Déjah Dixon-Green portrays Cleo in Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner.Dahlia Katz/Obsidian Theatre
- Title: Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner
- Written by: Jasmine Lee-Jones
- Director: Jay Northcott
- Actors: Jasmine Case and Déjah Dixon-Green
- Companies: Obsidian Theatre and Crow’s Theatre
- Venue: Streetcar Crowsnest
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Sunday, May 26
Critic’s Pick
In her heart-crushing debut novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison wrote of a Black girl in the early 1940s whose mind is warped by white standards of beauty. Fast-forward 80 years and we now have Black girls watching as white celebrities appropriate their physical features, while still leaving them feeling inferior.
So much for progress.
Young Black British playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones has cited Morrison’s classic as an inspiration for her own debut work, an angry dramedy with a delicious title: Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner.
Her 2019 play, getting a combustible Canadian premiere from Obsidian Theatre (in association with Crow’s Theatre), finds Cleo, a university student, spewing her rage at the eponymous reality-TV-star-cum-cosmetics-entrepreneur of Keeping Up with the Kardashians fame.
The trigger is the news that Forbes magazine has named Jenner the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire, which occasioned more than a few eye-rolls at the time. A disgusted Cleo (Déjah Dixon-Green) goes further than that, however, taking to Twitter (this is pre-X) and not just slamming the shallow celeb for her white privilege and cultural theft, but proposing ways of doing her in.
Her tweets are suitably provocative and elicit the expected backlash, with predictable comments that Cleo must be jealous. But she rises to the bait, posting evermore gruesome methods of Jenner-cide, until the haters get ugly and racist. And still she won’t quit.
Kara (Jasmine Chase) and Cleo (Déjah Dixon-Green) in a scene from Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner.Dahlia Katz/Obsidian Theatre
Watching it all, half-enthralled, half-appalled, is her queer BFF, Kara (Jasmine Case). Much more chill, Kara both tries to get Cleo to shut down her tirade and starts to dig for the hidden source of her friend’s vitriol. First, she discovers that Cleo’s Black lover has recently left her for a white woman. Although that’s only scraping the surface. As Kara and Cleo continue to talk, old resentments and animosities between the two are flung up, threatening to tear their long friendship to shreds.
Lee-Jones alternates their increasingly heated conversations with snarky excerpts from Cleo’s Twitter detractors, also delivered by the show’s two actors. Everything is rendered in a breathless barrage of social-media speak that’s feverishly funny but sometimes a challenge to follow. Helpfully, a dictionary of acronyms is included in the theatre program.
But you don’t need to know the slang to know where it’s all heading. It’s the familiar arc of many a Twitter teapot-tempest, with internet sleuths finding out the true identity behind Cleo’s “incognegro” handle and then dredging up shameful posts from her teenage past.
Seven Methods was originally produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it was revived in 2021 and later toured to New York and Washington.Dahlia Katz/Obsidian Theatre
The real drama, though, is offline, as Lee-Jones touches upon the homophobia and shade-ism that blight Cleo and Kara’s friendship (Kara is light-skinned) and explores the insidious messages that young Black girls still receive about their appearances and, by extension, their worth. By the end, the playwright artfully drops the social-media argot as both women express themselves plainly and eloquently.
Seven Methods … was originally produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it was revived in 2021 and later toured to New York and Washington. It won Lee-Jones a couple of “most promising playwright” awards and it’s a perfect vehicle for the fresh talent assembled here.
Dixon-Green, who has been making her mark at the Stratford Festival – she was a dynamic Regan in Kimberley Rampersad’s King Lear last season – owns the role of Cleo. She flaunts the brash overconfidence of a budding intellectual who, when she isn’t gleefully eviscerating Kylie Jenner, has no problem also handily cutting Martin Luther King down to size. But when Cleo is finally forced to replace her endless accusations with some serious self-reflection, Dixon-Green makes her inner pain palpable.
Case, a relative newcomer, is a delightful foil as the languid, hashish-vaping Kara. She and Dixon-Green fill Crow’s Theatre’s Studio space with crackling female energy and rapid-fire exchanges – during one argument, they even circle one another warily like gunslingers at a showdown.
Jay Northcott, making their Obsidian directing debut, channels that energy into a sizzling staging. They’re helped by one of designer Nick Blais’s typically imaginative sets. He gives the fiery Cleo a round bed that resembles the red mouth of a volcano, which at one point even emits smoke. Above is a formidable phalanx of screens, where video designer Laura Warren splashes the replies and hashtags multiplying like so many rabid rabbits on Cleo’s home page.
Lee-Jones is clearly a neophyte writer. Not only can you spot the influences of The Bluest Eye, but she also ends up retelling the tale of Sarah Baartman to find a poignant counterpoint to Kylie Jenner. Baartman, the 19th-century South African woman who was exhibited to white Europeans as the “Hottentot Venus,” has since had her story reclaimed in films, books and plays – including Meghan Swaby’s Venus’s Daughter, which premiered at Obsidian back in 2016. But you can’t fault Lee-Jones for referencing it once more, especially for younger audiences who may not (and should) know it.
Those clumsy touches don’t detract from a play that effectively shows both the continued impact of racist beauty standards on young Black women, but also the increasing pushback.
Where Morrison’s novel and Baartman’s story are tragedies, Cleo’s defiance and self-awareness suggest a happier outcome. That’s progress.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)