With Clyde’s, Canadian Stage delivers a particularly poignant parable for springtime. The play, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage, directed here by Philip Akin, follows a group of ex-convicts working at a sandwich shop off a Pennsylvania highway, serving hungry truckers. As our four protagonists — Rafael (Augusto Bitter), Letitia (Jasmine Case), Montrellous (Sterling Jarvis), and Jason (Johnathan Sousa) — make their living layering breads, meats, and sauces, they cower from their rude and abusive boss, Clyde (Sophia Walker), who owns the joint (and gives it its name). Upon this foundation, the play’s drama coheres as a struggle between competing worldviews, namely Montrellous’ older, slightly paternalistic optimism and Clyde’s destructive pessimism.
Clyde’s and Montrellous’ opposing positions coalesce into a prolonged argument about progress, innovation, and the possibility of Clyde’s becoming more than just a commercial food outlet. Where Montrellous advocates for sandwich-making as a creative and generative exercise, Clyde approaches her business pragmatically, with a small-minded pessimism rooted in her intimate knowledge of the low-income ex-convict’s position as a subhuman outcast around whom society delineates its borders. She therefore operates on the certainty that normative, straightforward success is impossible for her employees. For the sake of maintaining her dysfunctional business, she counters Montrellous’ contagious ambition and naive optimism to keep her staff from dreaming beyond her kitchen. Through this dynamic, the play barrels forward on a forceful single note, driven by confident and enthusiastic performances from its cast into a startling final existential conundrum.
Clyde’s is particularly interesting because of the risks Nottage takes with both its form and structure. With five characters on stage for 90 minutes, Nottage writes the play to be as compact and pressurized as possible. At the Bluma Appel Theatre, Akin’s direction articulates Nottage’s vision with complexity, guiding the mood and performances toward a pitch of desperation and anxiety as the atmosphere turns increasingly ominous and surreal with each escalating act of tyranny from Clyde. The play’s events occur within the same small, unchanging environment. The action is repetitive: endless sandwich-making, the same squabbles and extended metaphors reenacted over the sandwich-making. There is no macro plot beyond the micro dramas of the kitchen.
Through Nottage’s “slice of life” approach, Clyde’s limits the existence of its sandwich makers to a single, self-contained kitchen. Rachel Forbes reinforces this in her set design: overhead mirrors turn the room inward, reflecting the kitchen back onto itself, which translates into evidence that Clyde’s is the only place that sees the worth in these ex-convicts. Beyond style and textuality, it looks and feels like the world begins and ends at Clyde’s for these characters. This limitation evokes the spectre of prison literally, metaphorically, and textually. Despite their freedom — poignantly shown in their creative clothing choices beneath their aprons (costume design by Arianna Moodie) — these characters remain imprisoned in situations of theirs, Clyde’s, and society’s own making.
From this depiction of entrapment, the play circles Montrellous’ pursuit of a perfect, creative, and expressive sandwich as part of its larger existential dilemma. The play asks: After being marked as ruined, is it truly possible to transcend the limitations of one’s existence? How can we differ between a leap of faith and a lapse of naivete when society itself is constituted through your position as a ruined subject? Does one ever really escape the horrors? These are familiar questions for Nottage, following her Pulitzer-winning Ruined, and she navigates them with subtle confidence, propelling the play’s characters as vehicles for its existentialism.
Playing Montrellous, Jarvis convincingly embodies a man whose lofty aspirations and delusions of grandeur only make sense as a symmetrical relation to deep trauma. As the antagonist, Clyde’s character similarly presupposes profound trauma, except hers turns her mean and destructive. In a play full of pyrotechnical visual delights, nothing lights the stage on fire quite like Walker villainously, devilishly does.
As Clyde, a character who can so easily read as another angry Black woman, Walker instead decides to embody negativity as a form of transgression, subversion, and radical subjectivity. Consider the special effect of Clyde’s receipts burning up in her employees’ hands as a so-called test of their memory skills. Consider how she seems to come fully alive when she is crushing the hopes of others. Clyde, I believe, is more than an antagonist. In fact, I would argue that her negativity is just as important as Montrellous’ positivity. Both characters stand as practical critiques of what may become of Black and brown people in their effort to transcend structural and social limitations. Where Montrellous survives on blind hope, Clyde remains rooted in the meanness of the world, a meanness which Walker delivers with escalating tenacity until she appears not only mad, but truly demonic.
Bitter, Case, and Sousa deliver their supporting characters as impressionable, traumatized subjects and fodder for the play’s dyadic drama. Desperate for a way out of the sandwich shop into something more, these actors cohere as an ensemble, balancing the humour, banter, and dramatic tensions upon which Jarvis and Walker spring into action, each trying to persuade the others toward their character’s own worldview. In the end, rather than presenting a single solution or a moral binary, Clyde’s leaves us in the throes of its titular character’s negativity. Here, we must figure out for ourselves what the true value of negativity is. What is the human cost of succumbing to the world’s meanness? Who is to blame, and does a good story absolve us of that sin?
Clyde’s runs at the Bluma Appel Theatre until April 26. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Divine Angubua
Jonathan Divine Angubua is a freelance arts and culture critic living in Toronto. Divine holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in Political Science, History, and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of theatre, he is most inspired by the strangest things.
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