Review: Factory Theatre's THE ART OF BUILDING A BUNKER

The award-winning one-man play "The Art of Building a Bunker" now on at Factory Theatre Lab, is about a desperate outsider named Elvis Goldstein who is incapable of experiencing love and the consequences that follow. His namesake, of course, was the King of Rock n' Roll. This homunculus is the King of Pain. He is also a vicious bigot.

As portrayed by co-writer Adam Lazarus, Elvis is an idiosyncratic, ignorant, unfiltered, bitter civil service office drudge whose view of the world is a hateful one. Isolated and with no friends, he spews and hurls sexist and racist invectives that are frequently and harshly hilarious in their political incorrectness. Some are offensive, one is particularly shockingly.

Suffering from anhedonia, Elvis is incapable of experiencing pleasure. He is consumed ... almost paralyzed ... by fear. He is so paranoid and scared of the world's problems ("Islamic terror, war, the Ebola virus, climate change, Somali pirates, etc.") he hunkers in his bunker he has constructed in his basement depicted by Camellia Koo's stage design of interconnected pipes. (There is also a canoe and a desk. Why the canoe? I don't know, but it does remind me of that great Canadian tip "Don't stand up in a canoe.") As the old saying goes "Paranoids think everyone is out to get them. Sane people know it." Well, that's Elvis and his self-image.

He lives with his wife and his child. He loves them, we think. At work, he has been forced to enroll in a week-long sensitivity training group which he loathes. But he has to comply or he'll be fired which, obviously, is not an option. We're not told what he did that prompted such action. That's a weakness in the script.

The group is led by the self righteous, culture appropriating Cam who has never met a "Namaste" or "Meegwetch" he hasn't liked. Cam reminded me in particular of Saturday Night Live's self-help, daily affirmation guru Stuart Smalley played by now US Senator Al Franken. ("I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it, people like me." "My, Cleopatra wasn't the only Queen of Denial."). Although he is charged with healing and soothing, Cam is ironically intolerant of any point of view with which he doesn't agree.

Also in the group are an irritating dweeb who annoyingly keeps asking questions, a mild-mannered, inarticulate Chinese woman about to explode in anger, a sexy Latina and a despicable racial supremacist South African, all skillfully portrayed by Adam Lazarus.

The result is a 90-minute screed sometimes funny and, at times, deeply offensive, but never poignant. You can laugh at this cruel cretin/lost soul but, unless you're magnanimous enough, you're never moved to feel compassion for him, especially this week with the killings of two soldiers in Canada by similar, we can assume. disaffected madmen consumed by sophistry.

Will Elvis, in the words of Paul Simon, "do some damage one fine day?" That's left for us to decide.

"The Art of Building a Bunker" is co-written by Lazarus and Governor General/Chalmers Canadian Play Award-winning Guillermo Verdecchia who also directs. An early version was presented in May 2013 at the Toronto Festival of Clowns and it became a hit at Toronto's 2013 SummerWorks Festival.

"Bunker" actually reminds me of the work of Eric Bogosian ("Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll") and John Leguziamo ("Mambo Mouth.")

Lazarus performs the show in the tradition of the confrontational and satiric bouffon, the nasty clown. The term comes from Jacques Lecoq's L'École Internationale de Théatre in Paris in the 1960s. Its focus is "the art of mockery" within the realm of narrative theatre.

In fact, the two gentlemen created this edgy, fiercely written and performed play/monologue in order to explore the limits of this style of theatre. And that they do push it in one joke, to the art of insult.

The joke is: "What's the difference between a black man and a Jew?" Blacks go to the back of the oven." I was shocked, but upon second thought I'd be offended if it wasn't so puerile. In defence, Lazarus, a Jew himself, said in a post-show Q&A that he and Verdecchia, when writing the play, were searching for the most offensive jokes they could to illustrate Elvis' depravity. In this case, they succeeded. Lazarus admitted they have received complaints, but young people tend to shrug it off as just so much "Meh." Now, THAT's scary.

A co-production of QuipTake and Factory Theatre Lab, The Art of Building a Bunker is now playing through Nov. 2nd. More information available a twww.factorytheatre.ca.

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