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Culture Theatre

Hang is an issue play that bores instead of intrigues

HANG by debbie tucker green (Obsidian Theatre). At the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs (26 Berkeley). Runs to February 25. $20-$35. 416-368-3110. See listing. Rating: NN

Hang is an issue play, but revealing the issue would be a spoiler. Whatever tension debbie tucker greens script contains comes from figuring out the theme and then seeing how the characters deal with it.

In a nondescript room set some time in the near future, a cautious, watchful, Black woman (Sarah Afful) unnamed in the play but called Three in the script, is being guided through some important decision involving a consultation and paperwork by two unnamed bureaucrats (Zoe Doyle, who plays One, and Vladimir Alexis, Two).

The woman, clearly shaken up, at first refuses all niceties: tea, water (hot or cold), the offer to hang up her jacket. Theres much small talk too much, in fact about water coolers, air conditioning and office chairs.

Green, whose play Dirty Butterfly was produced here several years ago, wastes time by having characters awkwardly begin statements, pause and find another tack, and directors Philip Akin and Kimberley Rampersad cant make these sequences anything but repetitive.

Doyle, her eyes and posture betraying her characters conscience, is better at navigating this script than Alexis, who plays his part in one mode and has got diction issues. (The people behind me kept muttering that they couldnt understand him.)

Afful has a magnetic presence and is intriguing, especially when she gets to do something, whether its describing her distraught family or perking up at news of Ones recent divorce.

But a lot of her performance is technical, her voice cascading up and down on cue or throbbing with calculated bursts of passion.

Steve Lucass cold, anonymous set doesnt offer much to look at, and Christopher Stantons sound design offers few clues about the world were in.

Despite the important questions the play raises near the end be prepared for some heated post-show discussions the work feels like a 20-minute writing exercise (Write about an issue without naming it!) padded out to 75 minutes.

And the significance of Threes race (shes identified as Black in the script) isnt fully explored.

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