Skip to main content
theatre review

Heather Marie Annis, Amy Lee and Anand Rajaram in Morro & Jasp In Stupefaction.Alex Nirta

Red-nose alert! While Toronto's most serious theatregoers are distracted by the festivals (Stratford, Shaw and Luminato), the clowns have sneaked in to take over the city's stages.

Over at Tarragon Theatre, the beautiful French clown Mimi is once again taking audience members out for dinner and drinks in Rebecca Northan's improvised international hit, Blind Date, while at Soulpepper, VideoCabaret 's buffoonish vision of Canadian history is back, telling the story of Confederation with Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald in whiteface and fright wigs.

At the same time, over in the east end at Crow's Theatre, the clown sisters Morro and Jasp are back with one of their biggest and most ambitious shows to date: Stupefaction. Unfortunately, their 90-minute comedy fully lives up to its name – and not in the positive sense.

Clowns aren't much loved south of the border in popular culture, thanks in part to Stephen King's 1986 novel It and its various adaptations. But Morro and Jasp are trained in that more benign form of Canadian clowning, also known as the Pochinko Method – a character-focused approach to creating theatre that is closer to mask work and results in much more relatable clowns.

For a little more than a decade now, Heather Marie Annis and Amy Lee have been creating shows centred around the clown sisters Morro and Jasp. Morro, who dresses in red, is the taller, sweeter, but more anarchic one; Jasp, who dresses in blue, is the shorter, brighter one, whose enthusiasm easily turns aggressive.

These self-acknowledged clowns – who, yes, sport red noses – have appeared in a series of plays directed by Byron Laviolette that have genre-hopped from cooking shows to theatre for young audience romps to adaptations of classics. (I was a particular fan of 2014's Of Mice and Morro and Jasp.)

It's not initially clear what Morro and Jasp are up to this time around. They arrive at Crow's Theatre not as performers, but as audience members – and latecomers at that. An usher (Ride the Cyclone 's Elliott Loran) shows them to their seats – but they cause a scene as Jasp has the tickets on her phone, which has, of course, died. Meanwhile, Morro wants to get a snack – and tries to find a way to get to a cart full of Hawkins Cheezies across the room without leaving her seat.

Soon enough, a voice comes over the speakers to tell the audience that whatever show we are here to watch is experiencing technical difficulties. A stagehand (Sefton Jackson) comes in to start taking apart the stage – and, not long after, a FedEx courier (Anand Rajaram) arrives delivering a mysterious box.

In what initially seems like a riff on Waiting for Godot, little happens – beyond Morro and Jasp arguing like their clown-inspired brethren do in that Samuel Beckett play.

Eventually, the two sisters do find themselves up on the stage – and flashes of light and sound effects connect them with the disembodied voice we heard earlier.

Stupefaction, it turns out, is a religious journey for Morro and Jasp – who, in trying to find meaning for why they're at the theatre, begin to invent a divine dimension to the evening.

Jasp – who is addicted to her phone and depressed by it – proves particularly zealous in the fashioning of a new religion, developing a series of commandments about the box that must be followed.

Morro is on board as a disciple – until one of Jasp's rules bars her from eating her beloved Cheezies. Cue a conflict between the fundamentalist and apostate clowns that leads to a ukulele version of R.E.M's Losing My Religion, sung with charming gusto by Annis.

There was little else in the show that I found equally charming, however. Mostly, Stupefaction came off as a meta-theatrical muddle – one that rarely really got me laughing, or thinking about anything other than how the Blue Jays might be faring at that particular moment.

Perhaps because they're in a larger space than normal, or because Stupefaction is staged in an alley configuration, Morro and Jasp project their squeaky and shrill clown voices more than usual – and I found their squabbling irritating to listen to at times.

And while it's nice to see the pair expand their company, the extra characters are underdeveloped and underused – though Rajaram is a lovely, warm presence as the FedEx guy.

Over the course of a decade, Morro and Jasp have built a strong following – and, coming to this show a few days after it official opening, it was heartening to see a Tuesday night performance almost entirely sold out. The diehard fans seemed to enjoy themselves – but, on the way out, one newcomer came up to me and said: "Are you reviewing that show? That was terrible." I wouldn't go that far, but Stupefaction is definitely not for those who haven't already been converted by these clowns.

Morro and Jasp in Stupefaction continues to June 29.

Actor Daren A. Herbert says the production Onegin is not an opera – though it’s based on a Tchaikovsky opera and an Alexander Pushkin poem. The indie-rock musical runs until June 4 in Toronto and is heading to Ottawa in the fall.

The Canadian Press

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe