Review: Don’t be afraid of letting ‘Craze’ make you feel alienated

This co-production is an orgy of ideas as fascinating as it is enigmatic

What: Craze
Where: Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave.
When: Now, until Sun., Dec. 15
Highlight: Augusto Bitter’s transcendently human performance
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: To sit in awe in a bold new play that has way too much on its mind and a militant refusal to spoon-feed any of it.


IT’S LATELY SEEMED that much of Tarragon Theatre’s new play development strategy has followed an oddly specific formula: start with a canonical play from the Western dramatic repertoire, place it in a contemporary setting with new characters from a different cultural context and then give it a big twist — e.g., start with Chekhov’s Three Sisters, recast it with a contemporary Mexican-Canadian family and then shake it up with a magical realist second act and you get last season’s El Terremoto; start with Macbeth, recast it with literal goblins, add some killer improv and you get Goblin:Macbeth. True to the culinary metaphor behind the company’s name, adding various herbs and spices into a big pot has been yielding some well-seasoned stews.

Tarragon’s latest offering, Craze by Rouvan Silogix and Rafeh Mahmud (co-produced with Modern Times Stage Company, in association with Theatre ARTaud), is evidently following the same pattern: Start with Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, recast it with mixed-race polyamorous couples and twist it up with an unnerving AI smart-home assistant named Buddy (voiced by Augusto Bitter). In fact, throw in a few extra twists for good measure. As over-seasoned as this stew might be, I’m admittedly in awe at how good it tastes.

The plot is difficult to synopsize and virtually impossible to spoil. It begins by following the early beats of Virginia Woolf nearly to a tee. An elder married couple, Renee (Ali Kazmi) and June (Lisa Ryder), invites a younger pair, Selina (Louisa Zhu) and Richie (Kwaku Okyere), into their home for an evening of fun, games and way too much drinking. But a night that initially seemed preordained to end in an orgy keeps getting derailed by blown fuses and unexpected visitors, to say nothing of conversational topics as far-reaching as the military-industrial complex, AI technologies, racialized otherness, inherited trauma and anti-essentialist philosophy. And that’s all before things get completely wild in ways that’ll surely make CanStage’s upcoming production of Virginia Woolf feel quaint by comparison.

For a play that’s deeply concerned with questions around transhumanism, it’s appropriate that nobody in the cast behaves quite like a recognizable human being. Okyere and Zhu in particular act like over-the-top cartoon wolves clonking themselves on the head out of excessive libido, with Kazmi and Ryder doing their best to keep pace. The characters all conduct themselves as if they’re fully aware that they’re living in an Albee-esque psychodrama, condemned to play out the familiar scenario with less autonomy than the military drones that they so frequently discuss. And then, flipping the script on where humanity really lies, it’s Bitters who performs the play’s most devastatingly human moment — you’ll know it when you see it.

This production, directed by Mike Payette, is largely successful at making everything fit into place, albeit not without its fair share of rough edges. Christine Ting-Huan 挺歡 Urquhart’s sleek set design contains striking flourishes, such as hidden doorways, a turntable, haze-spewing vents, and a mock Rothko painting. Arun Srinivasan’s lighting design uses thin LEDs to evoke the technological alongside the eschatological, and Maddie Bautista’s sound design makes the auditorium quake with otherworldly force. Corey Tazmania’s intimacy direction conjures palpable sexual tension, though various turns in the plot deprive the characters of the release valve they so desperately need.

Craze is a fascinating mess of play that I couldn’t help falling in love with. It’s definitely not for everyone, but everyone should give it a shot to see if it might be for them. This is easily one of the most inscrutable pieces of theatre I think I’ve seen in a long time, which is precisely what makes it so invigorating. It’s become so rare to see a play in Toronto that actually lets its audience live in a space of confusion, militantly refusing to spoon-feed anything. That’s not to say that it’s being opaque for opacity’s sake. It almost seems as though Silogix and Mahmud feared they might never be allowed to write another play so had to make this one say and do everything they needed to get out of their systems. They bite off way more than they can chew but never fail to swallow.