July 1st-12th: Lockdown! At The Fringe Festival...

MOODY'S GLOBAL, July 02, 2009

July 1st-12th: Lockdown! At The Fringe Festival...

CaribbeanTales in conjunction with Leda Serene Films, Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the Toronto Police Services Board, celebrated Canada Day on July 1st with the world premiere of its new play Lockdown, at the 2009 Toronto Fringe Festival (from July 1st to 12th). Lockdown is the work of award-winning Founder and Artistic Director Frances-Anne Solomon, whose own upcoming CaribbeanTales Film Festival takes place from July 9th-12th.

Pre-View

Powerful plays like Lockdown are what we Fringe-aholics crave. Ms Solomon developed her stellar script through a collaborative improvisational process with the entire cast to further refine the ideas she explored in A Winter Tale, a multi-award-winning feature film about an Afri-men's support group in the wake of gun violence that takes the life of a young child. A week prior to the world premiere at The Fringe, we were treated to a special launch of Lockdown at the TOTA Lounge (592 Queen Street West). At TOTA, the actors performed selected scenes about what it's really like in a "normal" high school. We were shocked(!). Afterwards, we received some unexpected honesty about the performance from the play's student actors.

Actor Nikola Gorolova ("Martina", the conflicted youth character who is capable of great tenderness and great violence) pulled no punches when speaking about girls “pimping” girls or about how “useless” students feel is the presence of armed police guards in their schools. These stories are typical to the work that director/writer Solomon continues along her well-worn path, going where few local director/writers wish to tread, plunging right into our fears about class, culture, race, violence and youth. Her grand vision "walks the walk" instead of overindulging us with what Toronto Mayor Miller’s Special Assistant Sylvia Searles described to me as “talk fests”, speaking in reference to all the community town halls that we partake in yet worry that they do little to affect change, when we hear yet another news story regarding youth-on-youth violence. I say “youth-on-youth” violence as I am against referring to this problem as Afri-violence, something it is clearly not. You'll notice that Lockdown gives us a very multicultural cast dressed in matching uniforms so that we do not immediately assume the school is “urban” (read: poor and/or ethnic) and/or that the violence is about race or class, something that too many of us tend to dismiss or ignore.

Frankly, the audience felt that what we were shown and told about at TOTA was just too bad to be true. The adults appear as powerless to stop the violence as the kids involved are to understanding why they should stop being violent. And we thought our eyes were opened about what the actual play would be like when it premiered at The Fringe. Fortunately (and unfortunately), what we saw at TOTA would be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to showing us what violence in schools is really like. (Photo: Frances-Anne Solomon, Julie Dash at Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival 2009)

At The Fringe

As opposed to typically situating the theatre audience into a comfort zone so that we feel we know what’s going on in the play, the story of Lockdown literally explodes on the stage at the University of Toronto's George Ignatieff Theatre. A student has been killed so the police “lock down” the school by following emergency procedures that the classmates are now used to in order to keep them safe during unforeseen danger. We are suddenly and immediately in the middle of what feels like an enormous mess. The students are stuck in their classrooms, while horrified parents scramble around outside, and police officers swarm the school property. We don’t know what’s going on and are quickly uncomfortable.

International award-winner and icon Leonie Forbes stars as school Principal Higgins. Higgins spends most of her time sitting in her corner office, unmoving, distant, almost—shall we say--complacent? Like most of the police movement at the school, her movement is little. She is The Establishment and the establishment doesn't move. And it's oblivious too. In one scene, youthful teacher Mr. Wright (played by ever-expanding star Michael Miller) tries in vain to get through Higgins' tough exterior regarding the challenges that he and his students faced. These two adults can readily acknowledge how much both of them enjoy teaching Afri-history, but Higgins is defensive about Wright's concerns and sees his questions and comments as a threat to her authority. For most of the play, she appears incapable of understanding his (and others') seemingly obvious cries for help while Mr. Wright wearily walks a fine line of respect between the students and the teaching establishment. (Photo: Braeden Soltys)
And armed policemen are clearly the norm, both in Lockdown and in high schools as stated by student actor Gorolova ("Martina") during the TOTA Lounge previews. The play’s students barely notice the police presence. Could this be because the policemen barely make their presence known unless there’s a “problem”? Is this situation “normal”? Um, how is this community policing? We are left with the impression that policemen only associate with youth when there’s a need for an investigation.

Not surprisingly, actor Ryan Ishmael’s Policeman Solomon has the same challenges that any parent of a delinquent youth does. Policeman Solomon is strict, tender and desperate about getting his son to behave. The fact that he’s a policeman appears to make little difference to the situation. And he is not the stereotypical unmarried (and ethnic) father: Policeman Solomon is actually parenting his child. His child, the spineless Vusani is believably played by Lameck Williams, as a drug dealer who does little to appease his father’s frustrations about his ongoing criminal activity. Vusani and his other go-along-to-get-along classmates like Eldon Laing’s also-believable fellow drug dealer Adam are just as bad if not worse than their classmates who commit violent acts. Lockdown is a play that shows us over and over again how non-violent crime begets violent crime begets non-violent crime.

Other fascinating characters include Lauren Bunn’s highly sexualized Alicia, and Kimberley, the most violent of the eight students, portrayed by the amazingly strong Chrystelle Robinson. Yes, a female is arguably the most violent character in the play. She's the leader of the play's central female gang who teases Adam (played by an astute Ben Laurie), the romantic and would-be engineering student, the “biggest victim" in a play where everyone who is involved--or not involved--is a victim. (Photo: Chrystelle Robinson)

Lockdown’s music is sparse, adding to our ongoing discomfort with the idea of regular violence in the schools. Don’t just sit there in the audience, do something, right? Spontaneous, well-performed popular songs and rap verses by characters such as Gena Joella Sylvester‘s spirited Shyla, transition us through scenes, but do not engender either warmth or happiness. Yes, their sporadic outbursts of song help us to view the students as average, but this music (and the sparseness of it) well-contrast the teenage normalcy of the ongoing school violence. The ability to sing a beautiful song in one breath and kill someone with the next breath is positively psychopathic. Singing doesn’t disguise or distract us from this violence; it clarifies the violence for us.

Lockdown’s ending is in keeping with Solomon’s preference for climaxing realities that too many of us would rather avoid. She is less interested in “giving us hope” for the future as much as she is in starting or continuing the dialogue about the problem in order to affect change. Still, Solomon’s characters are multi-faceted and do show us both dreams and diligence as well as tenderness and caring. The humour that balances the play’s violence throughout is again there (via Miller’s character Mr. Wright) for us in the end. What is it they say: the best comedy comes from pain? Lockdown is Solomon’s idea of reality as well as her hope for the future.

Bravo Frances-Anne. Bravo.

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Lockdown is now on at the George Ignatieff Theatre, 15 Devonshire Place, at the University of Toronto. For more information, please visit CaribbeanTales.

Show Times (@ the George Ignatieff Theatre):

Thursday, July 2: 8:15pm to 9:45pm

Friday, July 3: 1:15pm to 2:45pm

Monday, July 6: 10:45pm to 12:15am

Tuesday, July 7: 1pm to 2:30pm

Friday, July 10: 4pm to 5:30pm

Sunday, July 12: 8:30pm to 12pm

Posted by Moody's Global, Moody's for Youth at 2:35 PM

Labels: arts and entertainment, awards, Canada, Caribbean, diversity, education, history, interpersonal relations, justice, philanthropy, politics, Toronto, women, world, youth