Once and for all we're going to tell you who we are so shut up and listen
- Directed by Alexander Devriendt
- Written by Alexander Devriendt, Joeri Smet and the company
- Presented by World Stage
- At Enwave Theatre in Toronto
Once and for all we're going to tell you who we are so shut up and listen has to be one of the more misleading titles affixed to a piece of theatre.
A carnivalesque creation about adolescence, created and performed by adolescents, it actually involves very little telling at all. In fact, the title has more words in it than most of the scenes.
What the 13 Belgian teenager creators - nine girls and four boys, aged between 14 and 18 - really do is show you who they are, which is always more telling than telling. So sit down and watch.
Directed by adult Alexander Devriendt, Once and for all…, a hit of the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe that has since toured the world, condenses all the boisterous joy, abrupt tragedy, sullenness, boredom and awkwardness of the in-between years into a single, frenetic five-minute scene.
The colourfully clothed teens enter, alone, or in pairs, or in clumps, and sit down in a row of chairs. Then all heck breaks out.
Two boys snap balloons at each other. The tallest guy and the girl with the knowingest look crawl into a garbage bag to make out. One boy confidently removes his shirt and offers up his abs for a feel, while another awkwardly offers a massage. Meanwhile, the demurest blonde girl sits saucer-eyed burning a Barbie's hair with a cigarette lighter.
Then, an alarm sounds and these wild things halt their rumpus and quickly clean up the stage. A few seconds later, the scene repeats, exactly as before. This messy display of adolescent anarchy turns out to be a carefully choreographed performance. Which, likely, is true of most messy displays of adolescent anarchy.
From here on, the performers repeat and revise this scene, enlarging, shortening or deconstructing their actions.
In one iteration, they describe what they were doing instead of doing it, reciting stage directions like: "Attack Christophe with balloon" or "Murder Elies with a plastic bag." In another, they transpose the action to a rave, or whatever it is kids do these days that looks like a rave.
Occasionally, a performer will stop to talk to the audience, but, ironically, instead of breaking down the so-called fourth wall, it puts a barrier up. The teen performers' body language is timeless and universal, but listen to them speak and they suddenly become alien, and not just because of their hiccuping Flemish accents.
The revelation of the show, for me anyway, is that adolescence really is a subject better understood through movement than words.
It makes sense: Read any teenager's diary and you'll find clichés, snippets of song lyrics and inarticulate or over-elaborate attempts at originality. But observe this baker's dozen of performers move and interact and all the richness of is transitional period of life is there to be examined - in postures, movements, gestures.
Once and for all… is a reminder; it's like time-travelling back through your body to that feeling of constant self-consciousness, as if 200 people were watching, which, in this case, they actually are.
Now, some of the scenes are more effective than others. But even when Once and for all… stumbles, it still works. The conceit is, essentially, foolproof.
The few moments where the performers awkwardly attempt to act, instead of just playing around? Well, adolescence is awkward.
The over reliance on pre-existing recorded music - Radiohead's Videotape; Jose Gonzalez's cover of Heartbeats - to create mood and communicate emotion? Again, that's the teen years in a nutshell.
It helps that the play is just an hour, so the exuberant energy doesn't have time to get tiresome.
Once and for all… doesn't really bust any myths about adolescence. The 20th-century invention of the "teen-ager," the connection with consumer culture - these concerns are off-limits.
Yet, while this is puberty as viewed from inside the pububble, as it were, the creators are not entirely lacking in self-awareness. In the show's longest speech, which is pretty short, a girl informs the audience of presumed adults - this is the telling part, I suppose - that she will go too far whether you try to stop her or not. "Everything has been done before - but not by me," she says.
This is a theme also illustrated by the T-shirt one of her costars wears: It's of Blondie, the New Wave band whose singer Debbie Harry is now 64, believe it or not. One way or another, we've all been here before.
Once and for all… continues in Toronto through Feb. 20.