RAGE AGAINST trilogy, Toronto Fringe Festival (#fringeto, #rageagainsttrilogy)

One interesting thing that happened in this year's Toronto Fringe Festival is that Theatre Artaud staged a trilogy of sorts, a collection of three plays set in a shared universe grappling with philosophical questions drawn from the three sections of Dante's Divine Comedy. As I happened, I reviewed the first play in this trilogy, RAGE AGAINST The Complacent, for Mooney on Theatre, as I did the second one, RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem). RAGE AGAINST The King, the third one, is a play that I opted to see (and review!) on my own coin.

What does it all mean? Did the trilogy exist in a meaningful way? Was there some meaning that could be derived from the three plays together that could not be taken from any one individually?



The three plays do exist in a shared universe. The death of Bob, a homeless person, is an event present in each. RAGE AGAINST The Complacent is dominated by Bob, a homeless man displaced from his warm grate by Toronto Western Hospital when that institution fences the grate off who, after becoming mildly famous following an article by some desperate journalist, ends up getting his throat cut by a random woman. RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) features more appearances by Bob, a man who in his poverty is disdained by the women and who is indeed killed by one of them, Polly, after a street confrontation, with the police confessing their disinterest in doing anything. Bob's death also appears in RAGE AGAINST The King, when rock musician Izzy P distracts himself from the criticisms of his girlfriend and his record company's fixer by sending out a tweet memorializing his death with the hashtag #dosomething that gets five hundred retweets.

The other element binding the three plays together directly is Banish The King. This takes on two forms, oddly enough.

• The rock group Banish The King, a Canadian grunge group big in the 1990s and the 2000s, is the subject of interviews with the journalists of RAGE AGAINST The Inferno, and is disdained by the characters of RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem). Banish The King dominates RAGE AGAINST The King, a play all about the crisis of conscience of lead singer Izzy P as he wants to break from a band with a legacy he hates and co-musicians he holds in contempt to do something creative as a solo artist.


• The group appears to drawn its name from a parable, one that changes between plays. In all three plays, the anecdote begins with a prince who sees his father the king extend a blind eye to a beggar who steals a loaf of bread and then, angered by this mercy, turns harsh. In RAGE AGAINST The Complacent, the anecdote ends with the prince being killed by the king before he can take over. In RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem), the prince sets off to kill the king but finds him dead of natural causes. In RAGE AGAINST The King, meanwhile, a broken Izzy P begins to tell the anecdote when record fixer Eden and his girlfriend Lilah convince him to stop and go get some sleep.

The trilogy has lofty aims. "The ideas revolve around "Good vs. Right", "Finding Home" and "Seeking Paradise", and the madness and indifference in between. The structure is loosely inspired by Dante's "Divine Comedy" - with each of the three shows drawing from "Inferno", "Purgatorio", and "Paradiso" respectively." It does do that. RAGE AGAINST The Complacent's journalists do descend into a pit, their lack of knowledge about their world and about their own true motives leading them in the end to failure and the sabotage of the company of a friend who had tried sincerely to help them. RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) is concerned with characters who are desperate to be able to make a homes for them all in a dangerous and ever-changing world, trying to avoid excesses. RAGE AGAINST The King does deal with a protagonist, Izzy P, who needs to be led in the direction of plausible and good actions, and with supporting characters who make similar journeys of their own. I cannot say that the trilogy or its plays necessarily adhere closely to the plot of Dante's poems, but the relationship Theatre Artaud seeks to set out is there.

What does the trilogy do that the individual plays do not? From my perspective as an audience member, the question of one is to lead a live that not only has the appearance of being good but actually has good motives is central. RAGE AGAINST The Complacent, in the end, was all about people who found out that their impure motives in wanting to be successful led to their downfall, that they did not so much want to save the world as be seen saving the world. RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) dealt with the risks coming from an excess of love, from erecting boundaries too high or too low with the world outside of the world one loves. RAGE AGAINST The King, finally, is a play about a musician past his creative and commercial prime who needs to come to a realization about the limits facing them. I take away from these three plays together a powerful argument in favour of taking meaningful action grounded in a pragmatic realism, of first recognizing where one is in life and why one does what one does and what one can actually do. With that self-knowledge gained, knowing one's position in the universe and one's limits, only then can one do well.

Could the connection have been made more tightly? The three plays of the RAGE AGAINST trilogy were each very different, the structured and mannered RAGE AGAINST The Complacent contrasting against the surrealist RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) and neither having much in common stylistically with the more conventional RAGE AGAINST The King. It might not have been possible to tie the three plays more closely, perhaps with a common character, but greater consistency in style would have helped audiences curious about the trilogy to see commonalities more easily. Each individual play is good, and the trilogy does have some force considered collectively, but connections could have been tighter.

This was a worthy experiment. I only hope to see more of its kind in the future, whether at the Toronto Fringe Festival or elsewhere.