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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.3 (2003) 75-84



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Second Skin
The Theatrical Passion of Tanja Jacobs

Beth Herst

[Figures]

Quebec playwright Carole Frechette's La peau d'Elisa (Elisa's Skin) is a postmodern Scheherazade tale, the story of a woman compelled to collect, and retell, intimate histories of love and sensual encounter. Like Scheherazade, Elisa staves off an impending fate, in her case, a mysterious illness that is slowly imprisoning her--as she believes--in fold after fold of excess skin. Each story of longing and consummation she recounts releases a chemical that prevents her skin cells from multiplying, but only if her listeners participate in the sensations she describes, if they share "the sweat, the shaking, the exact rhythm of the heart." This is her fate: to defy the limits of language, to make words act upon the body like a touch.

A metaphor for the writer's self-appointed task? A parable of aging and its imposed isolations? A fable of the restorative power of love and/or language and of the inextricable connection between the two? Elisa's Skin is a true rarity: a quietly subversive theatre text that is as ambiguous as it is engaging, as sensuous as it is intelligent. A virtual monologue--a young male interlocutor makes brief appearances--the piece could easily sink under the weight of its imagery alone. Yet in the right hands, it soars into a space of pure emotion that is also pure theatre.

Those hands belong to the extraordinary Canadian actress Tanja Jacobs. To watch her Elisa is to witness the electric encounter of a performer at the height of her powers with a text that calls out those powers to their full and then takes them further still. Fellow actors invariably refer to the force of Jacobs's intelligence, and it is radiantly on display here. Her comic gifts too--the precision timing, the physical expressiveness, the gift for deadpan absurdity--are fully in play, as well as Jacobs's trademark facility with complex, image-laden text, which she makes both utterly clear and infinitely suggestive.

It's difficult to imagine anyone navigating the script's shifting moods of comedy, pathos, and erotic lyricism better. No show-stopping, "Look at me, I'm acting" displays of technique, no physical or vocal pyrotechnics, just a luminous clarity of word, thought, and feeling that somehow encompasses both vulnerability and power. Jacobs herself defines the effect more vividly: "Those last moments of the [End Page 75] piece . . . I think the audience saw what they would see if they watched a person die, how that person is more present just as she's leaving. That purity of spirit."

The director of Elisa's Skin agrees. For Jackie Maxwell, Elisa represents a new level of self-exposure and risk for a performer long known for her fearlessness: "She went even further in this piece than any of us thought she would. She's someone who has many, many attributes at her disposal to win over an audience. But she was even braver than usual. She wouldn't use them, because the character simply didn't have them. She was more naked as a performer than she's been for a long time." This emotional nakedness, coupled with the delicate suggestiveness of Frechette's text, gave Jacobs's performance an unusual intimacy, what she herself terms "a startling immediacy for the audience. The effect of someone whispering in your ear."

It would be tempting to call this a career-making performance, if it weren't for the fact that Jacobs has spent most of her twenty-year career giving career-making performances, without ever quite achieving either the professional or financial security that should have accompanied them. At forty-two, recently returned to work after the birth of her daughter Nina, Jacobs finds herself in a position sadly familiar to many Canadian theatre performers, actresses in particular. She is now a fully mature artist, in total command of her craft. Yet the roles she is offered rarely match her power or scope. And even those roles are increasingly harder to come by. In a...

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