Cant
Rhinoceros Theater Fetival
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There’s one thing about motherhood: it lands you smack-dab in the middle of the land of the body. (And you don’t get out until your children let you–if then.) Many of the threads in Cant revolve around the body, especially the act of eating, and Magnus weaves them together with ease, segueing from a song about the “sweetness of the drug” to a stand-up bit in which she sticks her butt out at us and asks “How can it be that the bigger I get the more invisible I become?” (hilarious to any woman who’s ever felt she’s no longer on the hottie radar) to a bit in which she “eats” her baby (played by the soft white bag). Every loving parent understands the desire to consume the child, which is so “delicious,” in Magnus’s word. We work backward from this scene to the mother’s sweet, drugged state, and indirectly to the drugged feeling of boredom and depression once one is stuck at home with young children, which can lead to the drug of overeating.
Hunger, feeding, and exercise all figure in Cant. When Magnus strings up the pillow to stand in for a punching bag and starts jabbing at it and talking about what an attractive person she is, we naturally assume a new mom has gone to the gym to improve her appearance and self-esteem. But no, this is the insensitive husband of a young mother. The exercise motif is Magnus’s excuse to muse about one’s relation to oneself, another issue that parenthood brings to the fore: What constitutes self-pity? What’s the value of self-sacrifice? Now that I’m “evaporating” (to use Magnus’s term), how do I maintain what’s left of me?
I realized I was in trouble when half the audience disappeared during intermission–then reappeared onstage at the beginning of the second act in a big party scene. I know the theater world can be insular, but this was ridiculous. And yet the acting was far better than the script, which takes as its starting point a plane crash, then spirals into a shaggy-dog story that involves one stereotyped character after another. Themes are introduced only to be dropped, and after nearly two hours in the theater we get only a mysterious, totally unsatisfying conclusion. Trying to figure out how it all fit together, I could only come up with the thought that three of the characters were committing suicide because they couldn’t stand the male and female leads. The piece’s only redeeming feature is Liz Birch in the role of the Feral Boy, a teenager of ambiguous gender. She has an adolescent’s seductive, ambivalent, ingratiating body language down pat. Unfortunately her role reaches its apex at the end of the first act; in the second her character is as annoyingly mannered and empty as all the rest.
