Beginagame

Beginagame, which plays at the Tarragon Theatre Mainspace as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival, is a work that I’m sure began with the best of intentions, but has spiralled into absurd levels of awkward and painful, as an unintentional dramatization of what white privilege looks like.

Beginagame literally turns the statistics of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women into a awful game show, with a host that makes the most annoying adult on a CBC Kids Show look like Johnny Carson, who is supposedly leading a white woman through her subconscious as she comes to terms with her own guilt about a murder of an Aboriginal woman she witnessed when she was seven. Yet, even as a theatrical construct, the game show doesn’t at all resemble someone’s subconscious (unless they’re on a bad acid trip) and, most horrifying of all, the murdered Aboriginal woman is only referred to by all the white characters in the most objectified terms- even when they are trying to make the argument that murdering Aboriginal women is wrong, it’s completely de-personalized in a way that they might as well we talking about how it’s wrong to kill bears or it’s wrong to tear down heritage buildings. This is not at all her story, it’s the story of an abused seven year old white girl living with her guilt at the expense of a murdered Aboriginal woman, all turned into a joke and, ultimately, a train wreck.

TWISI FRINGE RATING: