Here’s a Push: Go See This is About The Push!

This is About the Push is a fascinating new play written by Rachel Blair which plays at the Factory Theatre Studio as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. An exploration of women at war, this play examines the political and personal power struggles between a group of women at their husbands’ company pool party and takes the audience to the brink of battle where the distinctions between friend and foe begin to blur.

Blair centres her story on the newest couple invited to the pool party. After Bob’s promotion, he and his wife are initiated into an exclusive social club at the “boss boss’s” house. The wife immediately encounters the odd dynamic of wives whose hierarchy mirrors their husband’s positions at the firm. Amid scathing gossip and blame games, Bob’s wife is continually caught in a tangled web of deception and insincerity where she is constantly being pulled between engaging in the behaviour that she thinks will benefit her husband’s corporate goals and remaining true to her own values. The story is told from Bob’s wife’s perspective, but her memories and her choice of whether or not to be entirely forthwith is continually being challenged by the two other characters on stage, which prompts the narrative to be sometimes adjusted and exposes the malleability of memory and the subjectivity of perspective.

Kimwun Perehinec plays Bob’s wife with an overwhelmed eagerness to please which spirals quickly as she becomes increasingly desperate and delirious in her struggle to play the role her husband’s colleagues and their wives have scripted and concocted for her, while still maintaining the integrity of a loving wife and respectable mother. Jennifer Villaverde and Naomi Wright enliven the unnamed wife’s recollection by leaping in to play the plethora of different characters at the Pool Party, whose social graces Perehinec’s character manoeuvres through like a minefield. Villaverde is particularly evocative as a character who has chattering, exaggerated, pretentiousness down to an absolute art. Naomi Wright gives a wonderful performance as Marcy, the Boss Boss’s wife, whose cold and terse haughtiness is obviously filling a wide gaping hole in her marriage, and Wright is absolutely extraordinary as the Boss Boss, sleazy as a snake with his wandering eyes and dangerous hands.

Kelly Straughan’s direction of this play is impeccable, as she knows precisely when stylized movements are most appropriate to capture the hazy nature of memories and the way Bob’s wife perceives this army of women not as individuals, but as a solid collective marching towards her with the intention of destroying her sense of self. At other times, Straughan lets the scenes play out more naturalistically, which allows the audience a bit of distance to draw their own conclusions about these characters and their intricate and rigid situation.

This is About the Push reminded me of what it was like to watch adults schmooze and partake in compulsory corporate small talk when I was still a child to whom this all seemed utterly absurd. Rachel Blair’s play is eloquent and theatrical, rich in both ideas and emotion, and it vividly recreates the reality of life for so many women across a multitude of generations. Yet, Blair offers us a fresh perspective from whence to ask, “who are these women fighting?”, “what are they fighting for and why?” and “can there be a winner?” Intricate paradoxes abound with limitless fascinating possibilities to explore as we push ahead in search of truth, enlightenment and understanding.

This is About the Push plays at the Factory Theatre Studio Space (125 Bathurst Street) at the following times: