“Do Animals Cry” focuses on the various animalistic aspects that often lurk under the surface of the dynamic of the nuclear family. The terrain it excavates seems to be rooted in Freud’s famous theories on infantile sexuality that continue to be influential and yet can often feel dated if not supplemented with more contemporary notions about the formation of the subject. Father and son roughhouse in a duet that turns murderous. A mother fawns on her son with adoration that turns erotic. Violence and tenderness mix in nearly every interaction between the performers. One family member arrives back home and injects energy and enthusiasm into the otherwise moribund group using the breathing and bodily gesture of an excited dog. This energy infects everyone else. This same family member (perhaps a son/brother?) arrives from the top of the set and is placed into a familiar sacrificial pose upon the backdrop of the woven branches while the other family members prowl and fawn over him. This, of course, leaves us wondering how we use one another for emotional crutches. Why do we need unconditional love? Why do we need devotion of any type? Do we objectify one another when we extract or demand adoration? Outcast members of the family are, in one sequence, stuffed into the doghouse (which echoes the metaphoric notion of being “in the dog house”) and in another sequence a cozy family gathering takes place inside the doghouse while one member is left out in the cold. The dialogue deploys generalized clichés that serve to highlight the mundane nature of the “tragedies” endured by the average nuclear family. Dad left, Mom is on prescription drugs and we’ve lost the house. These events are paired with horrific stories from page one of the newspaper as if to offset the very different nature of these events and yet each are termed, in an ironic deadpan voice by one of the actors as “good news.”
The notion of the nuclear family as an abiding and necessary (even a useful) unit is put into question here through movement and dance. The movement is a deliberate departure from the convention of beautiful movement that, at one time, we might have expected from dance/theatre/performance. It seems to want to externalize emotional pain through the medium of the body. This, of course is not unbroken ground as the controversial work of artists such as Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist will attest to.
There are gestures toward absurd humour (a dead stuffed dog being made to fetch a stick) that echo the cyclical and futile struggles of Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame and there is much here that can be said to be derivative of the theatre of the absurd but it never reaches the provocative and murky depths that Beckett plunged theatre audiences into. The set is beautiful; an arresting piece of visual art, in itself. A tunnel composed of lashed together branches that is lit from the inside creates an eerie and evocative metaphor for the often disturbing emotional landscape of the family. The length of this piece, unfortunately, undermined its potential power. It was as if the audience were asked to sit through the improvisation that the team went through, as well as the finished product. Of course repetition can be deployed and the staging of work in progress can serve to challenge audiences’ inherently Arnoldian notions of high culture but this alone is not enough. The making of this piece seems to have been a complex journey, more engaging for the creative team than for audiences. There simply wasn’t enough complexity, in my opinion, to warrant the length.
Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal University
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