THE ART OF BUILDING A BUNKER by Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia (QuipTake/Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst). Runs to November 2, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2 pm. $23-$45. 416-504-9971. See listing. Rating: NNNN
You’ll find lots of laughs in The Art of Building A Bunker, but they won’t always be comfortable ones.
Written by performer Adam Lazarus and director Guillermo Verdecchia, Art follows the journey of Elvis, a disgruntled office worker shoehorned into taking a week-long sensitivity group. He hates it, his anger bubbling up through internal monologues, bits of which are sometimes are spoken aloud when his internal censor fails to turn on.
But he has to get through it or forfeit his job, and with a new baby and a concerned wife, he can’t do that.
Elvis doesn’t see the importance of this kind of workshop, given the problems in the world that isolate him, when he’s not in group, in his basement. The action takes place within Camellia Koo’s clever design of interconnected pipes, lit by Michelle Ramsey, a metaphor for the protective hunkering down he feels necessary for his family. Hovering over the action, tantalizingly out of reach, is a canoe suggestive of the group members’ journey of self-discovery.
Lazarus, a talented bouffon – the clown who tells nasty truths – plays all the characters in the show, including a supremacist South African, a sensual Latina, a soft-spoken Chinese woman with a ball of fury inside her and a whiny guy who constantly asks questions.
One of the show’s best creations is the group’s leader, Cam, who has all the right jargon for this kind of soothing sensitivity group work but is himself appallingly narrow and unsympathetic to those who don’t see things his way. It doesn’t help that what he spouts is an amalgamation of self-help techniques and wrongly appropriated First Nations imagery.
Elvis, though, is front and centre, an “irritated, stuck and defensive” man with sexist, racist and other nasty attitudes toward those around him. The writers give him other sides, too. A scene in which he talks to his child through a baby monitor reveals some humanity, and the deep, dark secret he holds and finally releases, involving a neighbour named Selma, opens up a surprising guilt that’s linked to his anger.
Under Verdecchia’s direction, Lazarus’s bravura, high-energy performance is a treat. Though some scenes go on longer than necessary to make their point, the performer is always willing to take chances, physical and verbal, as he pushes to see how much we can take in terms of what’s permissible or politically correct.
Bunker is the kind of show that changes depending on the nature of the audience and what it finds funny. The evening I was there, a series of three jokes began by eliciting gales of laughter but ended, on the third (about a black Jew), with a stifled gasp people weren’t sure whether it was all right to giggle.
That’s just what the creators intend. The chuckles here are rarely easy or comforting, and sometimes the most unsettling ones are the most revealing.
