When you take your seat for “Romeo Pimp,” the harrowing new drama by the Canadian playwright Jesse McQueen, look up. Plastered on the ceiling of the King Black Box theatre is a collage of various newspaper articles, intricately criss-crossed above the audience.
This collage is a hallmark of every production at the King Black Box, an intimate, 50-seat storefront venue in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. But it wasn’t until I saw director Sophie Ann Rooney’s charged, if somewhat uneven, production on Wednesday — only my third time watching a show by this fast-rising company — that I paid any particular attention to it.
Those news clippings each tell a story. Some are Easter eggs alluding to the theatre’s previous productions. Many others, however, serve to complement, and extend, the ideas in McQueen’s play. There’s an article about Amanda Todd, the B.C. teenager who died by suicide after she was cyberbullied and blackmailed. Another piece lays bare the staggering statistics related to sex and human trafficking in Canada.
This tapestry serves as a prescient, ever constant reminder that the story at the heart of McQueen’s play, as painful and horrifying as it may be, is merely a brutal reflection of our society.
When “Romeo Pimp” begins, McQueen presents her audience with a set of parallel, seemingly unrelated narratives.
In one, we see a young woman (Juliette Diodati) who’s trapped in the sex trade. She’s beaten, abused and coerced. We know little of her backstory. And at least initially, we don’t even know her name. The same holds true of her pimp. As played with conviction by Sam Wexler, he’s an unfeeling, maniacal manipulator.
When we cut to McQueen’s parallel narrative, we experience a bit of whiplash. Jamie’s (Charlotte Salisbury) story — at first, at least — could not be more different. She’s a typical high school senior. She enjoys blasting musical theatre numbers on stereo. She can’t stand her overbearing, nosy mother (McQueen), nor her sports-loving younger brother, Connor (Brennan Bielefeld). After school, Jamie and her BFF Paige (athena kaitlin trinh) gossip their evenings away, talking about hot boys they like — and their hot math teacher (Jack Creaghan).
Ever so gradually, however, these two stories start to merge. This convergence is initially imperceptible. Indeed, “Romeo Pimp” starts slowly. Perhaps even too slowly. (The play’s first half tends to drag.) But what McQueen achieves by doing this is establishing a sense of normalcy. We, the audience, are convinced that nothing in Jamie’s life is out of the ordinary. We feel happy for her when she finds a boyfriend (a very charming Agape Mngomezulu).
But all this while, unbeknownst to Jamie, the coils are already turning, growing tighter and tighter and tighter. Those parallel narratives aren’t so much on parallel tracks, after all. They’ve skewed inward and are heading on a collision course.
By the time Jamie realizes — or we do, for that matter — it’s too late. And that’s what is most chilling about McQueen’s drama, so carefully constructed with the profound insights of Jessa Crisp, a survivor of human trafficking.
Rooney’s production is filled with visual flourishes. But at times, her punchy use of sound (designed by Jeff Styga) and light (designed by Grisha Pasternak and Creaghan) feels excessive. Everything’s already there in McQueen’s script.
I also found some actors to still be settling into their roles and into the show’s pacing. On opening night, there sounded to be several miscued lines. Currently, two of the strongest performances are coming from Wexler and Diodati. He’s bone chillingly terrifying, with an ice cold stare. She’s a magnetic performer, lending overwhelming sympathy to the supporting role.
The statistics related to human and sex trafficking in Canada are startling to even consider. According to the Global Slavery Index compiled by the international human rights group Walk Free, there are an estimated 1.8 people in 1,000 living in modern slavery on any given day in this country.
We may occasionally read these statistics, like perhaps in those news articles pasted on the theatre’s ceiling collage. But what McQueen’s “Romeo Pimp” does so persuasively is to humanize those numbers, to give them a name, a face, a story — and to tell it with complete honesty and empathy.
