Sargent & Victor & Me (& Me)

While technology advances, live entertainment holds its value. The immediacy of being in the room for a performance captures a shared humanity whether it's in the form of theatre, music, comedy, sports, or even juggling.

There are many possible pitfalls for a one-person show, and many things need to go just right in order to pull it off well. I saw the one-woman version of Sargent & Victor & Me at the University of Winnipeg on March 4th, and found it a powerful experience at times. Debbie Patterson plays all the parts with equal commitment but varying results.

I found myself tearing up several times during the performance, but it was more to do with my personal experience with people living with multiple sclerosis than anything else.



What worked really well were the set and sound design. The set gave Patterson many opportunities to have things for her characters to do while she delivered her monologues. The sound design added a lot to the atmosphere, and the sound and lighting cues that often accompanied Patterson's character switches helped to make the performance pretty clear. Patterson also did a good job of having fairly distinct physicality and vocality for each character.

I felt that the writing could have been stronger. The characters venture into a lot of stereotype territory. It's likely important to acknowledge the prevalence of stereotypes and potential racism when dealing with the sort of characters that turn up through the course of the play, but some of the characters felt more like window dressing than real people.

The humour lacked sophistication completely. Most attempts at humour fell flat, earning a reaction from the audience only when when Patterson was able to surprise with abrupt shifts into crudeness.

I've been to see live theatre in the past, but never a one-person show. It was better than I expected, but I didn't have the bar set particularly high. It's hard to ignore that it would be immediately more engaging and interesting to watch if there were more than one actor in any scene. Acting is so much about listening and reacting that it's difficult to do in an incredibly compelling way without being able to play against anyone else for 90 minutes. Other plays I've seen, like Lenin's Embalmers, have the advantage of having more than one performer in the cast.

I'm not sure how much schmaltzy theatrical manipulation I'm expected to put up with. The image of the one-winged angel, intended for such poignance, grates on my nerves. Was that the best thing she had to work with when she was writing? It's just too much overwrought drama-ness for the sake of overwrought drama-ness.

The audience has hearts and feelings, and this play goes for broke in trying to play them like filthy spit-filled public school recorders.

A one-person show feels to me like an exercise in theatre. Like, "we could have made this better with just one more actor, any actor, but we like to do it the hard way". It was a reasonably effective performance, but I find it incredibly difficult to subscribe to the idea that character monologues are a great method of tackling the story of an entire neighbourhood.

What I truly hate about going to see live theatre are the "public radio types", for lack of a better term, who laugh WAY too hard at garbage jokes like they've never heard terrible jokes before.

Now, I worry that there is a whole section of the population who completely lacks a sense of humour, and that it will someday lead to the rounding up and caging of people who live for the absurd. For the time being, we will refer to these humourless people as "University of Winnipeg theatre students".

I have trouble with it whenever characters grow hams for hands, like some of the secondary characters do, but it doesn't get in the way too much. Sargent & Victor & Me is a beautifully performed piece of theatre with excellent set and sound design. It goes for the heartstrings brazenly, but it often finds them.