How high is the price tag attached to working in the arts? Everyone Is Doing Fine at Workshop West, a review

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

In Everyone Is Doing Fine, the season finale at Workshop West, Calgary-based playwright James Odin Wade steps boldly up to a conundrum that leaves the arts and its practitioners stuck between a rock and a hard place, looking for wiggle room. And it’s provokingly current.

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In Wade’s new dark, smart, and thorny comedy about selling out and moral vetting, premiering in a Heather Inglis production, we meet an unstable triangle of characters. Two of them are art school grads, stalled underachievers struggling away in poverty to find a foothold in their chosen careers, the ones they trained for.

Daniel (David Madawo), who’s Black, is a painter who quit a coveted residency and gave up painting when the (old white moneyed) sponsors “paraded him around like a lost Black artifact” and then slagged his work for not being Black enough. Anika (Christina Nguyen) is a socially aware art curator of the activist stripe who got dumped by her boyfriend for ranting at a wedding about capitalist profiteering from global warming. She currently works for MOMA — as a tour guide.

Caleb, the third character, is a successful hedge fund manager (Sebastian Ley) with rich friends and deep pockets. He’s looking to surround himself with prestige “culture” and its hip up-and-coming practitioners. And he has the means, and the desire, to fund it, and them.

He is, in short, the temptation. The seduction of solvency has begun.

As the play begins, Daniel, too strapped to even make rent for his dump of an apartment (there’s a mushroom growing out of the ceiling), has taken an easy gig as Caleb’s personal assistant while he works on his new thing, a graphic novel. And in Caleb’s swank Upper West Side brownstone apartment (suggested in high-style by Alison Yanota’s set and lighting design). Daniel is under attack for selling out from his loud, righteous, in-your-face friend Anika — as they drink Caleb’s spendy booze in his kitchen. “Someone should be in prison for this counter alone,” she jokes, a heavy dose of acid in her voice.

Daniel holds his ground; Madawo’s performance conveys decency making the best of things, of necessity (and experience with the racism of the world). And he gets roasted for “sticking up for venture capitalism” by his relentlessly sardonic friend who, in Nguyen’s outsized performance, has no inside voice, and seems to have channelled a worthy sense of outrage into wearying anger management issues.

Sebastian Ley, Christina Nguyen and David Ley in Everyone Is Doing Fine, Workshop West. Photo bty Marc J Chalifoux

It’s an intriguing set-up. And it’s made less intriguing, I think, by the high-volume, shouty way the production begins (or at least did on opening night). There’s something to be said for conversational scale in a kitchen, and for leaving room for escalation. As it is, you might mistake Anika for a theatre major.

In Ley’s performance, Caleb has a certain confident charm, and an offhand shrug about him. He’s unpretentious; he doesn’t need pretension to get what he wants. So Anika’s sneers just slide right off him. He tells them that unlike his boring banker friends, “you two are like real people. Interesting people.” And they can’t help being a bit disarmed.

Are there strings attached to Caleb’s overtures? Daniel argues for reserving judgment. But Anika is instantly suspicious of him, and wonders about a sinister agenda, a dark mystery from the past. Nonetheless she takes a gig buying art for his walls, and excoriates him for his lack of taste.

Wade’s dialogue is witty (all three characters are smart and they have things to say). And the structure of his play is a wicked double-spiral, coloured by the equivocal nature of taking money and despising the giver.  A mystery unravels, as the lives of the three characters get more and more tightly intertwined. Is there — should there be? — a heavy personal and moral price tag for having the means to work in the arts? Should you lose yourself to gain yourself?

I shouldn’t say more, except to give kudos to Darrin Hagen’s clever score; it references that structure, with its snazzy corporate sheen giving way to pulsing beats and more jagged riffs. The title of the play changes its colour, and meaning, depending on the way you say “fine” (practise this at home).

Christina Nguyen, Daniel Madawo, Sebastian Ley in Everyone Is Doing Fine, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The questions of the play don’t dissolve in resolution, comedy notwithstanding. In a world where the arts struggle to create, and do so on the backs of impoverished artists, you can’t help extrapolating on a larger scale, outside the play. Are sponsorships, patronage, and donors tied to oil or tobacco companies dirty money and too morally dubious to accept? What about oligarchs with links to the military-industrial war machine or pollution for profit? Or big pharma with ties to the opioid crisis? The controversy about the Sackler Wing at the Met in New York, for example — family financial connections to Purdue Pharma, the notorious company behind OxyContin — springs to mind (it’s mentioned in the play). Or Imperial Tobacco’s support of jazz festivals in Canada? Everyone Is Doing Fine makes you think about things like that.

In an era of dwindling sponsorship and grant money, the line that divides having the wherewithal to move forward in your art and selling out, gets pretty smudgy. Everyone Is Doing Fine plays along that mined frontier. Think, and argue, and think again.

Have a peek at ’s preview interview with playwright James Odin Wade, here.

REVIEW

Everyone Is Doing Fine

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: James Odin Wade

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Christina Nguyen, David Madawo, Sebastian Ley

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: May 6 through 24

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will).