Ignorance
At the Cultch until March 10
Tickets: 604-251-1363
thecultch.com
What if misery serves some evolutionary purpose? That's the question posed in Ignorance by Alberta's Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Would fire have been invented, for example, if mankind hadn't been freezing its collective buns off in dank, dark caves or if eating sushi night after night hadn't begun to get tiresome?
Puppeteers Pete Balkwill, Pityu Kenderes and Trevor Leigh, all in grey longjohns, explore the evolution of our love affair with happiness (indicated in this production by yellow, happy face balloons that keep drifting just out of reach).
Huge, curving antlers frame a glowing fire beside which sit our Paleolithic forefather and foremother: two boulder-headed puppets with articulating lower jaws, hollow eye sockets and scraggly hair. Suddenly, she "grows" a prefrontal lobe and imagines ("the very first imagining") a better life and subsequently she persuades him to leave the cave in search of paradise. They speak completely understandable gibberish and when more abstract ideas are running through this prehistoric Eve's head, rustic drawings are projected on the cave wall-a tightly stretched animal hide.
Flash-forward to the present with pudgy-headed puppets with tiny, pinched faces confronting miseries of a different, more contemporary sort: heartbreak, marital discord, difficulty parallel parking or being eaten by a balloon-inflating machine.
The puppeteers are always visible and are a large part of the fun as the puppets share a feast of raw rat, fall in love, have sex, learn to hunt, procreate and die. Except for dining on rats, doesn't it all sound so familiar?
While Ignorance doesn't answer the question-"What if happiness isn't the point?"-it certainly poses the question in a darkly funny, laugh-out-loud, imaginative way. The Old Trouts say most of us have only 14-and-a-half minutes of happiness in our lifetime and we should make the most of it.
Make yourself happy for another 60 minutes-see the show.
