Multiple files are bound together in this PDF Package. Adobe recommends using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat version 8 or later to work with documents contained within a PDF Package. By updating to the latest version, you’ll enjoy the following benefits: • Efficient, integrated PDF viewing • Easy printing • Quick searches Don’t have the latest version of Adobe Reader? Click here to download the latest version of Adobe Reader If you already have Adobe Reader 8, click a file in this PDF Package to view it. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html 978-1-926958-01-9 139 Play Review Multinational [G]rape Corporation written and di- rected by Ozgur Cinar, performed by Ozgur Cinar and Chara Berk. 2010. Reviewed by: Aaron Henry1 “Welcome to the market time. Everything has turned into a market today ergo it is not that surprising to see urinals exhibited in museums”. Enter Multina- tional [G]rape Corporations (MGC), the play that took this year’s Ottawa Fringe Theatre and Arts festival by storm, winning the outstanding original work award. Yet reviews of this play, for the most part, have entirely missed what is truly out- standing about it. While several reviews have praised the actors, who were indeed electrifying, or marveled over the irreverence and the spectacle of the play, none of them have discussed the meaning of this play. The meaning has been largely shoved aside, one reviewer even went so far as to suggest that “it defies explanation” (Marr, 2010). This is disappointing because it is in the structure of the play where Cinar’s brilliance, the play’s originality and its message lie. It is, then, the architecture of the play that needs to be given attention, if MGC is going to be reviewed for not just its spectacle but for its internal content. However, the two are necessarily in- terdependent. The set of the play is austere. It features a table and two chairs upstage, a suit- case full of different props and two squares on the floor formed by red-tape labeled security. The play opens with a man and a women vomiting through a slit in the closed curtain while eating and drinking behind it, a married couple who are the key subjects of the play. The play scrolls through many different locales in capitalist society, ranging from the interior of an immigration office where the man is made to pay over and over again to gain permanent residency; a doctor’s office where tapeworms are removed from the woman—played indomitably by Chara Berk— 1 Aaron Henry is a MA student at Carleton University in the Department of Political Economy. He can be reached at ahenry2@connect.carleton.ca Multinational [G]rape Corporation 140 Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research where, as a consequence, the doctor informs her of not eating organic food; the first date between the married couple, to a scene of protest against exploitation. Each of these scenes closes with the couple’s retreat to the table. The next scene begins with the transformation of the woman, following a sound cue that imitates defecation, into an advertisement for different products and services ranging from fair-trade coffee, CDs or for a holiday vacation. Following this metamorphosis of the woman into a commodity, the couple retreats into their respective security boxes where the man, played by Cinar, attempts to commit suicide over and over again to no avail. This structure has a number of important effects that taken together form Cinar’s critique of capitalist society—a critique that goes far beyond being merely anti-consumerist and anti-security, as other reviewers have commented on. Fore- most, the play is presented as a number of instances between subjects. The thread of unity that binds these instances is not that of unified characters with a linear nar- rative but the existence of the market within these relations. This is perhaps epito- mized by the scene where the man applies for a study permit and then a permanent residency card to integrate into Canada. This scene unfolds as primarily a monetary 141 relationship between the man and the Canadian immigration officer who remains alienated from the man and treats him from a distance established by both the cash relationship and the sterile rationality of the bureaucracy. Similarly, on the couple’s first date the romantic evening is disrupted as the woman laments that she must “take a dump” but that they can’t afford access to a toilet. The scene sublimates the tender moment of the couple back into the market. The love between them cannot exist without the commodification of the most basic and biological human needs. Multinational [G]rape Corporation 142 Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research MGC produces its scenes around subjects that are produced by market rela- tions. This forecloses on the unified character one would find in the classic plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Wilde, Synge, etc. and substitutes this character for a frag- mented subject that develops and disappears in line with the market relations that Cinar exposes. The play progresses not as a linear narrative but as a process of inter- action between fragmented subjects as the man and woman transform before the audience, into police officers, immigration officials, doctors, waiters and lovers. The subjects are then formed in context to the power relations that develop within capi- talist society and, as such, they develop and disappear discontinuously and through this disclose the totality of these relations. This structure conveys the message that the market has fully crept into social life, to the degree where one is at once an ad- vertisement and a person. Living under these conditions produces a number of con- tradictions that constitute the insanity and hypocrisy of living in capitalist society. Market society then, produces not only fragmented subjects but the com- plete fragmentation of social life. This fragmentation allows the brutality of capi- talism to colonize the human condition. As Cinar laments, we get urinals next to the wonders of human history, cosmetics next to the death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq, the marketing of vacations alongside brutal exploitation and dictator- ship. Cinar reveals the societal response to this through the couples retreat to their own private security boxes, provided to them by the market. In this sense, the complete commodification of social life finds its terminal point of expression in the partitioning of our own social beings from these processes and our own feeble attempts to secure ourselves from them. The consequences MGC aptly shows is the reinforcement of our own alienation from ourselves and from each other, pre- cisely because we all form part of capitalist society. The man, in particular, is a paragon of this reality as he attempts suicide in his own private security box to end his imprisonment from the market only to be distracted by the very processes he revolts against in disgust. His repeated failure to commit suicide is caused by his inability to see that he himself constitutes part of this market society. Cinar in fact lays this theme out quite clearly and succinctly in the opening lines when the woman declares “We are the flowers of the commercial world. We are the vomit of the commercial world”. They, like all of us, are at once both of these things, nur- tured and cared for as consumers, the subjects of society and at once the objects of it - the refuse, the labourers who are exploited to constitute its existence. The tragedy and insanity is that the couple cannot recognize themselves as the sub- jects that constitute the processes that transform them into these wretched objects. 143 This is one of the central messages of MGC. The structure of the play con- forms to that of capitalist society insofar as capitalist society cannot be understood through a single narrative. Instead it can only be understood under the fragmentary conditions its relations of exploitation and alienation produce. Superficially this reality appears disjointed, chaotic, and beyond explanation. However, with greater focus we see ourselves as the subjects of capitalist society that constitute these rela- tions. Our imprisonment to the market stems from the fact that we ourselves play a part, much like the man and woman, in the exploitation and alienation that constitute capitalist society. In the end we cannot understand this reality; we have after-all “only applied for cleaner, dish-washer or waiter positions”. We don’t under- stand that in these positions we ourselves are both the subject and object of these processes. Cinar’s play is a scream to see outlining this insanity. As such, Cinar’s play constitutes an important critique of capitalism in Canadian society and warrants engagement by all. References Marr, Den. Fully Fringed, June 28th, 2010. www.fullyfringed.ca Photos by A. Erdem Ozcan. Multinational [G]rape Corporation 144 Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research Whole Book PDF