Before last week, I had never been to The King Black Box in Parkdale for a show. After experiencing the inaugural run of George F. Walker’s Girls Unwanted there, I won’t forget my first visit any time soon.
Embedded in its bustling Parkdale environs, the venue – with its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it street entrance — is a repurposed office or apartment on the second-floor of a low-rise set of shops. The creep of gentrification has arrived in the vicinity, but only just.
This is still OG Parkdale: a setting where the prolific Walker likes to situate his plays, and which is populated by a glorious glut of chatting, laughing, sometimes yelling humanity. As you walk towards the King Black Box, they’re sitting, standing and hustling down the streets.
After you mount the stairs, a door from a narrow corridor puts you in the middle of the venue. To the right are maybe 40 spectator seats. To the left is the set. Its walls are dotted with mirrors and pictures. Every spare inch of wall space is covered with posters and flyers. In front of them is a common room setting anchored by two couches with blankets and pillows. A desk and chair and some other furnishings lie beyond. Visible in the back is a kitchen.
And when the lights go down, this intimate venue explodes in a theatrical echo of the life outside. We’re inside a halfway house. The door we entered through is now a portal to the rest of the home, including the residents’ bedrooms. Fuelled by ugly retorts and earsplitting door slams, the titular girls begin flying through that door – into and out of this liminal space.
This is a halfway house in every sense of the word. It is populated by four volatile young women abandoned by the tragic circumstances of their lives at this way-station between youth and adulthood, self and family, isolation and connection.
The earnest young cast throw themselves with abandon at their roles as the four girls unwanted. Ziggy Schulting is the abrasive, self-absorbed Hanna – whose face and clenched body speak volumes even when her loud voice is not filling the space. Alexandra Floras-Matic is the caustic and combustible Kat, whose armour begins to drop – just a little – as the show progresses. With a mix of ethereality and brittle brutality, Marline Yan conjures the medicated and intermittently lucid Ash. And L.A. Sweeney’s haunted, old-before-her-time Maddy straddles a special half-way role as a former resident thrust into the role of ranking caregiver.
In the small space between incarceration and freedom, self-delusion and aspiration, and despair and daring, these four flail loudly and violently. They haul us bodily into their drama, as their stories – laced with familial neglect, sexual abuse and violence — tumble out.
They have begun sketching their precarious relationships when the show’s lone male – Louis Akins’ soft-spoken Max – shows up to complicate them. He is a privileged outsider with a surprising connection to one of the residents. And he has more in common with these unwanted girls and with their abusers than we at first might think.
When a shocking event occurs, it lights these combustible materials into a full-blown conflagration. A firestorm of revelation and sentiment ensues, in which the play teeters on the edge of over-exposition and over-emoting. But this intense, committed young cast – locked into their roles and ably directed by Walker – prevents it from ever tipping over. They make every second on stage count, holding us gripped in their thrall until the house lights come on, and we can breathe.
Ultimately, there is much to chew on from our side of the halfway house – including intergenerational trauma, the failures of social supports and societal structures, and the high price and tenuous possibility of escape.
But while a shattering ending does arrive, very little is resolved. To the contrary, we’re left unsettled, with questions about what actually happened.
And curiosity about what could happen next.
And the sick feeling that it’s not right . . . but in our damaged world, maybe it is ”better this way”, as one character suggests.
And the tiniest, faintest hope. Hope that the fragile green shoots of human connection – which push their way tentatively through the ashes left by the on-stage conflagration – just might take hold, and enable these ragged, raw and unwanted to help one another.
Because no one else will.
Girls Unwanted runs Thursdays to Sundays, September 5 – 29, 2024, 8:00 PM at The King Black Box Theatre. Viewer discretion is advised. Reserve tickets at thekingblackbox.com.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2024
