A Toronto Theatre Review: Robert O’Hara’s Meta-Theatrical Dark Comedy Turns Sexuality, Childhood, and Power Into a Deliciously Unpredictable Playground
By Ross
The first image of Bootycandy is of a sexy Black man standing tall on a pedestal in tighty-whities while the company gathers around him, looking him over as though he were an object on display. It’s a telling moment of introspection, as we are asked to look at how we are looking at him, and ponder what that means. Then the framing shifts, and suddenly that man has remade himself into a little boy who has misunderstood something his mother has said about going to the circus. And before we have even had time to settle into the joke, this child shifts focus, asking why his mother calls his dick “Bootycandy,” followed by a question that seems to unlock the entire wonderfully outrageous world Robert O’Hara has created: “Can I lick it?” I immediately leaned forward, almost losing my balance in my chair, as I wanted to know what this mother was going to say to that, but also where the hell this play is planning on taking us. That feeling, thankfully, never really goes away.
Directed wickedly and wonderfully by Jay Northcott (Obsidian/Crow’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner), this Canadian premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, in co-production with Obsidian Theatre Company, unwraps and reveals itself through a series of sharp, absurd, and frequently hilarious vignettes that refuse to behave like a conventional narrative. Bootycandy is almost impossible to prepare for, which feels entirely appropriate for a play that seems determined to keep pulling the rug out from underneath whatever expectations we bring into the room. A church scene sheds its skin to attack the ‘I heards’ who quickly become ‘THEY-HEARDs‘ in the congregation, and suddenly the scene sparkles purple and bright with wondrous theatrical possibility. A tangled phone conversation between women turns a discussion about the naming of a daughter into something tee-hee-twisted and wildly inappropriate, and a screw-up at a convention becomes the source of some clever examination of intention that is both ridiculous and remarkably smart.
O’Hara (MCC Theater’s Shit. Meet. Fan.) keeps changing the rules while we are still trying to figure out what game we are playing. One mother tells her son that he needs to “stop, stop, stop,” being the kind of young man he wants to be, including his desire to be in the school production of The Wiz, and the joke carries the weight of everything she fears that boy might become if he continues to follow the path he is going down (especially the one that he takes home from school – that one is wrought with trouble, or is it temptation?). You’ll know what that means when you know, and until then, know that this telling comedy is enormous, but underneath all of its playfulness sits childhood, sexuality, family, race, power, and the expectations placed upon a Black queer body. And laughter and sequins are just the way of the Lord in this regard.
Rightfully standing on that pedestal, Kyle Brown (TIFT’s The Frogs) carries the production with remarkable ease as Sutter, giving us a character whose journey stretches across different ages and experiences without ever feeling like a collection of disconnected sketches. Brown becomes the sexy, emotional thread running through O’Hara’s episodic phallic structure of a play, allowing the humour to land while giving the more vulnerable moments somewhere to go. The magnificent Helen Belay (StratFest’s Ransacking Troy) and the exceptionally game Dan Mousseau (Crow’s Summer and Smoke) are superb teammates in this strange theatrical universe, particularly when the humour ventures into racial territory that requires precision, nerve and an instinct for exactly when to push a joke and when to let the discomfort sit in the room. The vibrant Meghan Swaby (Tarragon’s Interior Design) and Christopher Allen (Tarragon’s Redbone Coonhound) add layers upon layers to the ever-shifting collection of characters, helping Northcott maintain the production’s restless momentum into mayhem. The cast has to be willing to jump from the outrageous to the painfully uncomfortable without warning, and they throw themselves into that instability with a confidence that makes the whole thing feel wonderfully sharp and alive.
The stage itself understands the assignment. Nick Blais’ set design gives the notorious 17-foot phallic sculpture a deliberately tacky and deliciously excessive playing field that becomes a visual wild ride for a play obsessed with the ways Black bodies are viewed, sexualized, and interpreted. It is funny before we even know what it means, and then it keeps gathering meaning as the evening progresses. Arianna Moodie’s costumes help the production float between its shifting worlds and identities, while Darren Shaen’s lighting gives each vignette its own theatrical temperature without allowing the transitions to become interruptions. David Ariza’s sound design and composition contribute to the production’s constant sense of movement, helping Northcott turn a collection of seemingly disconnected episodes into one strange, pulsing theatrical experience. The design never feels decorative even in its abstractionisms. It is part of the joke, part of the provocation, and part of the way the production keeps asking us to reconsider what we think we are seeing.
I know I’m being vague and abstract in my presentation, but I am deliberately resisting the temptation to explain too much about what happens because so much of the pleasure of Bootycandy comes from being caught off guard. Two souls pledge themselves to something profoundly non-committal, with a bitch-slap sealing the deal, and then we are thrown into a wicked game of ‘truth or dare’ that manages to reveal something about the characters, the world they inhabit, and perhaps our own expectations as audience members while also taking these three players somewhere extreme. That is where Northcott’s direction finds its particular ridiculously ripe and wicked rhythm. The play can be filthy, wild, affectionate, uncomfortable, and deeply moving within the space of a few minutes, and the sudden turns never feel like accidents, but smart observations made purposeful. O’Hara has built a theatrical machine designed to make us laugh before making us wonder why we are laughing, and then to leave us wondering what else we have missed. The production’s distinctly Canadian perspective also gives these American origins a new context, engaging with the realities of Black Canadian experience and refusing to make pain the only available language for that experience.
That is the delicious quality of Bootycandy. It is meta with a capital M, and that M could stand for magnificent, magnetic, maddening, and marvellously unpredictable. The production asks its audience to stop trying to get ahead of the game and simply go where it takes us, through childhood memories, sexual discovery, family expectations, racial assumptions, theatrical performance, and the strange machinery of storytelling itself. Beneath all the jokes and audacity lives a young man trying to understand who he is in a world that keeps telling him what he is and isn’t allowed to be, and the laughter becomes lickably part of that investigation. By the time that boy who first asked about the meaning of Bootycandy has travelled through all these fractured hotel rooms and familial encounters, the outrageousness of the question has acquired an entirely different emotional charge. That is the beautiful hat trick of Bootycandy. It can leave you gobsmacked by the sheer nerve of what you have just watched, then make you realize that underneath the laughter, you have been watching someone trying to find a way to name himself. And of course, his dick.
