Fewer Emergencies
Presented by mitch, in association with Groundwater, at SummerWorks ‘08
Directed by Brendan Healy
Featuring Ken Mackenzie, Vahid Rahbani, Erin Shields, Andrew Pifko
Design by Ken Mackenzie
Sound by Jesse Ash
Assistant Directed by Jessica Glanfield
Stage Managed by Steve Minnie
Produced by Gideon Arthurs
With Fewer Emergencies, Martin Crimp launches a triptych satirical attack on the platitudes of contemporary western domesticity at the beginning of this new century by dramatizing some of its central anxieties: violence towards women and children, infidelity, international terrorism and war. In Whole Blue Sky, a woman realizes that her marriage is a mistake, but stays, colluding with her husband in living a public lie while wreaking damage and violence behind closed doors. In Face To The Wall, a Columbine-esque high-school shooting is perpetrated by a killer who is unknowable. With the eponymous Fewer Emergencies, a couple's imaginative child escapes into a magical tower while a violent revolution rages outside. Crimp offers us a disturbing vision of a paranoid western world that is isolated and lost in a culture of contentment and entitlement.
“Highly Recommended - Erin Shields, barefoot in a 1950s green party dress, is compellingly watchable, while Ken MacKenzie and Andrew Pifko, a sort of tag team of arch devil's advocates, provide a series of interjections in a way that drives the narrative to the edge of absurdity and madness. Odd as heck but surprisingly watchable.” - Bruce DeMara, The Toronto Star
"All the exchanges are precisely calibrated, everything brittle but impeccably conversational, nothing forced." - Robert Cushman, The National Post