Theatre 2023: Bad Roads

Crow’s Theatre continues its trend of putting on intense dramas with its mounting of the play Bad Roads, written by Ukrainian playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit based on verbal testimonials from victims of the initial 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war. This show is so devastating and triggering that multiple emails were sent out to ticket holders with warnings of disturbing content including “depictions of physical, emotional and sexual violence”. There were even instructions regarding how and when to exit the theatre during the 2 hour show (with no intermission) should the need arise. Given that Russia’s most recent war on Ukraine is still raging after over 600 days of fighting, this play is all the more relevant, poignant and disturbing.

The one common aspect of all the shows that I have watched at Crow’s Theatre so far is the innovative staging and Bad Roads was no exception.  Held in the smaller Studio Theatre with five rows of stadium seating on each side of the room, the “stage” at the centre was covered with black, ash-like particles that simulated the rubble or debris found in bombed-out war-torn areas.  The sparse set consisted of a shabby wooden crate attached to a few steps on one side and a wooden bench on the other, with a bright spotlight shining in the middle.  Yet the audience is totally transported into this horrific landscape,  just with a few extra props, wardrobe, sound and lighting. The play consists of six vignettes, five of them depicting an aspect of the war, mostly told from the female perspective.

The first is a lengthy monologue by a female reporter who travels with her military escort to inspect the battle zone around the Donetsk airport a year after its siege.  Speaking for a few seconds in total darkness before being illuminated by the central spotlight, she describes herself, her travel companion who she is attracted to and eventually becomes her lover, their harrowing journey, and the state of the war in general.  Pacing back and forth across the performance area, she reveals intimate details such as cleaning herself with wet naps since there is no available water source.  Achingly she conveys the difficulties of trying to find love and intimacy in midst of a war.

The lights darken during each scene interchange.  These are your chances to leave although no one did.  There was no clapping between scenes.  It is not that type of play.  The audience sat in (sometimes shocked) silence while trying to absorb what they just saw and heard.

The second vignette starts with three young teenaged girls huddled on a bench on a chilly night, discussing their Ukrainian “lovers” who give them gifts. Disturbingly, the girls think they are in relationships and don’t realize that they are being abused and used like prostitutes by the soldiers.  One of the girls is an orphan whose grandmother shows up and tries unsuccessfully tries to convince her to go home.  It is sad to see how war has impacted the lives of children.

The third story involves an inebriated schoolteacher who is stopped at a Ukraine checkpoint and realizes that he accidentally brought his wife’s passport instead of his own.  To make matters worse, he is in possession of a fake rifle which further raises the suspicions of the border guards, a Commander and another soldier.  In a tense interaction while he is pushed around and threatened with a gun, the schoolteacher tries to reason with the guards, citing patriotism and reminding that they are on the same side.  But just as the soldiers are letting him go, he spots one of his female students coming out of the Commander’s tent (off stage).  It is the orphaned girl from the previous scene.  The teacher tries to admonish the Commander for using a child for sex and to appeal to his sympathies towards the unfortunate situation of this girl.  But when the Commander grows defensive and threatens the teacher’s freedom, the ultimate instinct of self-preservation kicks in.  The teacher backs down and drives away, pretending to accept the claim that he was mistaken in what he saw.

The fourth scene depicts a female medic riding in a jeep driven by a soldier as they traverse a dark deserted road.  In an unexpected role reversal, the female is aggressive and domineering while the male is meek and subservient.  By simply placing a grill with two headlights in front of the wooden crate which they sit on while jostling up and down, the illusion of the bumpy jeep ride is conveyed.  As their conversation progresses, we learn that they are transporting the headless body of a senior officer in the trunk who turns out to be the soldier’s commander and the angry grieving medic’s lover.  The woman is being taunted by cruel text messages sent from the dead man’s phone by the enemy who killed him.  When the jeep breaks down and they are stranded without cell service, the woman’s anguish finally overflows and she explodes in a rage, thrashing around in the black debris.  Towards the end of the vignette, having survived the freezing elements overnight by using the dead soldier’s body bag for cover, the medic sadly tells her companion that she won’t even get to attend her lover’s funeral—that honour will go to his wife.

The fifth situation is the most viscerally horrifying in its graphic depiction of both emotional and physical torture including violent rape. But it is also one of the most artfully choreographed portrayals of such acts that I have ever seen.  A female reporter has been captured by an enemy soldier who has been so traumatized by all the debauchery that he has both witnessed and participated in that he now thinks of himself as an animal and acts accordingly.  Two sequences at the beginning of the scene show the captor physically attacking what he sees as his prey.  In the first, they are both rolling around in the rubble as he pounces, and she deflects trying to defend herself.  But they each act out his or her part on separate sides of the stage, with a light alternately shining on each of them to highlight their actions. In the second sequence, he rapes her as she screams but there is actually a bench between them as he stands on top of the bench and she lays prone under it.  The use of a flashlight simulates the thrusting motions as he “penetrates” her.  This was all sickeningly painful to watch, but in reflection, you realize that the actors never touched.  Yet the illusions they created are forever seared in your mind.

Using her wits and determination to survive, the reporter talks sweetly to her captor, trying to find the humanity that she hopes still exists inside him.  She asks questions about him and tells quirky anecdotes about herself, including the time that she accidentally ran over a farmer’s chicken.  Slowly she works to break down his defenses as she plots her escape.

After that shocking and agonizing fifth scene, the sixth and final vignette felt jarring and out of left field in its change in tone, yet it had its own message to convey.  We are told that this story happened “pre-war” as a young woman runs up to the gates of a farm and tearfully tells the farmer and his wife that she just killed their chicken.  This clearly refers back to the previous scene.  At first the couple are nonchalant about the occurrence and there is some humorous debate as to the value of a chicken, which reflected back on the previous scene where the prisoner and her captor debate the value of a human life. But back to this scenario, once the woman, who is obviously wealthier than them, offers to pay for the chicken, greed sets in.  The demands the farmer and his wife make grow more and more outrageous as they take all of the woman’s cash, her jewelry, handbag and even want her car, threatening to lock her up and call the police if she doesn’t comply.  Suddenly, shocked back into reality by the cry of a neighbouring baby, they let the woman go while admonishing her for “tempting them”.   Perhaps the moral of this last story might be that it does not take war to trigger greed or evil?  Or maybe there was just the need to lighten the mood a bit before sending the audience out into the night?

This was an extremely difficult play to watch, but that was the whole point.  As badly as we felt experiencing enactments of these situations, imagine how it was, and still is, for the Ukrainian people to actually live through them.  We should be so grateful that we live in Canada where it is relatively peaceful and safe.