Body & Soul
Created by Judith Thompson
and the cast
At the Young Centre in Toronto
Unrated
The press material I received for Body & Soul certainly stood out from the pack. It is indeed rare that I am invited to "a new play by dove pro-age." Dove Pro-Age is not the playwriting offspring of a couple of West Coast hippies named Proust and Burbage, but the brand name of a line of perfumed lotions and potions that women rub on their skin for reasons both reasonable and ridiculous.
As a rule I am interested in increasing the diversity of voices in the theatre, but staging plays by soap seems a step in the wrong direction. What next? Long Day's Journey Into Night by Sealy Posturepedic?
Slippery (smooth, radiant, vital) slope aside, Body & Soul is a play commissioned by Unilever, the parent company of Dove. Its actual creation fell to playwright Judith Thompson and "13 real women" (as opposed to drag queens or fembots, I suppose).
Enough snark. I have a lot of respect for Thompson, whose recent Palace of the End was a triumphant return to form. And the 13 non-actors over 45 years of age who worked with her on this collective creation about "the second act of womanhood" all have tremendous, worthwhile tales to tell.
There's Polly Clark, 68, who was raised as a Hindu and beaten by her brothers for dating a black man. Glenda Klassen, 53, a Cree woman who was abandoned by her mother and now works at a transition house. Lois Fine, 49, who spearheaded a Charter challenge that eventually allowed same-sex couples to be listed on their child's birth certificate.
In fact, there are far too many stories to tell comprehensively in just 2½ hours. Thompson has made an attempt to sculpt the women's lives into a cohesive whole, arranging the show by theme, so, for instance, they talk in turn of memories of their mothers, their first sexual experiences, things they like and dislike about aging, things that make them angry. All 13 are on stage for the entire running time - even former nun Jeannine Boucher, 78, the oldest of the bunch, who held onto her script through much of the show like a safety blanket and bowled the audience over with her genuineness.
There is no star rating because the acting is amateur, which is meant as a description, not an insult. (Though Barbara Nichol, 54, should hit the comedy-club circuit.) When the women are simply speaking about themselves in sequence, it's all very charming, often even poignant. It's when they attempt something a little more scripted in the second act ("Speaking of orgasms, Barbara") that it begins to feel embarrassingly artificial.
There's a real hunger for empowering plays about women's lives, as the success of Trey Anthony's Da Kink in My Hair demonstrated. That play originated at a Fringe festival; Body & Soul was created by a multinational corporation.
Canada's funded theatres, I suppose, think it's beneath them to commission uplifting plays that simply and directly address the concerns of women.
But, then again, the task of entertaining women has long fallen to soap manufacturers. Along with Proctor and Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, Lever Brothers (which merged with Margarine Unie in 1930 to form Unilever) was one of the original companies that sponsored the radio serials aimed at housewives that became known as "soap operas."
Unilever's involvement in Body & Soul - so crudely proclaimed in the invitation that arrived in my mail box - is still much subtler than the frequent mentions of Spry shortening that accompanied the long-running serial Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories (1937-1956).
Dove Pro-Age gets no mention in the text. Indeed, one of Body & Soul's "real" women even voices her anger at the idea that women need to have smooth skin at all; she's rough and proud of it.
Of course, that was undercut by the fact that, under every seat, there were gift bags containing moisturizer, body lotion and "beauty bars." The discovery of these, by the women who packed the sold-out matinee I saw, garnered Body & Soul's first round of applause - and a more heartfelt one than I have heard at many a night of theatre.
Body & Soul's final two performances are today at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.