Rebecca Applebaum spices up one of the vignettes in Paper Series.
David Yee was nominated for a Governor-General's Literary Award last year for Lady in the Red Dress, a play that mixed the serious subject of Canadian immigrant experience with the lurid conventions of pulp fiction.
Yee's latest work, receiving its premiere from Toronto's diversity-oriented Cahoots Theatre Company at the Young Centre, does much the same thing. Only, as the title Paper Series suggests, this time the pulp in question is literal as well as figurative.
Paper Series is a collection of six short pieces using paper as a linking device. One revolves around the writing of a Dear John letter, another concerns tampering with fortune-cookie fortunes, a third skit uses paper dolls to tell a foster child's story, and so on. It's a clever means for Yee to showcase his own diversity as a young playwright, jumping from crime thriller to relationship comedy, from a wild Tarantino-esque shoot-out in a Chinese restaurant to a poignant study of Mumbai doctors compelled to drive taxis in Toronto. And if a few of these bite-sized plays are weaker than others, director Nina Lee Aquino and her talented cast present them all with wit and panache.
The least-successful piece opens the series. Paper Burns concerns Baht (Marjorie Chan), the Chinese-Canadian daughter of a currency counterfeiter who gets into the family business and in over her head with Russian mafia types. The story comes off like the truncated scenario for some second-rate Hollywood movie, enlivened only by Rosa Laborde's amusing shtick as a Russian mobster.
Laborde pulls out her burlesque Slavic accent again, briefly, in Paper Cuts. Delivering a monologue that oscillates between comical and introspective, she plays a young woman trying to draft the perfect Dear John missive to her sleeping boyfriend as he snores nearby.
But the series doesn't really hit its stride until Paper Dolls, a sweet, funny fantasy about an unhappy orphan (Rebecca Applebaum) who is comforted by her dead Scottish father and Asian mother in the form of paper cut-outs. Yee, who is of Scottish-Chinese descent himself, gently pokes fun at racial and cultural stereotypes as the parents (Chan and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia) bicker over the relative merits of Sean Connery and congee.
That leads us to the show's sidesplitting centrepiece, Paper Tears. A delightful Lorenzo Garcia, as a waiter named Wisdom, breathlessly narrates the tale of how he and other mischievous staff members of the Dragon Inn created havoc by slipping their own personalized messages into the restaurant's fortune cookies. Once again playing with Asian stereotypes, Yee lets this humorous anecdote rapidly build until it reaches a chaotic crescendo that resembles something resembling a scene from Reservoir Dogs crossed with the martial-arts comedies of Yuen Woo-ping.
Yee is less assured when it comes to straight drama. Paper Folds, the tender confession of a heartbroken lover (Byron Abalos), suffers from overworked origami imagery and feels like a rehash of Paper Cuts without the laughs.
The most ambitious piece is the last one, Paper Route, featuring Kawa Ada as Isaac, a Toronto taxi driver who keeps his medical degree on display in his cab instead of his licence. As with Paper Tears, Yee once again shows his skill at quick-sketching a handful of distinctive characters - this time, Isaac's fellow cabbies, all former physicians in India whose training has come to naught in their new home. The story blends Russell Peters-style racial comedy with darker observations on the destiny of immigrants, leading to an intense and ironic climax. It finds Yee swimming in less familiar cultural waters but, assisted by Ada's adroit performance, it's entirely convincing.
Aquino, Cahoots' artistic director, gives her 90-minute production an imaginative minimal staging, moulding her nimble actors into endless configurations like living origami. Designer Camellia Koo turns the Young Centre's black-box Tank House Theatre into a blizzard of white costumes, blond furniture and reams of blank paper that bestrew the stage long before the performance ends.
Paper Series suggests that Yee is still finding his most effective voice as a playwright, but it makes you eager to hear more from him.
Paper Series
- Written by David Yee
- Directed by Nina Lee Aquino
- Starring Byron Abalos, Kawa Ada, Rebecca Applebaum, Marjorie Chan, Rosa Laborde and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia
- A Cahoots Theatre Company production
- At the Young Centre in Toronto
Paper Series runs until April 9.
Special to The Globe and Mail