June 13, 2012. Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Centre’s Imperial Oil Opera Theatre, Toronto.
The circular stage of Robert Lepage is a cornucopia, a horn of plenty whose mouth disgorges a multitude of players and scenes: A bunker in Bagdad where soldiers are playing strip poker; a chapel in Vegas where Elvis instructs a bridegroom to “Love Her Tender,” and the bride to “Always be His Teddy Bear.”
Trapdoors of all sizes and shapes open and close in the dark: players appear from the waist-up, serving and drinking at a cocktail bar, sink and disappear, pulling the doors shut over their heads; couples cavort in sunken bedrooms that convert to swimming pools; gaming tables rise up on plateaus that extrude overhead monitors of gambling games and live TV broadcasts of President DoubleYa explaining the assault on Saddam Hussain.
Door-frames flip up like box-tops, characters knock, enter, close the door which then collapses back into the stage as the scene proceeds. Spades is a miracle of theatricality, exquisitely well scripted and acted by 6 actors playing 30 characters who seem equally convincing in English, French or Spanish or speaking English with heavy French, Spanish and British accents.
What is totally amazing is how this virtuosic cadenza of theatricality gradually polarizes into dramas that take intense hold of your emotions. An illegal Mexican chambermaid who fears she may have cancer is victimized by her doctor; a salesman with a gambling problem is stripped by loan sharks; the honeymoon couple are seduced by a conman; a soldier, intimidated by a homosexual officer goes AWOL and commits suicide by hooker.
The theme of Spades is war and the game of probabilities people play in the hopes of winning at class war, economic war, cultural war, and of course the War in the Middle East.
Spades runs June 13 through 17 at the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Centre’s Imperial Oil Opera Theatre. The production runs 3 hours, no intermission, Don’t Worry, Don’t Miss it.