Roberto Zucco is a scathing indictment of the bourgeois class during the AIDS crisis. But does it live up to Buddies in Bad Times Theatres’ new values of liberation, audacity, and [artistic] rigor? In a word: yes.
This season marks the first one programmed by artistic director ted witzel and artistic associate Erum Khan. witzel and Khan revamped the core values of the theatre to reflect the present day needs and dreams of the longest running queer theatre on Turtle Island. They landed on liberation, audacity and rigor. With those in mind, I went to see the first play of the season, Roberto Zucco.
In 1988, as French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès was losing his battle with AIDS, he saw the film footage of the infamous Italian serial killer Roberto Succo on the roof of the prison he was trying to escape.
Koltès was struck by the spectacle and penned his final play, naming it after one of Succo’s pseudonyms. The play begins with two bumbling prison guards (Daniel McIvor, Oyin Oladejo) witnessing a prisoner on the roof escaping. Zucco (Jakob Ehmen) makes his break into the dark recesses of the grimy underbelly of a city that could easily be anywhere. There he makes connections through explosive acts of violence perpetrated against those on the fringes before disappearing into the neverending night.
The ensuing drama revolves around the victims of Zucco and the ways in which he irreparably changes their lives.
The killer Zucco is used as a mythological force to express Koltès’ anger with the systemic violence perpetrated against those who dare to deviate from the norms defined by the bourgeois, heteronormative, patriarchal class.
After the murder of his mother (Fiona Highet), his next victim (Samantha Brown) takes up a search for him. In a moment full of contradiction, because she is feeling a complete lack of intimacy and meaning in her life, Zucco’s actions provide connection and a distraction from the bleakness, while also clearly violating her. Pushed to the police by her brother (Kwaku Okyere), she names him, leading to his recapture after a spate of killings.
The small but stellar cast give life to numerous characters, from unrepentant opportunists to endearingly fragile and lost individuals.
Audacity
Koltès writing is incisive, dark, funny, touching, poetic. With no jail able to contain Zucco, the use of a violent criminal as a mythological and mystical force breaks the norms of the societal structure Koltès rages against. The production feels dangerous and sexy with just the right amount of dark humour. It’s both an audacious means of conveying Koltès rage, and a statement as the season-opening choice by witzel and Khan.
Liberation
This is a more difficult criteria than audacity. Roberto Zucco, dark, expressionistic with a splash of absurdity, is liberated from more conventional styles of storytelling. It exposes some ugly truths about the world of Koltès, one not unlike today. Through punitive social controls, each character is stripped of their humanity, their ability to connect, and ability to sexually consent.
To chilling effect, a lonely mother (Highet) visits a park with her son (Brown), only to encounter Zucco and his violence. It was easy to imagine their daily routine, visiting the park, the mother filled with longing for intimacy, the lack of it a punishing reminder of her needs. In meeting Zucco he frees her from the monotony and loneliness with a different flavour of brutality.
Every character similarly pushes against the isolation of dehumanization in one way or another, only to find themselves punished for their efforts to find human connection. Each character strives for liberation but never fully arrives.
Under witzel’s direction and the expert work of the creative team, the atmosphere is dark, hazy, and liberated from the traditional incandescence of the stage. The world of Roberto Zucco is more an experience that escorts the audience into the perpetual twilight of poverty and despair.
Rigor
The attention to detail in the set design, like the peeling wallpaper and the timeless noir-cum-thriftstore costuming, both by Michelle Tracy, is superb, striking a wonderful balance between tension and camp.
The lighting design by Logan Raju Cracknell is creeping and oppressive and sound designer Dahsa Plett creates and eerie sonic ambience. The foreboding world is meticulously calculated.
The cast is a who’s who of Canadian stage and screen, including denizens Daniel McIvor and Fiona Highet. Jakob Ehman as Zuccco is enigmatic sympathetic and monstrous. As siblings, Oyin Oladejo, Kwaku Okyere, and Samantha Brown have precious little chemistry and in any other production this would be a fault, but in Zucco it heightens the uneasy disconnection of their world.
The artistic rigor of Roberto Zucco is substantial at every level.
Buddies’ new season has gone off with a bang, fulfilling their core values. And if Roberto Zucco is any indication of what’s to come, it’s going to be one defiant and thrilling season.
Robert Zucco is showing at Buddies in Bad Times until Oct. 5.