TORONTO - In his quest to redefine contemporary theatre, Mammalian Diving Reflex's Darren O'Donnell has come a long, long way -- stretching the conventional theatre canvas with works such as pppeeeaaaccceee and A Suicide-Site Guide to the City.
He continues down that road with Diplomatic Immunities: The End, a new work produced in association with Buddies In Bad Times that opened on the Buddies mainstage Tuesday night.
In many ways, it is a work that simply carries O'Donnell farther down paths he began exploring in Suicide-Site Guide, blending audience participation and multi-media with live participation to create a theatrical adventure that, oddly enough, never seems to spill over into theatrical anarchy.
Whereas SSG put the focus squarely on O'Donnell, Diplomatic Immunities seems to train the spotlight on just about everybody but O'Donnell, as it sets out to explore the disintegrating state of our world and what some believe to be its inevitable end.
To accomplish this, there are taped interviews galore, with everyone from a crack-addicted hooker to the owner of a sex shop, from open-faced school children and aspiring Pakistani actors to the wife of a respected international diplomat.
Most of these interviewees are introduced by O'Donnell and his his seven co-research artists, as they lounge about the stage while photos of their subjects are projected on one or more of the screens scattered throughout the space.
The information thus imparted ranges from the biographical to the banal, and the subjects raised range from phobias through faith, to the music best suited to accompany the end of the world.
The role of research artist does not, however, begin and end with introducing video clips and interrogating their subjects, and each of the eight research artist ends up facing the camera and answering many of the same questions they have posed to others.
So, when the time comes for the audience to start answering questions, it seems almost inevitable.
By a process of gentle elimination, the focus is narrowed to two specific audience members who quite willingly face an interrogation similar to the ones we've been watching, as questions are posed first by the research artists, then, once a tone of gentility has been established, by their fellow audience members.
Casually staged, with Rebecca Picherack sharing directorial duties with O'Donnell, Diplomatic Immunities is, in many ways, a lot like settling into the theatrical equivalent of a warm bath. As all good theatre does, it creates in its audience a sense of shared experience, but where it stops short of those standards is in its sense of introversion.
So, when it comes to creating something that might potentially take an audience outside itself and outside the theatre -- something that might stop us short and make us examine the world in a whole new perspective -- O'Donnell is less successful.
One starts to hunger for more edge in this cutting-edge approach -- and on opening night, by inadvertantly engaging a very engaging, young dipsomaniac who aspires to a future in photography and/or economics, O'Donnell managed to underline not only how far removed he is from conventional theatre, but how much further he has to move as well.
As long as he's this good, however, it's certain he won't have to move on alone.
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