Some thoughts on The Missionary Position, the new Greg MacArthur play commissioned from the U of A’s Lee Playwright in Residence for Studio Theatre:
- There’s no shortage of wistul, nostalgic paeans to starry-eyed youthful idealism in the theatre repertoire. It’s a lot more unusual to discover a play, written especially for the young actors in the cast, that looks at the ugly downside of youthful idealism. The Missionary Position is worth seeing for that alone: youthful idealism takes a drubbing in the course of the evening, which is, you have to admit, interesting.
- The Missionary Position was inspired roughly by the real-life scandal of the New Life Children’s Refuge in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. It’s a satire that explores the sense in which “good intentions,” or zeal for a cause generally, are potentially damaging in the absence of things like cultural research, language skills … ah, and humility. Because, yes, it takes a certain sense of humility to make the effort to understand other cultures. (Arrogance looks a lot like innocence at 100 paces, as the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon revealed, more playfully, and with song and dance production numbers). Anyhow, had the range of motives amongst its characters included any combination of the above, rescuing “orphans” from the street would not have turned out to be kidnapping and complicity, however inadvertent, in child trafficking.
- And Jan Selman’s 12-actor cast goes for the gusto (occasionally to a fault) in heightening, in broad strokes, the flaws, absurdities, and indiosyncracies of individual characters, located everywhere on the spectrum between high spirits and none, smugness and anxiety. We meet an amusing trio of giddy young airhead narcissists who are the stars of a Christian youth-type TV show, Rise Up! We meet a twitchy 18-year-old nerd who’s never been away from home and church before. We meet a couple with a secret sorrow and a damaged relationship. Led by Lianna (Lianna Makuch), their arrogant self-styled guru who’s convinced she’s a personal representative of God’s will, they’re propelled by an assumption – they’d call it belief – that they’re doing the Lord’s work for the benefit of lucky others. “The Lord God is our shield!” they cry. And besides, “we’re Canadians!” Selflessness turns out to be self-absorption for the benefit of … themselves.
The spirit and the ego are, evidently, closer cousins than you might think, along with innocence and sloppy ignorance. The de-frocking of the illusion that missions are for others happens as soon as things start to go wrong.
- The set-up is this: in the wake of tsunami devastation in a remote Central American country, a diverse bunch of young Canuck missionaries gather to help. The objects of their attention are street children, whom they blithely, and conveniently, assume to be orphans. They scoop up the orphans at night, and relocate them to a new life … in a foster home run by them. When the missionaries find themselves in prison facing enormous and serious charges, certainty turns to incredulity, and youthful idealism turns rancid, immediately, in a scene that seems to go on and on, at high volume. Revealingly, in the general group panic and flood of mutual abuse, the calmest, most humane party is the secular guy who’s devoted to Tae Bo instead of God. At least he has a sense of adventure.
- Mat Simpson turns in a dexterous performance as a oily-slick operator, who has a nose for need in do-gooders. In this pageant of human folly, the most dimensional and nuanced character is a Canadian embassy operative, and he gets a smart, detailed performance from Ben Gorodetsky.
- Selman’s production is handsomely attended to, in projections and in lighting, not to mention rain, by LLARS Design. I didn’t get the need for a nude shower scene near the outset, but the lighting was sensational. The full ensemble scenes seem somehow less convincing (and hence over-extended) than the more intimate confrontations. They are, I think, pitched a little high, for theatrical rather than dramatic purposes, and in the end seems to backfire.
- A satire, and deconstruction, of the youthful impulse to do good works isn’t something you often get to see in the course of theatre-going. In the end, the play probably explains too much for true, serious discussion. But you’ll find yourself wanting to think about our Canadian superiority after the show.
The Missionary Position runs through Saturday at the Timms Centre for the Arts. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).
Photo credit: Greg Southam, Edmonton Journal
