Down the rabbit hole
Dave Jaffer
|
Amy Lee Lavoie pulls strange rabbits out of familiar hats, metaphorically
photo: Courtesy of Infinithéâtre
|
In the uneasy world of playwright Amy Lee Lavoie's Rabbit Rabbit, even the ostracized and loathed still chase love
Rabbit Rabbit, the brand spankin' new Infinitheatre production, is about "two sort of unlikely people experiencing human connection... they wouldn't get the opportunity to experience otherwise." That vagueness comes straight from the mouth of the play's author Amy Lee Lavoie, 25, who wrote Rabbit Rabbit after picking her two main characters - "a pedophilic birthday clown and a shy prostitute" - out of a hat during her first month at the National Theatre School. What started as a writing exercise begat a play that's invariably going to cause some controversy - truth be told, it already did at Edmonton's Fringe Festival.
"The play," she says, "is about Larry visiting this marginal-fetish escort service weekly to suppress his urges to touch kids, and the stakes in [the play] are that he's met this young girl who's special, and he really needs his fix from Sabrina, who's his 12-year-old regular. And she's busy so he's paired up with Britney, who's voluptuous, and lousy."
Furthermore, Britney's in love with Ace, her pimp. Ace issues the girls' clients scorecards, and if Britney gets another bad score, she's out on her ass.
Yeah. Ibsen it ain't.
"For me, the whole point is giving voices to those who don't have them," says Lavoie, explaining what Rabbit Rabbit is, to her. "[Larry and Britney are] ostracized from society, and with good reason, but what would happen if they found some sort of camaraderie together, and if they had a connection? What would come out of that?
That interests me."Currently in her third year at NTS, Lavoie previously attended Bishop's University where she studied drama. It would be easy to describe her as the shy, awkward ingénue except from where I sat during our interview, she had the confidence of a seasoned pro, and the earnestness of a writer who's trying quite hard to do a good job.
"I don't think it was my goal [to write a love story]. I think there's a love story within, or at least through Larry's perspective of what he believes love to be. Who am I to define what that is for somebody, even if I am writing from the perspective of a pedophile?"
Rabbit Rabbit
At Bain St-Michel (5300 St-Dominque), Nov. 12-29
