What does it mean to be alive in a world seemingly spinning out of control?
Brothers Rouvan Silogix and Rafeh Mahmud explore this question with searing wit and raw intensity in their latest play, Craze, enjoying its world premiere at Tarragon Theatre. Known for their audacious storytelling and incisive perspectives, Silogix and Mahmud (the duo behind the The Caged Bird Sings, which premiered in striking, site-specific fashion at the Aga Khan Museum this spring) deliver a work that interrogates technology, the nature of human connection, the possibility of free will and the chaos of modern existence.
It pulls no punches and suffers no fools – demanding audience curiosity, engagement and reflection to make meaning of it.
Who’s afraid of…Craze?
The story that begins late at night with unhappily married couple June (Lisa Ryder) and husband Renee (Ali Kazmi), who have just returned to their sleekly appointed, tech-enhanced home from a party at her ad agency. They’ve been drinking, and the fractious ugliness of their relationship – a toxic brew born from resentments and realities intertwined with their differences of race, sex, occupation and appetite – fills the stage. When a second younger couple – Selina (Louisa Zhu) , who works at June’s agency, and her surgeon husband Richie (Kwaku Okyere) – appear to take refuge from the raging storm outside, these alcohol-intensified dynamics are multiplied and sent careening off in unexpected and (many would say) risqué directions. Frequent theatregoers will see almost immediately that we’re inside an outlandish, utterly modern echo of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But this is just the opening frame of a complex journey.
Craze, which is co-produced with Modern Times Stage Company in association with Theatre ARTaud, first emerged during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The play was inspired by the brothers’ reflections on humanity’s complicity in its own chaos. During lockdown, they observed how, despite widespread condemnation of major global problems, individuals remain inherently tied to the systems that perpetuate those issues. There was much talk about how “the world” is messed up . . . but little recognition that “we” are the people who messed it up. So beneath the surface of this edgy play, they explain, “we’re asking ourselves: What does it mean to be alive, or human or conscious? . . . How can we judge others when we can’t even reckon with ourselves?” Bottom line: “It’s impossible but to feel all the conflicting sides of it.”
Directed by Mike Payette with assistance from 郝邦宇 Steven Hao, Craze springboards from that booze-soaked Albee frame into deep questions of identity, consciousness, and moral complexity. The brothers link the subtextual challenge to a famous quote from Game of Thrones’ Jamie Lannister: “I have an oath to my king and an oath to my father. What happens when the king tells me to kill my father, and my father tells me to kill the king?” Such struggle underpins the play’s exploration of inner turmoil and moral conflict: “We understand the duality of that all too well in our present socioeconomic times, and certainly feel the craze of it.”
As always, the brothers began creating the play with the core idea. “And then, as we’re researching, ideating, searching for inspirations — pieces that draw us in are the ones that connect with what we’re trying to say” — in this case, works by Albee, Noel Coward and Dante. They were drawn to the worlds of Albee and Coward for their surface elegance, but “as much as we love those works (and we really do), nothing much is at stake—ultimately, even if the characters don’t find love or actualization, they’ll still drive home in their Rolls Royces and sip martinis. Their lives are not at stake in the way we see around the world today, with every increasing inequality and marginalization.” In Craze, by contrast, everything is ultimately at stake: life, identity, morality, success . . . meaning itself. The play charts a bizarre and dangerous descent from that initial Albee frame.
Down, down . . . into the Inferno
That descent is where Dante’s Inferno enters the picture, as a guiding lens for exploring the anguish of modern life. As the brothers put it, “To solve the suffering, first we need to accurately identify the suffering—and the deeper-rooted causes: trying to find the fire, rather than the smoke.” The descent to the fire is structured in three parts: “Tomfoolery and Other Shenanigans” (the opening scene), “The Trial (Ghosts Reign),” and – in the clearest nod to Dante — “Inferno”. Especially in the second and third parts, the play incorporates nonlinear storytelling and flashbacks to reveal unsettling truths about the hosts’ past and their complicity in huge systemic issues, such as the military-industrial complex and global suffering.
Audiences come to recognize the importance of Buddy, Renee’s experimental AI system (voiced by Augusto Bitter), which serves as both a tool and a mirror reflecting the characters’ unease with technology. With Buddy and with the tougher, more intimate lines of questioning pursued by the two couples, the playwrights reflect on the nature of identity. They ask, “Are we necessarily the sum of our experiences, circumstances, socializations, genetics? Do we have any choice in this? Can we fight for the tabula rasa, or are we forever predestined by how and who we were born?” And pushing from our fears about ourselves into our fears of the non-human, “Can [AI] self-actualize, or will they necessarily be a shadow of ourselves?”
The plot marches downwards, it seems, towards answers . . . but the answers turn out to be secrets and further questions, which challenge the characters and the audience to confront deeply uncomfortable truths. “We feel today we live in a fraudulent world,” the brothers note. “We applaud billionaires, knowing they make money on the backs of slave labour. Our countries and banks profit off global turmoil and war. Our heroes are bloodthirsty. And we spam ourselves on social media, trying to make sense of all of it, because it’s all too much to keep up with.” But the real problem is that “we voted for this! Not with elections, but with our things, and with our money.”
And when norms, structures, and belief systems all fail, madness is the inevitable result. Under such external and internal duress, the brothers suggest, “it’s almost impossible to go back to pretending that life is normal, and that staying in our homes and hoping for the best will do anything other than keep us devolving into complete madness.” As the two couples attempt to to do just that – by staying in Renee and June’s home to wait out a dangerous storm – the chaos inside the home mounts, and the futility becomes obvious. And as bizarre as it may feel for audiences, the brothers posit that “in that way, we feel right in the middle of it. Life is a craze.”
Clashing is inherently part of the game
In keeping with the play’s broad and deep themes and its experimental nature, the production is highly stylized. One especially striking sequence during the play’s descent through the inferno juxtaposes spoken dialogue from the older couple with cryptic, silent movements from the younger pair. Reflecting each couple’s unique relationship and struggles, the contrast deepens the storytelling and ups the ante substantially for audiences working to make sense of the evolving tale. This, the brothers explain, is a contribution of “Mike Payette, our director, who is incredible to work with”. Payette had “a lot of ideas on how there’s a silent and quiet struggle in all of us, which can be even more haunting than the rambunctious fits of emotion”. In this sequence, Payette’s masterful direction visualizes the younger couple’s struggle as a silent counterpoint to June and Renee’s still-overt but evolving Albee-esque shouting match.
Arun Srinivasan’s lighting design and Maddie Bautista’s sound design, along with Christine Ting-Huan 挺歡 Urquhart’s ingenious set not only underscore the story’s thematic undertones but contribute richly to its nonlinear approach. The overall effect is of a kaleidoscopic interrogation of human frailty . . . and a hunt for meaning in a fractured world.
This is a fitting reflection of Silogix and Mahmud’s own relationship. As lifelong collaborators, they brought their individual, unique perspectives to the project, if only sometimes harmoniously. “There are definitely pros and cons with working as brothers,” they admit. On one hand, “it’s much easier to riff and talk about ideas and discourse.” On the other, “there’s no version of ‘leaving the room.’ (as we have to live with each other forever).” they laugh.
“Fortunately, we’ve been working together since we were little kids, from playing cricket on the streets, to creating stories together – and clashing is inherently part of the game.”
Just go along for the ride
Craze examines how humans struggle to reckon with their own roles in a broken system. And as the brothers acknowledge, “A great deal of the piece comes from our own feelings on our own place in the world.”
But the brothers are crystal clear on both the open nature of the finished work and the individuality of the experience of each audience member who mainlines the idea-rich Craze. In the end, they urge audiences not to “sweat it too much” but to approach the piece intuitively.
Yes, there’s a lot here. And yes, you may be left with questions and seeming contradictions. But the playwrights are firm: “There’s no such thing as ‘I didn’t get it’—most of the time people really do ‘get’ it, and we’d argue the meaning of the art is created for the audience member in that moment.” In fact, they continue, “that’s what we love about theatre and art to begin with.”
For Silogix and Mahmud, at the heart of Craze are certain key fundamental dualities of life – and the impossible attempt to reconcile them is the surest source of that feeling of not “getting it”. First, “we can’t have just joy, and we can’t have just misery. Life is beautiful and terribly depressing, all at the same time.” As they point out drily, “The world is funny, and then you die”.
Second, “we are where we came from, and where we want to go—and those things will always be in conflict.” This is a theme Dante explores “thoroughly in the Divine Comedy,” they explain, “and for us, as long as the explorations stay true, they should be funny and sobering. Such is life and dark comedy.”
And third, “as Karl Marx quips, ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’” For Silogix abd Mahmud, “that is life, and we’re trapped in the middle of it.” Through its dark comedy, vast imagination, unsettling contradiction and exhilarating storytelling, Craze invites audiences who are likewise trapped in the complex middle of existence to come along for the ride – or is it the illusion of a ride – to contemplate their own agency and complicity, and find the vanishing point where hope and hopelessness intertwine.
Craze continues at Tarragon Theatre until December 15, 2024. Reserve tickets at tarragontheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine
