FORTUNE AND MENS EYES by John Herbert, directed by Stefan Dzeparoski (Birdland). At Dancemakers Studio (9 Mill, Studio 313). To Sunday (September 8), 8:08 pm. $20-$29. totix.ca or brownpapertickets.com. See listing. Rating: NN
John Herbert’s Fortune And Men’s Eyes was a hard-hitting drama when it was written in the 1960s, but today there’s something of the overwritten museum piece about it.
Birdland Theatre gives a contemporary spin to the tale of four men locked together in a penitentiary cell, though director Stefan Dzeparoski’s staging in the large Dancemakers Studio loses much of the physical tension that a confined cell suggests. Only Gareth Crew’s lighting design, which uses shadow and bright illumination ominously, makes effective use of the space.
Smitty (Julian DeZotti), a young and innocent first offender, is thrust into the prison world with no sense of the politics played there. The Alice in this bizarre, unpredictable and nasty Wonderland, he meets the bruiser Rocky (Cyrus Faird), over-the-top queer Queenie (Alex Fiddes) and the shy, withdrawn Mona (David Coomber) and, through his changing relationship with the three, develops into a tough “politician” who knows what strings to pull to get what he wants.
Dzeparoski turns the script’s fifth character, the guard who’s embroiled in the daily lives of the men, into a puppet with a loudspeaker for a head each of the actors takes a turn speaking his amplified lines.
There’s an understandable self-protection necessary in this world, and it’s telling how each of the characters chooses to shield himself. Queenie and Rocky behave as raging extroverts, the former becoming a sharp-tongued harpy and the latter a macho man who hates fags.
The other two are quieter in their defenses. Mona separates body from spirit to keep himself sane, while Smitty silently and quickly learning how to survive in the prison system until he can, and is forced, to flex his muscles.
Played without an intermission, the show moves at a fast clip, but too often in the early sections the words are spoken at high volume, jumbled and hard to understand much of it is prison lingo that takes the audience a while to follow.
At times the writing is overdone, notably in the case of Rocky, who’s defined over and over by his defensiveness happily, Faird has a few moments where he can reveal another side of the self-defined cock of the cell. Fiddes brings some edgy humour to Queenie and offers occasionally nuanced work, too, as the bitter character opens up slightly and then quickly clams shut.
Coomber’s Mona is only vaguely defined for much of the play, but the scene near the end between Mona and Smitty gives him a chance to offer a lacerating look at the life of a tentative, effeminate man both in and out of jail.
That scene, in fact, is the production’s best. Having set up a suggestive mutual interest between Smitty and Mona when they meet, the director helps the two actors flesh out an attempted relationship that’s awkward, unequal and doomed to failure, even when each finally reveals the truth about his life.
DeZotti uses the episode as one step in Smitty’s evolution from a naive to a commanding figure. We watch that growth on the actor’s face, a move from wonder to confusion and then, as a wary beast testing his strength, a developing sense of how to be part of the power structure. Ironically, he ends the play on a riveting note of powerless rage.
Even though some of the acting is admirable, there’s a key flaw in the production: its nearly total absence of sensuality. Dzeparoski has said that Fortune And Men’s Eyes is more than a gay script, but the audience should still feel the tension of how these men look at and use each other, even if the sex is only a means of control.
