Orphans for the Czar at Crow’s Theatre: Gorgeously Textured
Even before the pandemic, Crow’s Theatre had emerged as one of the most fearless new theatres in Toronto, with blockbuster productions of The Flick (w/ Outside the March), Julius Caesar (w/ Groundling), Stars: Together, and, of course, their now legendary production of Ghost Quartet.
Plus, even when their highly ambitious 2020-2021 season (including Natasha, Pierre… at the Winter Garden) got cancelled due to the pandemic, that didn’t stop them: after each wave of COVID lockdowns, they’ve shown immense courage in consistently being the quickest Toronto theatre to open back up “in-person”.
And Orphans for the Czar fits into that narrative quite well.
The play, set in 1905 St. Petersburg, follows a nervous orphan, Vasley (Paolo Santalucia), who is terrible at making big decisions. The problem is, as Bloody Sunday approaches, and the political infrastructure of Czar-ist Russia begins to crumble, there’s a hell a lot of decisions to be made.
Perhaps more than any show I’ve seen recently, Orphans succeeds in creating a rich theatrical world for the audience to get immersed in. The design is rigorously conceived and professionally executed, with wonderfully satisfying textures to be discovered in every corner.
From the painted wood of Lorenzo Savoini’s set, to Thomas Ryder Payne’s polka-infused soundscape, to Ming Wong’s evocative costumes, this is a show that I would recommend on aesthetic alone even to people who don’t usually like theatre — the world of Orphans feels like it’s ready to compete with the wide suite of high-quality television/film content available out there right now, at times invoking an almost video-game-like tone of fantasy that is hard to achieve in the theatre.
The playtext, a new one by George F. Walker, integrates nicely with this design world, and never lets us get too comfortable: when we think the fourth wall has been firmly established, it gets torn down; when we think the play pivoted to tragedy, it swerves back to comedy; and so forth. Calling a comedy “dark” has lost some of its meaning over time, but Orphans certainly is: it’s perverted, violent, and gross in the best ways.
To that end, I almost feel like a darkened proscenium theatre isn’t best place for this show — I’d love to see a production with the audience more involved, in the round or drinking at tables. I think that would push this experience even further into something that could be a fun night out for a general Toronto audience.
Having not read the Gorky novel that the play is loosely adapted from, it’s difficult to parse exactly how this play is adaptatively functioning, but I think I get the sentiment: it’s a sort of deconstruction; a post-modern satire by-way-of exaggeration. If that’s true, the play is quite successful in what it wants to do — there’s a set of pretty rock-solid characters (Vasley and the Master are especially compelling), but, on top of that structure, there’s this freewheeling sense that anything can happen. That feeling injects the evening with some serious excitement, and, to use Jordan Tannahill’s terminology, give us enough “liveness” to justify the play’s existence as a live theatrical event — a justification which can be difficult to procure when adapting a novel.
Ahhh, thank god for Crow’s — the east end needed you.