Giving the finger to earnestness

Globe and Mail, Page R4,
November 10, 2006
By Michael Harris

The Qualities of Zero Directed by Britt Small
Written by Jacob Richmond
Starring Jacob Richmond and Celine Stubel

It's either a masturbatory study of one man's war with Prozac or a delirious satire of the same. Either way, I'm game.

 

 The Qualities of Zero starts with a cliche: Roland is a scientist afraid of feeling. After his mother dies, he begins to take a drug that tamps down emotions while allowing rational thought to continue. The drug is not Prozac nor Ativan, but a stand-in for the fistful of pills we pop in order to make it through.
Playwright and lead actor Jacob Richmond, between this play and his Fringe Festival triumph, Legoland, has given us a sweetly Gothic world to play in. His characters are all charmingly naive and self-centered, relating like third-graders.
It's too geeky to tap into the zeitgeist, but when Roland - decked in his grey suit and thick-rimmed glasses - tries awkwardly to express honest affection through the gauze of his medication, there is something terribly contemporary here.
Rene (the charming Celine Stubel, who also starred in Legoland) is the object of Roland's muted affection. She's a warmed-up Edward Gorey character, softly affectionate yet also liable to die a gruesome death without surprising anyone. The two have been working on rats in Roland's lab; rats that Rene secretly buries in tiny rat caskets in her backyard. What's not to love?
Disaster strikes (or rather, disaster is revealed) when the lab, which contains Roland's magic drug, is burned to the ground by a jilted peer. Un-medicated, our droopy scientist must confront his demons. Mom's death and Rene's oddly pleasing qualities both swarm Roland's heart, the sweat begins to pour, and a

farcical energy develops, as passion (for once!) takes over.
Richmond so embodies the nervous twit of a scientist that the experience of watching him go through this revelation should inspire sympathy. But, oddly, we don't suffer along with him; we laugh the laugh reserved for crying clowns. Richmond just marinates in a real and bitter flavour (one that's been developed at monthly Atomic Vaudeville cabarets in Victoria). He gives the finger to earnest experience, even as his characters long for it.
In some ways, The Qualities of Zero is the dark counterpart to another play in town - Life After God. Michael MacLennan's adaptation of the Douglas Coupland story attempts to breach the irony bubble we all live under, to find an authentic moment. Trouble is, "authenticity" on stage hovers perilously close to "melodrama" when viewed by a generation raised on the disaffected delights of YouTube.
Zero, by contrast, never believes that an escape from irony is possible in the first place - irony is not a pose to be unlearned, it's the oxygen of contemporary life. Its darkly comic characters are patently unauthentic, yet it's the paradox of Roland's reaching out for love, and his terror of grief - his most authentic impulses - that rivet us. Jacob Richmond, in other words, is a killer smarty-pants. More please.

The Qualities of Zero runs to Nov. 18 at the Waterfront Theatre, 1412 Cartwright St. Tickets are $18 to $25. 604-257-0350.