Review: Dutchman (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Brian Telzerow)

Hot-Button Theatre
by Dave Ross

Wander down Ossington Street, and listen for the hum of a generator near Queen Street. Poke your head around the corner and you’ll see a city bus parked at the back of a parking lot strewn with gravel pot-holes and litter. This is the site-specific setting for lemonTree Creative’s production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.

This production isn’t only site-specific, it is period-specific as well. Board the bus, and take a seat. Then spend a few minutes reminding yourself that it isn’t 2012—rather, it’s 1964. Racial tensions are still high, even ten years after desegregation. The civil rights movement is growing in strength. You will need to keep this historical context in mind as you watch the play, or it’s meaning becomes fuzzy.

The Show, August 6, 2012

Yes, yes, yes, SummerWorks is a festival of discovery, of shiny young faces and new works, but there is one work that sticks out that you should be lining up for and it is a classic. (As one US TV network used to say about its summer reruns, "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you!") 

Forget your Mamet and his vague, irritating plays with some vague, irritating hot-button issue in the middle. Before all of the pinkos and fascists in theatre, there was LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka - a hot button issue in his own right) and before the Oleanna's and the Race's there was Dutchman. First performed in 1964 and subsequently made into a tiny and terrifying little movie, Dutchman is the kind of work which, when performed well, leaves you walking out of the theatre in a daze, and remembering the experience forever.

A black man, a white woman, and - in this case - a bus where the audience members are passengers.

Nuf sed.

Dutchman is at SummerWorks