Have you ever had a quarter-life crisis? Well, so has Cole Hayley, and his experimental play exploring this, There’s Nothing You Can Do, presented at the Resource Center for the Arts Theatre LSPU Hall from May 7-11.
Written by playwright Cole Hayley, directed by Chelsea Dab Hilke, scored by a variety of St. John’s bands, including CUERPOS who wrote two original songs specifically for the play, and a cast brimming with local talent, There’s Nothing You Can Do is an entirely unique piece that is staunchly affectionate towards local creative scenes. The play tells the story of a group of recently reunited friends, all at different stages in life – but all experiencing that classic mid-20s existential dread – who get infected with a dancing plague.
Cole Hayley is originally from Elliston, Newfoundland. An alumnus of the National Theatre School and long-time writer, he’s worked on a plethora of projects over his creative career, but this one is particularly special. He cited it as “a play I could have only written at a specific time in my life, and I’m very happy that I managed to find it.” Though Cole Hayley was living in Montreal when the show was conceived, it is a play “born out of St. John’s.”
Inspirations + Creative Process
There’s Nothing You Can Do riffs on that “existential crisis” anxiety, using a metaphor of a dancing plague to explore the discordant crossroads the characters each find themselves in at a collectively uncertain time in their lives. Hayley credited the COVID-19 pandemic and the idea of the quarter-life crisis as inspiration for the play.
“I think a lot of people, for the first time in a long time, had a chance to pause and really consider their lives and reconsider what they want… Then I was reading about this dancing plague in Strasbourg [France] and it just seemed like the appropriate metaphor for not just the fact that we just went through an actual pandemic, but the main theory as to why these people were dancing in Strasbourg is because they were going through mass hypnosis because of huge amounts of stress they were feeling [following the Black Plague].”
A person’s early twenties are a tumultuous time, some of us are trucking through post-secondary, some people are travelling, getting engaged, married, having children – there are a lot of different life stages happening at once and it can feel incredibly jarring to watch others achieve milestones when you are uncertain what you might want, or perhaps if you imagined things might be different by now. These feelings are what There’s Nothing You Can Do aims to capture.
Changing Target Audiences
During the process of workshopping There’s Nothing You Can Do, there was a directional shift in terms of the show’s demographic. While the play employs the quarter-life-crisis trope, Hayley said upon further development that he “didn’t want it to be a show that only appeals to people in their 20s. That was no longer interesting to me because everybody goes through these crises and these moments of pause…there’s a big decline in the midlife crisis for people because we have multiple crises instead of this one big crisis now.”
“Once I realized that I could make a show that is, yes, about young people but can be relatable to people no matter what age or what situation, that really blew everything open for me,” Hayley said.
Music and Relationships Influencing Writing
Hayley moved to St. John’s at 17 years old and was immediately inspired by the people he met at the shows he would go to.
With a score consisting almost entirely of local musicians, evidently, music influenced Hayley’s writing greatly. “Writing-wise I’m super influenced by music,” he said, “I’m a huge music fan, I love going to shows, I love making music, I love listening to music… so when I was developing this show and I was freaking out as most people in their 20s are freaking out, especially right now, I was really finding solace in the muse that I was listening to whether that was local bands here in St. John’s or just my favourite bands. That spirit of music lives through this show a lot.”
While There’s Nothing You Can Do is not explicitly autobiographical, there is some truth to the experiences depicted in the show. “There’s no character in the show that’s like ‘oh that’s my stand-in’ but they’re all fragments of me… every character is an anxiety that I have had,” Hayley said. He also discussed the interconnectedness of local creative communities, emphasizing the uniquely intimate nature of St. John’s and how people help one another out.
“Everybody knows everybody in the art scene. The people who are doing visual arts are going to the shows at The Ship by the local hardcore bands, maybe somebody from the hardcore band is an actor in a play…everything is very connected. Doing the show, having the support of all these different communities, is super exciting and was important to me… I think that’s my favourite thing about doing art here, it’s not like we have this huge profitable thing that can exist here, but we do okay because everybody comes and supports it, which I think is pretty awesome.”
No matter what stage of life you’re in, if you relate to feelings of uncertainty, you might like There’s Nothing You Can Do. An art gallery coinciding with the play’s run, with visual art from Anthony Charles Brenton and Luanne Dominix, was also available for viewing in the LSPU hall’s Cox & Palmer room.
Note from the Author
While I don’t think I have the authority to write a review since I know virtually nothing about theatre, I had the immense privilege of seeing the show on Thursday evening during the May 8th showing, and I was blown away. What a hilariously cynical but oddly hopeful piece. I left the theatre having somewhat of a crisis of my own but to me, all that says is the show achieved what it was meant to do.
The performances were fantastic, each actor embodied their character so well. I really loved the characters in general. Cole Hayley was able to playfully use archetypes without sacrificing depth or over-satirizing, and each one also had vulnerable moments where the audience got a window into what was going on. I’m also very impressed by the actors’ stamina; I could not dance nonstop for an hour; that’s quite admirable, actually. The original songs by CUERPOS fit perfectly, and I can definitely see where the love for music comes in with the inclusion of other songs from Swimming during the party scene, and Vancouver indie garage band Peach Pit in the living room scene.
Without spoiling too much, there is a clear break in styles midway through that is tastefully jarring when experiencing it as an audience member. During the existential-spiralling-dance-mania sequence when each character is having their respective breakdown, there was one line that really stuck out to me – the character Pierre said that “pleasure is the only defence against annihilation,” a very powerful statement and arguably one of the main messages of There’s Nothing You Can Do. Cole Hayley achieved everything he set out to do with this.
