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Jonathan Tan and Kayvon Khoshkam in carried away on the crest of a wave.David Hou

Rating:

3 out of 4 stars
  • carried away on the crest of a wave
  • Written by David Yee
  • Directed by Kim Collier
  • Starring John Ng, Zaib Shaikh
  • At the National Arts Centre in Ottawa

David Yee’s carried away on the crest of a wave is not a play that carries you away, exactly. Sometimes it crashes loudly, but recedes gently; at others, it just laps at your feet but then surprises with a powerful undertow.

A winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Drama, the 2013 play is now getting a belated mainstage debut at the National Arts Centre in a large-scale production from Siminovitch Prize-winning director Kim Collier that matches the ambition of the script.

Yee’s inspiration was the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that claimed over a quarter of a million lives. He decided to tackle the enormous tragedy not from one angle but many, and made a loose necklace of nine little plays threaded together. The scenes jump back and forth in time – between 2004 and 2010 – and place – from Australia to Malaysia to Canada to India.

These playlets jump around in style, too. Set in Malaysia, an early one about a pair of brothers – one a champion runner, the other a champion swimmer – trying to keep their house afloat has the feeling of a folktale.

But the next strikes a Shavian tone: A Christian priest (Little Mosque on the Prairie’s Zaib Shaikh), whose church was seemingly spared destruction by the grace of God, argues with a Muslim engineer (Chirag Naik), hired to determine whether there might a rational explanation for why the water turned away from his gates.

Like many of his Asian-Canadian and Asian-American playwriting contemporaries, Yee is not afraid of genre: There’s a fantasy scene about a man falling down a hole for 4½ years – and another that is like the climax of an episode of Columbo (with a just-one-more-thing FBI agent played by Shaikh again). Brian Linds’s sound design does a good job of signalling these shifts in tone subtly.

For me, the scenes that deal with the tsunami and its aftershocks directly and with emotion are the most effective. Returning to the role he created at Tarragon Theatre in 2013, John Ng – now of Kim’s Convenience fame – is moving as an old orphan who pulls a younger one out of the water, in a mini-drama with a sucker punch ending, set in a Sri Lankan airport.

Likewise, in a miniature opera of sorts that Collier stages with unsettling simplicity, Ryan Hollyman compels as an edgy john visiting an enigmatic Thai sex worker (Andrea Yu) with special talents, one year after the tsunami.

That scene does point to one of the script’s more obvious flaws – providing only one of only three significant roles for a female actor, and putting her sexuality at the centre of it. (Unless the relative absence of women from Yee’s play is making a point: In some areas affected by the tsunami, Oxfam found four women died for every man.)

In many ways, Yee’s youthfully exuberant play has matured nicely, however. As a reaction to the tsunami, its overall idiosyncratic nature and the plots’ incredible coincidences felt frustrating. As a reminder and reflection of the tragedy, it’s easier to accept the fits and starts and magical elements. And as the scene in the church argues, for survivors of a disaster, the line between the banal and the magical blurs – a breakwater formed millennia ago suddenly becomes miraculous.

One oddly tangential scene involving a Toronto shock jock (a fantastically irksome Kayvon Khoshkam) who turns his anger toward corporations and rock stars after the tsunami has gained in resonance. Here we see how some men – perhaps especially those who have no God to rail against or marvel at like the Christian and Muslim earlier in the play – end up taking any event or issue in the world, no matter how serious, and turning it into a petty, personal game called, “Don’t I have the right to say this?”

In the play’s original production, the designer Camellia Koo found ingenious ways of including water in the set. In this production, Koo is again the designer, but in collaboration with Collier has come up with a new striking visual metaphor that allows the play to fill a mainstage.

Massive, clear sheets of plastic come down from the ceiling and wash each scene off a stage, which is painted with longitude and latitude lines like a flattened globe. The plastic can be frightening (like Dexter getting ready) or entrancing (rippling in a dance, not entirely under control of the show’s human creators). It is always suitably awe-inspiring.

While Yee’s play does effectively show how we are all connected, wherever we may be around the world, no matter what style of drama we think we’re living in, it’s less effective when it outright tells us that in speeches that bookend the play and don’t quite instill the sense of wonder that the design does.

Seeing carried away on a crest of a wave on this scale, however, I was reminded of a number of major recent British plays that I got to see on a Canadian mainstage despite the fact that they bit off more than they could chew – such as Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica. This National Arts Centre production is bittersweet in that way – a reminder of how infrequently we allow our own dramatists who take risks the same treatment.

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