Wights at Crow’s Theatre
Wights, a noble failure of a play by Liz Appel, is getting the high-tech, razzle-dazzle treatment from director Chris Abraham that’s fast becoming his signature style at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. Despite its drawbacks, I found it well worth the schlep into T-Town.
In a house in New Haven, Connecticut, a stone’s throw from Yale, one of New England’s oldest historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs), a trio of academics gather to help one of them prepare for the job interview that will determine whether she gets appointed as head of Yale’s Center for Reparative Thought and Justice
That Center is a made up entity, although The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center at Yale (say that six times fast!) seems to tread similar ground.
Anita (Rachel Leslie) plans to give a short statement prior to her interview in front of a panel, one of whose members seems to have it in for her. She invites her friends and fellow Yale academics Bing (Richard Lee) and Celine (Sochi Fried) to preview the spiel and challenge her as vividly and viciously as possible to prepare her for anything the panel might lob at her. They rise to the challenge with brio.
Also on hand is Anita’s husband, Danny (Ari Cohen), a crusading lawyer fresh back from court where he has seen his poor client held on a bail so high he cannot possibly meet it, meaning he will never again see his dying mother.
Appel’s primary theme in Wights is the yawning gap between identity politics and human individuality, which explains the title. The English word “wight,” which is never mentioned in the play or explicated in the programme, is now obsolete. Back in the Middle Ages it meant creature or being. In the context of Wights a good synonym would be people or folks. Her use of the word suggests that the themes of the play are ancient, perhaps primordial.
The identity politics that Anita embraces neatly silos large numbers of people into convenient categories according to race, ethnicity, geography, religion, and so forth. As her husband Danny eloquently and eventually angrily points out individuals slotted into these silos can vary radically, each with their own backstory.
The fact that Wights features two interracial couples is not accidental and it offers Appel plenty of room to score points. Anita is Black (or bi-racial); her husband Danny is a Jew. Bing is a Chinese citizen, with a green card and thoroughly Americanized; his wife, Celine, is the whitest of all White people – the American-born child of Canadians.
As Anita attempts to give her prepared remarks, Bing challenges shibboleths of woke academia like land acknowledgements (one of the few aspects of Canadian culture to have penetrated the Poutine Curtain) and introducing yourself by announcing your preferred pronouns. Celine criticizes the use of the phrase “rubbing salt in a wound” as a “racialized term” since salt was rubbed into the wounds of whipped slaves as additional punishment. Danny points out that back in the day salt was rubbed into sailors’ wounds to prevent infection.
There is plenty of cultural-political polemics in Wights. The dialog is intensely intellectual, loaded with academic jargon, and delivered at breakneck speed. That caused a few audience members to bail at intermission.
But Appel stirs in some fascinating backstories for her characters, saving them from being mere mouthpieces for various point of view. Anita and Danny live in her childhood home, bought at great sacrifice by her Black mother, then bequeathed to her wicked stepmother by her White father. She is waiting for a transfer of funds that will allow her to buy it back.
While Anita sees herself as equally oppressed as a Black person and a woman, Bing points out that she enjoyed the immense privilege of being the daughter of a famed academic, which among other things gave her free tuition during her Yale career. Bing, by contrast, had to struggle to get his education in a foreign country.
For his part, Danny points out that he is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, many of whose extended family were murdered and that the generational trauma in his family is fresher than that which slavery visited on Anita’s forebears.
Wights has a healthy dose of soap opera, too. When Bing reveals he is going to accept a prestigious academic position in Beijing, Celine, newly pregnant unbeknownst to Bing, freaks out. A nasty argument about what constitutes “home” breaks out and breaks up the evening.
While Danny is taking umbrage at the way in which Anita seems to lump him in with the long history of white male oppression in America he reveals that he has taken the money intended to buy Anita’s home to bail out his client. Anita is devastated and the argument becomes heated. In the midst of all this Danny tries to slice an apple and gives himself a nasty gash. Appel brings down the curtain on a terrific first act as an angry Anita literally rubs salt into Danny’s wound.
It might have been a good idea to end Wights on that note. Unresolved? Yes, but you could market it as enigmatically provocative and open-ended.
But then there is the second act, the place where promising plays go to die. Wights does that in fairly spectacular fashion with a sharp turn into apocalyptical surrealism and the distant future.
Director Abraham and his technical collaborators have taken Appel’s concept and run with it. The entire floor of the main playing area is one large video screen and it comes alive with random imagery, splattered blood, and hard to read texts. Lights shimmer and random voices says random things. Technically impressive, but it doesn’t really help. In the end, the second act of Wights is a hot mess. Too bad.
Still there is much to be admired in Wights, the cast for starters. All are first rate and under Abraham’s direction they handle the jargon-heavy dialog perfectly. Cohen is particularly impressive in the second act as Danny, quite literally, falls apart.
Joshua Quinlan’s set design is ingenious, with excellent support provided by Imogen Wilson (lights), Thomas Ryder Payne (sound design), and Nathan Bruce (video design)
Appel is a Canadian now resident on New York’s Upper West Side. She has sojourned at Yale where she collected an MA and a MPhil. She also has an MPhil from Cambridge in modern and medieval literature, where she no doubt encountered plenty of wights.
The Crow’s production of Wights is billed as the Canadian premiere, which suggests it has been produced elsewhere, but I could find no mention of any such production on Appel’s website.
Indeed, although Appel seems to have written eight plays, there is scant evidence of her having been produced professionally, save for a few staged readings and a run at at pub theatre on London’s Fringe.
Perhaps Wights, at least on the evidence of its first act, will change that. I would love to see Wights taken on by Yale Rep where its setting would resonate with the local audience. On the other hand, it’s highly likely that its implied criticism of the “wokeness” (for want of a better term) now clogging up academia like a fatberg in a sewer system would scare the Rep off.
Appel’s obscurity is a symptom of a trend in academic theatre. As drama schools and drama departments proliferate, playwrighting programs proliferate right along with them. That in turn creates a demand for playwrights to teach in and run them. These playwrights increasingly gain credibility through awards, grants, residencies and the like rather than through actual productions. Few of them, for whatever reason, break out of that ghetto.
Liz Appel has a powerful voice and demonstrable talent. She deserves to beat that rap and have a chance to develop through the crucible of professional productions.
Wights continues at Crow’s Theatre through February 9, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Crow’s Theatre website.
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