Her play delivers powerful poetry
Leo is a marvellous yet occasionally uneven production from a young author whose potential – as demonstrated in her latest work – is absolutely amazing. Rosa Laborde’s play tells the story of Leo, a poet whose youth and growth parallels the Socialist revolution of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Leo (Salvatore Antonio) grows up as one point of a triangle also composed of Isolda (Michelle Monteith), a young woman crackling with emotional energy, and Rodrigo (Jason Cadieux), a political revolutionary so idealistically noble it makes your back molars ache.
Backed by a sparse but elegantly mutable set, the three principals in this show are powerful enough to really project substance. Antonio is marvellous as a young Leo, growing convincingly into the awkward elasticity of youth and the passionate awakenings of adulthood. Monteith is delicious as a confused and alluring young woman torn between the two boys, and Cadieux does an admirable job with the reactionary Rodrigo, although not altogether possessing the magnetism that his character suggests.
The friends grow from childhood to young adulthood during the period of Allende’s rise to power. Each finds a balance in his or her triadic orbit, taking a position equidistant from each other politically, emotionally and sensually. It is a fairly typical and expected device, and I won’t ruin it by spoiling the details, but the playwright executes it with admirable panache. Her refusal to hesitate makes the entire thing hang together perfectly.
If I can sum it up in one tremendously stupid but apt simile (which I obviously can, since I’m in charge here), Leo is like a cabinet made beautifully out of unfinished wood. Carefully crafted in every way, but giving the occasional splinter. The author maintains a poetic and passionate voice, but occasionally steps way over the line into melodrama. I recall two instances of Leo screaming “Nooooo!” to the heavens, in an age where that is undeniably reserved for ironic parody. And when Isolda exclaims, “There are universes unfolding in my heart,” one can’t help but think, “How many universes does she need?”
The play is beautifully constructed and well joined: Scenes alternate temporally in well-placed juxtaposition. The movement jars our senses and expectations, but the dialogue places us instantly. What makes it beautiful is that the author serves the audience with materials and then allows us to do our own constructing. Motifs are sketched out through linked events, or hinted in parallel dialogues, and then left as scaffolding. But through constant repetition we are ourselves drawn into the process of building. Nature abhors a vacuum just as the human mind abhors a lacuna – both yearn to be filled.
For example: One scene ends as the lights close on an imprisoned Leo, then the words of his childhood friends suddenly break the tension and Leo is a child again, playing hide and seek. The darkness that enfolds him references the disappearance of his father, the blind abandonment of his mother, the horrors of a dissolving country, the personal betrayals of his friends, even the basic failure of language to illuminate… With nothing presented didactically, it becomes a fascinating, immersive experience.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Nov 30, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=10949
