A play where the fractures of society explode at the couple level

For its winter return, the theater Crow’s welcomes Wightsa new play written by Toronto-born author Liz Appel. The temporality of the story is precise: it begins on October 31, 2024 and ends the next day, a few days before the American presidential election which will bring Donald Trump to power for a second term.

The heroine, Anita Knight (Rachel Leslie), is a brilliant academic who invited a couple of friends from the same background to prepare for her job interview at Yale which is to take place the following day. Her husband Danny (Ari Cohen) is a lawyer dedicated to social causes. He joins the group after his work day. No one can then imagine what turn this meeting will take which, at first glance, is nicely bourgeois and slightly watered.

Chris Abrahamartistic director of the theater Crow’s stages the show. It once again adopts a quadrifrontal configuration where the audience surrounds the action. This choice has become an integral part of the company’s identity, since this is how the biggest hits of recent seasons were produced, from Uncle Vania from Chekhov to Master Plan from Michael Healey to Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.

From the couple to the stage

From the start of the show, tensions underlying the exchanges appear in the guest couple, Celine et Bing (Sochi Fried et Richard Lee). The man is also in a recruitment process, but for a university in Beijing, a process started without asking his partner’s opinion. A serious disagreement which remains out of proportion with the explosion which follows after their departure from the house…

Calm returned to the living room, Anita wants to continue working on her speech with her husband, but a sticking point appears over whether or not it is necessary to say recognition of indigenous territories in a job interview, which the protagonist plans to do. One of his friends had already had an ironic reaction: but are we still doing this? .

The position of the husband – the only white man in the room – is much firmer. He denigrates his wife’s intelligence and he relies on his certainties to reject this idea.

Take time for discussion

Wights first appears as yet another piece that discusses and questions some of the major social issues that span our time: systemic racism, as well as gender, class or racial privilege. Especially since the argument taking place before our eyes involves people who are themselves privileged.

But little by little, we get caught up in this very rapid and intense flow of exchange. The piece becomes, on the scale of the couple, a long variation on the impossible reconciliation of the different bodies of society if in-depth work is not envisaged, particularly when it comes to language or territory.

Through his characters, Liz Apple poses a big question: is it not time to find new ways of thinking, speaking and living in the world if we do not want to be condemned to always repeating the same mistakes? A reflection worth pondering.