Gallagher's research, and a showcase springboard for a cast we look forward to seeing again.