Theatre Review: The American Pilot

An American fighter jet is shot down over hostile Middle-Eastern soil, its pilot survives despite severe injuries but is unable to walk. A local farmer discovers him, hauls him to the nearby village, and sequesters him inside a dirty shed where he is beaten, then stripped of his ipod by the local military Captain, who is torn between selling him for ransom and publicly beheading him. Sounds like a pretty gritty night of theatre, eh? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

David Greig's The American Pilot (at the Jericho Arts Centre until Nov. 3) is a wildly uneven production that works very hard to makes its audience feel safe and comfy in its treatment of some pretty topical and prejudicial, not to mention terrifying, subject matter. With the televised Daniel Pearl atrocity recently refreshed thanks to the Angelina Jolie vehicle A Mighty Heart, and the toll of Canadian dead constantly increasing in Iraq, now is a darn good time to be working some of our fears out through our theatre, and wrapping these themes in cotton candy seems to me to be somewhat of a disservice. I'm sure that their hearts were in the right place, but if you're going to choose a play that vilifies war, playing it safe is just counter-productive.

Not that there weren't moments in the play that aspired to danger, guns were drawn and pointed, tempers were occasionally flared, it was clear that the playwright's intent was to scare us into feeling something resembling fear, or at the very least, concern. However, the direction soft-pedalled the physical violence - rifle butt-strokes, women getting slapped into place, torture, etc. - to the point of pantomime, even while the language of the play was markedly mature, effectively keeping us at a nice, safe distance. The script itself has aspirations to grandiloquence, but refuses to establish a foothold in its political positioning. I still don't know if it's pro- or anti-American policy, or pro-farmer and anti-militia, or what. It tries to be all things at once, it seems.

The acting, too, is disproportionate. Some of the performances are large and theatrey, and some, notably the two youngest in the cast, are simple and realistic. Arpad Balogh, fresh out of VFS and onstage here in his theatrical debut, made the most out of his shallowly-written role as the titular pilot, exuding all-American-boy charm through varying degrees of physical suffering. Young Maija Tailfeathers is a delight as the farmer's USA-enamoured daughter who becomes the pilot's champion. With an unfettered performance that hit all the right notes, whether comic or defiant, her stand against the wishes of her family and village was the most radical thread of the story. But it was Victor Vasuta's performance as the Captain's translator that was the stand-out of the night, effortlessly creating a multi-layered, sympathetic revolutionary out of a character that could easily have come off as simply creepy. All the more impressive considering that most of his scenes were with a miscast Murray Price as the Captain who, in a caricatured oversized military raincoat and German WWII officer's cap, seemed mostly to be acting in a Monty Python skit.

Having said all that, I must note that I've never been happier that I sat through a mediocre play come the ending, which blew my friggin' mind. I'm not going to reveal anything about it, other than to say that it was the most unexpected, bizarre, and riotous finish to a night of theatre that I have ever experienced, I was still laughing with glee on the ride home. When the dust had settled and with the crowd boisterously applauding, the cast came back onto the stage for their bows dancing in unison and looking for all the world like they were having the time of their lives. And while I'm all in favour of cast members having fun, looking back it seemed the wrong note to be hitting in a play meant to mirror all-too-real events on the other side of the world that deserve to be taken pretty seriously, for all our sakes.

Photo courtesy of Alpine Productions