Review by Kate Taylor - February 24, 1997

Staging of Cohen is poetry in motion.

In adapting the poetry of Leonard Cohen for the stage, Calgary's One Yellow Rabbit company announces its standards right from the start. The show, which opened Thursday in the Big Secret Theatre, begins with How to Speak Poetry from Death of a Lady's Man. It's a piece that rejects overly emotive readings and their pretentious attempts to dramatize each word. As performer Denise Clarke explains to her colleagues on stage, there's no need to make your voice float like a butterfly when you say "butterfly". Never act out words, is Cohen's message.

And they don't. There follows, from that initial statement, a first act of seamless words and movement featuring about 50 poems from Death of a Lady's Man, The Energy of Slaves, The Spice Box of Earth and several other collections from the sixties and seventies. There is never any facile attempt to directly illustrate what these words speak. Rather, this adaptation by director Blake Brooker mixes the poems with movement and dance that subtly and often humorously suggest their emotional tone.

With help from Clarke, a superb dancer and choreographer, Brooker's Doing Leonard Cohen is both very simple and filled to bursting with clever devices to make the words physical and the role of poetry apparent. Early on, all four performers - Clarke, Michael Green as a Cohenesque figure, Elizabeth Stepkowski and Andy Curtis - cozy up to different sections of the audience and simultaneously deliver different poems to each. The intimacy of Cohen's poetry, which is largely about sex and love, is instantly established.

Later, as Green delivers a particularly sexual passage that culminates in a surprise infidelity, Curtis swings one of Clarke's legs like a pendulum, treating it as an inanimate object. The image created when Stepkowski lies on the ground to manipulate Green's feet as though he were a puppet later flows into one of a spurned lover's abject begging. The performers speak their love and hurl their jealousy - they act, but they don't act out.

The second half, devoted entirely to the poetically charged novel Beautiful Losers, is more obviously a staging of that piece. Because the piece, in which the writer jealously mourns a wife and a friend, has three characters, the performers can each adopt a voice.

Again, Green is the "I," the narrator, the figure we associate with Cohen, dressed in black jeans and leather jacket. Stepkowski is his late wife Edith, squished at the bottom of the elevator shaft where she was waiting for him to come home in some bizarre emotional statement gone fatally wrong. Curtis is F, the pseudo-mystical, self-aggrandizing, bisexual hippy who has been sleeping with Edith.

Playing a dumb blond observer, Clarke is both a narrator more removed than the writer himself, and a participant in the threesome, her erotic presence emphasizing F's sexual gluttony. (It is a testimony to One Yellow Rabbit's existence as a genuine ensemble company that the presence of a fourth person is completely necessary to this menage a trois.)

The Images are never merely illustrative, and always hugely imaginative. As the poet describes outings to the movies where he sat between F and Edith, all four performers sit in a line with Curtis fondling both women at once. F has admitted that he once stuck his fingers erotically in Edith's ears, and the scene builds to a hilarious climax of three-way ear fondling. Then, as the piece returns to the "I," conscious that he is at his desk writing, Green suddenly mimes typing while he still sits in the steamy movie house. The Images created on stage are as hallucinatory as those of the novel's stream of consciousness, with its sexual escapades both hilarious and violent. It is a glorious evocation of the text.

Although it contains the added element of dance-based movement, this show is reminiscent of the dramatic performance of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw brought to Toronto and Montreal last spring. Both share a compelling belief in poetry as an oral and physical tradition.

Doing Leonard Cohen is no poetry reading; it is poetry speaking and moving.