Review: US/THEM is a Necessary Examination of Tragedy Through the Eyes of Children
By: Isabella Perrone Mar. 01, 2020
When tragedy strikes, most people can only try to imagine what the victims have experienced; and when children are among the affected, outside opinions tend to overtake individual in favour of a narrative of collective outrage.
Where writer and director Carly Wijs's US/THEM differs is that in terms of examining a tragic event, it does so through the eyes of a child - or, more accurately, two children being held hostage in a gymnasium during the September 1, 2004 Beslan school siege. The boy (Roman Van Houtven) and girl (Gytha Parmentier) work together to recount the events of the tragedy, beginning with the first day of school ceremony that saw nearly 2,000 people - mothers, grandmothers, a few dads, and children from toddlers through to 10-year olds congregated for a special assembly. As the boy and girl create chalk outlines of the school grounds on stage and perform snippets of the songs from the assembly, commonplace shifts into horror as they mime the initial attack that left victims dead on the playground, children rushing to hide in classrooms, and 1,140 people crammed into a hot gymnasium with 34 terrorists.
Van Houtven and Parmentier then guide the audience through what the experience in the gymnasium was like for the victims in a disarmingly childish manner. They interrupt one another, argue about who's telling the story right, and re-enact the actions of the terrorists and hostages over the course of three days with all the mannerisms of 10-year olds; they're assured in their knowledge, they're silly, and they're not able to process what's happening to them or why, making the whole story that much more heartbreaking.
Each actor brings a unique personality to the child they play, which serves as a stark reminder that when tragedy strikes, every statistic and number is a person - even if the narrators of US/THEM only ever use numbers to describe the other unnamed characters involved. Van Houtven is largely collected, analytical, and a bit more reserved as the boy. He also manages to use the more serious tone to the boy's personality to make humorous moments even more effective, like singing the theme from Mission Impossible over a highly dramatic moment in the narrative.
Parmentier is also facts-focused but only to an extent - she plays the girl with a wide-eyed innocence that feels like a punch to the gut whenever things take a turn from bad to worse. She's rowdy and a little bit silly, but also extremely compassionate, making her portrayal of a little girl caught up in something terrible completely believable and completely heart wrenching.
The stage design (Stef Stessel) is fairly complex for being a stool, a box, and a chalkboard. Everyday items like balloons and strings become wires and bombs, and create a web of obstacles that actors must jump over and crawl under, adding an element of physical demand to the already emotionally demanding roles. While lighting (Thomas Clause) and sound (Peter Brughmans) are kept minimal through most of the performance, there are a few moments where they completely overtake to create overwhelmingly stunning scenes.
US/THEM doesn't exist to capitalize on the tragedy of Beslan, though - it goes so far as to criticize the world's response to tragedies, from large monetary donations to victims that can never make things right, celebrities visiting the injured in the hospital, and media coverage that warps and recreates the truth of events for individual gain. We live in a world where school shootings and mass terror attacks have become pretty normalized in the news, and US/THEM is an urgent, necessary take on how the most vulnerable victims of horrific events might experience and process them.
Mirvish, BRONKS, and Richard Jordan Productions' US/THEM runs through March 25 at CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St, Toronto, ON.
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit https://www.mirvish.com/shows/us-them
Photo credit: FKPH
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