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Reviewed by:
  • Concord floral by Jordan Tannahill
  • Stephen Low
Concord Floral. By Jordan Tannahill. Directed by Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner. Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto. October 13, 2016

Directors Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner reconfigured the Bluma Appel Theatre for Concord Floral. Risers were placed on the stage floor, ascending from stage right to stage left, for the audience to sit on and look down onto a playing space demarcated by a rectangular patch of AstroTurf. This arrangement forced spectators to see the materiality of the setting, drawing attention to the significance of terrain, both metaphorical and literal, in the performance. Concord Floral explored liminal terrain in its setting, process, themes, and politics.

As the winner of the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award and Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for English-Language [End Page 585] Drama in the same year, Jordan Tannahill, age 29, maps the transitional terrain of being both emerging and established in Concord Floral in his dramatization of the lives of contemporary teenagers. The exploration of this liminal terrain theatricalized several important questions central to Tannahill’s life and work: geographically, the play considered how suburban development threatens the delicate ecology of the environment; temporally, the production metatheatrically staged the perilous terrain traversed between childhood and adulthood to highlight the harm of bullying faced by young people today; and thematically, the ghost who haunts the central characters of the play invited us to consider how both environmental devastation and bullying threaten our personal and communal well-being.


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The cast of Concord Floral. (Photo: Erin Brubacher.)

Loosely based on The Decameron, Boccaccio’s collection of short stories anchored by a single narrative, Concord Floral often deviated from its central plot, which follows two girls who are haunted by the specter of a fellow student they bullied and humiliated at a party a year earlier, to allow marginal characters an opportunity to tell their stories. In one such tangential anecdote, a girl recounted a tale that concerned her exploration of the terrain of her own body. After the humiliating experience of being caught by her mother and brother in the tub masturbating, she races out of the house and lies on her back lawn, where her father is cutting the grass. As she lay still in the fake grass, she fears that her father will not see her as he pushes the mower, and he does not until she jumps up at the last moment. The backyard lawn as the setting for this monologue encouraged the audience to consider her encounter with her developing sexual body as an exploration of familiar, but often unconsidered terrain.

This tangential anecdote was exemplary of Concord Floral’s investment in exploring the modern-day teen experience, which was emphasized by the amateur teenage actors playing the high school students that populate the story. This unusual casting decision realistically positioned the characters between childhood and adulthood, and the actors between amateur and professional. Teens, animals, the environment, and even the dead were all given voice in the play—all things that are often lost by falling through the cracks, but are always present and in desperate need of our attention.

The production theatricalized the impending devastation of local environments by setting the play in a suburban community where the ecosystem is being threatened by new commercial development. The ecosystem is represented by animals, including a fox and a bobolink, a couch that was deposited in the abandoned greenhouse, and the suburban landscape [End Page 586] itself as anthropomorphized characters in the play. An adolescent birdwatcher’s concern about the future of the land after the greenhouse is set to be torn down and replaced by a parking lot and megaplex drew our attention to pressing environmental concerns. He tells the audience about his fears for the wildlife that thrive in the liminal urban/suburban landscape, terrain that is not often the focus of environmental interest. The lives of this teenager and the anthropomorphized animals exposed the ways in which our shared environments connect us.


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Micaela Robertson in Concord Floral. (Photo: Erin Brubacher.)

Concord Floral, both...

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