Last Saturday saw the closing of the Theatre Department’s fall show
Concord Floral
in the KTSA Romano Theater. The show had been running since Nov. 3 and concluded with a 7:30 p.m. performance on Nov. 11 after a very successful and much talked about run on campus. The play is a modern adaptation of Boccaccio’s medieval work
The Decameron
about a group of teens in Italy who escape a plague in their hometown, only here the story is set in the suburbs of Toronto where teens within the same cul-de-sac wrestle with issues of sexuality, loneliness, friendship and, most prominently, a haunting within the run-down and abandoned greenhouse whose dark secrets finally emerge after the group of teens discover something terrifying. The play was written by Jordan Tannahill in 2016 and directed by theatre professor Emily K. Harrison.
The greenhouse Concord Floral, the play’s namesake, serves as the main meeting place of the characters and where the bulk of the action takes place. While often the setting is reworked into characters’ bedrooms, the school cafeteria or places, throughout their town, the surroundings never fully change and the audience is never taken out of the physical environment of the greenhouse. What’s most striking about the writing and staging of the play are its anthropomorphic characters and Brechtian-style character addresses and blocking. Most characters stand at the back of the stage when it is not their turn to speak, and some assume the inner monologue of motifs throughout the story in addition to the human characters they play (i.e. the couch and fox characters.
This modern conceptualization of the story addresses the audience head-on while not necessarily feeling like the show is breaking the fourth wall, but rather that we are dropped into the stream of consciousness and point of view of these unique and yet completely ordinary characters in a town not dissimilar from our own. While we are provided with these windows into characters’ lives, the rest of the show is punctuated by moments of two specific characters who are linked through a traumatic experience, and who must make amends to the personified plague that is haunting their existence, stemming from the actions of their pasts. This plotline gives the show a very eerie tone while also focusing on the characters at its center, and ultimately weaving together as all characters converge at the end to confront the act they’ve been complicit in and move on from it. And just as they unite, the greenhouse itself becomes no more.
The show itself was a 75-minute feat of endurance for the actors with no intermission and required a level of vulnerability that isn’t expected in productions such as these, but transports the story to a much more resonant place. There are moments where characters open up about their experience in the modern world where their honesty seems overwhelming, but their candor about the struggle of youth and the cognitive dissonance often required to survive in the social world is something to which many audience members relate. The cast and crew worked very hard to breathe life into the story with their raw performances tell the story truthfully even if if was uncomfortable at times, and the set, lighting, costumes and music were tailored to the story so completely that it at times wasn’t even noticeable itself but rather blended into the story seamlessly. The show has been met with warm reception from students and faculty all over campus and signals a triumphant run for the cast, crew and the College Theatre Department at large this semester.