Arts & Culture

What: For Both Resting and Breeding
Where: 164 Cowan Ave., Toronto (Private Residence)
When: Now, until Fri., Jan. 31
Highlight: The ensemble cast’s perfect blend of quirks and heart
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: An endearingly uncynical version of a premise that could have easily been drowned in cynicism

EVEN THOUGH THE  term “speculative fiction” is predominantly used to describe works set in the distant future, Adam Meisner’s extraordinary play For Both Resting and Breeding instrumentalizes a future setting to remind us that our knowledge of the past may be just as much of a guessing game.

This heartwarming act of bidirectional imagination is presented by Talk Is Free Theatre (TIFT), the Barrie-based globetrotting company that’s constantly redefining what it means to be a “regional” theatre. Before shipping this production out to Japan next month, Torontonians are treated to a brief stint, staged in the modern kitchen of a domicile just off King Street West. With a maximum capacity of 16 spectators per performance, snap up your ticket before it all becomes a faded memory.

With echoes of Huxley’s Brave New World, the year is 2150 and a team of five people, referred to only by the gender-neutral pronoun “Ish,” are preparing for the sesquicentennial anniversary of Y2K. Their plan: refurbish a house from the period into a museum where they will re-enact the life of a millennial family unit. Torn between the competing demands of historical authenticity, public education and personal desire, our quintet of Ishes connect and clash over what revisiting the world of yesteryear means to them.

Despite that pitch being quite literally ripped straight from a decade-old SNL sketch, Meisner elevates the cheeky premise by committing wholeheartedly to an earnest and thoughtful examination of how we conceptualize, commemorate and yearn for the past. He invites the audience to appreciate our own seemingly mundane present by considering the perspective of those who might one day reflect upon it with equal measures of confusion and rose-tinted romanticism. It’s also remarkable how we’re presented with a drab vision of the future that nonetheless lacks the cynicism one might typically expect of a Huxleyan cautionary tale, even when acknowledging that progress in some areas inevitably means losing aspects of the past we might hold dear.

With much of the (uncredited) production design being constrained by the ordinariness of the kitchen, what makes the performance shine above all is its exquisite cast. They’ve mastered the quirky mannerisms and (d)evolved speech patterns of their future civilization, as well as re-enacting the early aughts with an endearing enthusiasm reminiscent of how folks today might behave at a Renaissance Fair.

Maja Ardal (who also directs) has perfectly cast herself as the petty tyrant team leader, serving as a stern mouthpiece for their accepted cultural values. She’s joined by Richard Lam as the group’s chief historian, who’s motivated by an infectious curiosity about a world that he’s come to know only through research, which he now has the opportunity to reach out and touch. In one powerful moment, he delivers an amatory monologue for the ages, made even sweeter by virtue of the character having no direct frame of reference for the feelings being communicated. Alexander Thomas and Amy Keating take on slightly thankless roles as the more peripheral members of the team, but they still get plenty of room to flex their skills. There’s even a scene near the end that retrofits them with character arcs that weren’t necessarily present from the start but succeeded at giving the heartstrings a gentle tug.

Perhaps the most fascinating Ish is the one played by Jamie McRoberts, who undergoes a beautiful journey of self-discovery while chafing against 22^nd-century society’s suppression of gender and sexuality, using the safe space of historical make-believe as an opportunity for experimentation. Interestingly, though all characters wear seemingly identical jumpsuits in their day-to-day existence as a uniform of genderless conformity (costume design by Laura Delchiaro), McRoberts’s attire contains some individuating (and arguably gendered) details, such as a different cut of her collar and capri-length pant legs. This surely signifies the characters’ pre-existing attempts at more conventionally feminine self-expression, though that does risk undercutting the impact attached to her later adoption of haute couture dresses and high heels as the plot goes on.

But that’s a small gripe. For Resting and Breeding is a wonderful artefact of our culture that I hope future historians might one day study. As the alarmist saying goes, those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. This play offers a touching counterargument: those who don’t learn from the past won’t know what’s worth repeating.