Theatre Gargantua’s Dissonant Species opened at Factory Theatre on Friday night.  It’s written by Heather Marie Annis and Michael Gordon Spence and directed by Jacquie P.A Thomas.  It’s a multi-disciplinary exploration of the idea that “everything is sound” and it also explores other ideas about waves; vibration, the notion that two people can be (metaphorically) on different wavelengths and it flirts with the idea that everything is “vibration” which is sort of true in a QFT way.

The first thirty minutes or so really does explore these ideas in a fairly abstract way with some sound “experiments”; breaking a glass with a high note, making sand patterns on a membrane etc.  I half expected to see the Tacoma Narrows Bridge video!  All of this as the various characters who are all linked through a music theory class are introduced.  The one really interesting idea was that one of the characters was researching the impact of music on the brains of dementia patients (and in particular her mother).  One could dismiss a lot of this as psychobabble crossed with academic duck speak but I really felt there were some ideas there that bore further examination and I hoped that that was where the play was headed but I was mostly wrong.

As the piece evolves it becomes more and more about the conflicts between the characters who are on different wavelengths.  The problem is finding a reason to care about most of them!  There’s a prof teaching a counterpoint class (Spence) who actually seems to think that tritones are Satanic and who is just so stuffed with repressed rage that he’s barely functional.  There’s his RA (Annis) who gets pregnant and goes on maternity leave at which point the prof sabotages her dementia research for questionable reasons.  There’s her sister (Hannah Sunley-Paisley) who is only in the class because of her RA sister, can’t see the point of any of it and has a passionate hatred for a jazz musician (Nicholas Eddie) who she is convinced, on rather slight evidence, is some sort of MAGA loon.  He, in turn is trying to chat up (spectacularly unsuccessfully) the one person who actually seems to care about what she’s doing in the class (Malia Rogers).  There’s an interesting opportunity here to explore how someone could use music to express thoughts they can’t otherwise articulate but it rather goes begging.

The dialogue is often loud and shouty and it’s punctuated by dramatic lighting, some interesting sound design and a lot of energetic movement that’s visually interesting but doesn’t really move the thing forward.  After an hour I was wondering how they were going to tie these meandering and vaguely connected story threads into an ending.  The answer was that the prof lets out his anger and frustration in a screaming session which the rest of the cast join in on.  Perhaps surprisingly, the audience didn’t join them.

The cast is pretty impressive.  They sing, they play multiple instruments, they throw themselves around energetically and they can all act.  Sunley-Paisley even does interesting things with a basketball.  But, absent a coherent concept, that all rather goes for nought.  Certainly there were ideas I’d like to have seen explored further, but, ultimately, the rather banal stories of the characters are unsatisfying and if they are all on different wavelengths, the piece, as a whole, is not on mine.

Dissonant Species continues at Factory Theatre until November 23rd.

Photo credits: Michael Cooper.