Choir Boy at Canadian Stage
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Tarragon Theatre artistic director and Montreal native Mike Payette landed in Toronto triumphantly this September with a dynamic production of Jeff Ho’s Cockroach. Though Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy is a far more conventional play than Cockroach, Payette approaches it with the same energetic freedom in a new production at Canadian Stage.
The show, set “last year” at the American “Charles R. Drew Preparatory School for Boys”, centers a young boy named Pharus (Andrew Broderick), who has to work extra hard to achieve his goals — like leading the school’s prestigious choir — because of the homophobia that stalks the school.
Some plays approach toxic masculinity indirectly, and feature hardened men whose sensitivities bubble but never erupt.
Choir Boy is more direct.
Though the students clash, and Pharus’s classmates attack him with slurs, the show’s scenes of conflict are linked together by acapella gospel hymns, performed live. Structurally, these are “transitions”; but that doesn’t seem fair: they are the glowing heart of the show. And while this bisected approach at times threatens the show’s dramatic momentum — maybe Choir Boy should’ve gone all the way, and been a musical — it does allow for wonderfully direct theatrical access to the hearts and minds of these young men.
Payette’s stage — designed by Rachel Forbes — is open, and fairly sparse. Center stage, a stained glass window towers above the action; on the right and left, there are curved staircases leading to raised platforms with bookcases on them. There’s no permanent furniture — benches and beds roll in for some scenes, but, generally, the actors are up and moving.
This constant movement helps the cast tap in to a particularly theatrical acting style. Payette pushes each scene to its explosive limit, which helps them compete with the excitement of the songs. Broderick’s Pharus transcends the fourth wall — when he’s leading the choir, he commands the whole room with infectious confidence. And most of the important moments are played out: though the advertising for Choir Boy flexes McCraney’s screenwriting creds, he was a playwright first, and this production makes appropriately vibrant theatre out of his script.
Sophie Tang’s lighting design helps punctuate Payette’s minimalist-maximalist style. The Bluma Appel Theatre, where Choir Boy is performed, is quite tall, so there’s a spirituality to the lightness with which Tang’s beams float down from the ceiling. The choir’s harmonies meld with the light of heaven to bathe the space in warmth. It beats down on the choir’s faces as they sing; and even when it divides the stage into different sections, seperating each singer into their own distinct world, they seem connected, because all of the light emanates from the same place: above. Where, it is said, there are answers. And as the choir sings, they don’t just receive energy from the heavens: they send it back. It courses, upwards, through the beams, a call for help to a silent god from a student otherwise reprimanded for being too loud.
Payette messes with vertical depth throughout. Beyond the obvious contribution of the set’s raised platforms, one of the show’s most moving scenes — a gospel hymn sung in the shower — is an expressionistic meeting of heaven and earth. Up from the floor of the shower, “steam” from a smoke machine rises. It rises past the water trickling from the shower head, towards the ceiling. While, throughout the show, light and sound create subtle links between students and sky, for an all-too-short moment, this steam forges a gorgeous, undeniable visual bond.
The script of Choir Boy is slightly unfocused: it explores Pharus deeply, but doesn’t spend enough time with any of his classmates to really flesh them out. We get half-pictures of all of them, instead of full pictures of one or two. But the ensemble works magic with what they have, giving layered, dedicated performances; in group scenes, they listen carefully, reacting with specificity, so, when their characters finally speak, the audience already knows them. Savion Roach builds a particularly compelling arc out of Pharus’s roommate, AJ.
And Headmaster Morrow (Daren A. Herbert) layers more complexity on top of the conflict between students. Morrow, who has been at Drew for two years, is the youngest headmaster the school has had. He is also uncle to Bobby (Kwaku Okyere), who frequently butts heads with Pharus: at the start of the show, Bobby heckles Pharus as he sings at graduation; and, later, Pharus expels him from choir.
So, as Morrow tries to discipline the students for pranks like “leaving the cages open in the science lab, and tagging the doors with ‘Underground Railroad’”, there’s lots for Morrow to balance. Lots of people to please. He wants to treat these young men with the sensitivity they deserve, but he also wants to keep his job, and uphold the school’s sterling reputation. Morrow’s inner conflict climaxes when, spurred on by pressure from above, he forces the students to take an elective — “creative thinking” — with the old and fairly racist Mr. Pendleton, who used to be headmaster of Drew. Though Pendleton has some wisdom to offer, Morrow can surely see he’s no longer quite fit to teach at the school. Still, he has to gaslight the students into thinking he is.
Herbert’s performance digs carefully into the various forces pulling at Morrow. It’s not an obvious performance — Morrow is a professional, and largely in control of his feelings — but that makes it all the more rich.
Politically, Choir Boy is quite American. But in Payette’s vital production, the show’s heart rings through nonetheless. This is the kind of exciting, accessible theatre we should be able to expect in a city like Toronto.