The White Crocodile
Created by Laurie Fyffe, Directed by William Beddoe
Produced by Plan B Productions
Review by Brian Carroll
40 min / 14+/ Play, Storytelling, Drama / Violence, Mental Health
“You have to give them hope.” – Harvey Milk.
Fringe isn’t just attendance, word of mouth, awards or reviews. Unjuried, Fringe lets playwrights experiment. Veteran Ottawa playwright Laurie Fyffe is trying three new plays: Dammed, I Am Oil and The White Crocodile.
Dammed is a dystopian projection of what Tom Nichols calls The Death of Expertise. Reality is relative. A structural expert warns that a local dam is about to fail, but the Department of Premonitions won’t act.
Scene from Dammed. Photo provided.
In I Am Oil, technology harvests previously uneconomic oil reserves like the Bakken Formation. A 73-car train of Bakken oil derailed and exploded in the town of Lac Mégantic.
Dammed and I Am Oil are like candy. They taste sweet, but they’re bad for your teeth. Dammed draws quick laughs but comes at a cost of fatalism.
I Am Oil declaims our addiction to oil. Katherine Kayhoe says disasters make people freeze. They need solutions they can implement.
Scene from I Am Oil. Photo provided.
The White Crocodile interweaves three stories: Prague Spring, Vietnamese Boat People, and the Pol Pot Cambodian massacre.
A young teenager empathizes when she sees a photo of a Czech girl her age standing up to Russian tanks. Then her parents take in a refugee Czech couple, displacing the girl from her newly acquired bedroom.
Boat People. A sandy beach on the idyllic island of Ko Samui in Thailand. Paradise, until the sea washes the body of a teenage girl onto the beach.
Scene from The White Crocodile. Photo provided.
In Cambodia, a school house is now a museum, a former torture chamber under Pol Pot. A tourist describes three scenes. Your skin crawls.
The White Crocodile is the most nuanced, developed and complex of these three plays.
Is there hope? You’ll have to see The White Crocodile yourself.
Hard core Fringers will try anything. The White Crocodile is worth their time.
The White Crocodile is playing at Studio 1201 from June 14–22. Tickets are $14 plus service fees at the Fringe box office (3rd floor, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue), and at the two satellite box offices (LabO in the Ottawa Art Gallery and La Nouvelle Scene). 5 and 10 Show Passes are also available. Visit the Ottawa Fringe Festival’s website for the show’s schedule and check out their online schedule here.
