Review: The Fever (SummerWorks)

On Mortality and privilege
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

We take our seats and face a classic interrogation setting: stark black-and-white colours, a lone straight-back chair with a ceiling-fan overhead. A polished, 30-something woman walks in from the audience, casually takes a seat under the fan and begins to talk.  There is no lighting cue; in fact, she barely raises her voice.  This minimum bow to theatricality is not compromised throughout the production.  If anything the dramatic force of the piece comes from its almost total refusal to embed the discussion in any kind of spectacle.  

The Fever is a play about one woman’s existential crisis, only we learn almost nothing about the woman in question.  There are some important clues as to who she might be: through her dress, her voice, her mannerisms. She travels alone, lives an exquisite upper-middle class existence, speaks of no family ties or connections. Rather we get a lengthy discourse on topics that range from Marx’s commodity fetishism, to the emptiness of a certain elite decorum. What we do know of her life is that the woman, for no particular reason, finds herself in a hotel in a nondescript poor country where civil war has broken out.  She describes her feelings of nausea as she ponders her own Western privileges. Even while she regales us with scenes of unimaginable cruelty, she retains a similar air of casual frankness, there are no cries, whispers, or shrieks of anguish.   The point seems to be that it would be false to dramatize this matter-of-fact issue.  

The Fever is an unsettling and forthright commentary about our own immorality, our investment in the idea that our privileges are in any way deserved.  While the protagonist doesn’t seem to veer into novel territory, her observations have resonance in this period of the Occupy movements and the disappointments of the Arab Spring.  As she talks of the inadequacy of art, even political art, to do anything of value in terms of helping “the poor,” the audience squirms in their seats.  If you’re looking for catharsis, this isn’t the show for you. 

The Fever is at SummerWorks