True Crime

Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre until February 24, 2019
Tickets from $29 at artsclub.com or 604-687-1644

Posted February 7, 2019

Actor/musician/writer Torquil Campbell was sneaking around behind his wife’s back. Another woman? No, much more complicated than that. Against the advice of his wife, actor Moya O’Connell, Campbell was making clandestine trips to California’s Ironwood State Prison to visit convicted murderer Christian Gerhartsreiter with whom he had become obsessed. “He murdered someone, chopped him up in pieces and buried him”, O’Connell reminded Campbell who responded, nevertheless, “I like him”.

But Campbell, while recognizing that Gerhartsreiter’s “darkness” was “infecting” him, persisted in his conversations with the con. And then Campbell made ‘art’ out of it by turning his curious relationship with Gerhartsreiter into True Crime.

Gerhartsreiter, whom Campbell knew as Clark Rockefeller, has aliases too numerous to count; indeed, as well as a physical resemblance to Campbell, Gerhartsreiter is much like an actor, putting on and taking off personas with frequency. One role – murderer – landed Gerhartsreiter in prison where he remains.

Emigrating alone from Bavaria in his late teens and then back and forth across the States, marrying twice, posing as TV director, corporate bond manager, Yale graduate and wealthy German, Gerhartsreiter was eventually convicted of the murder of Jonathan Sohus, the son of a woman who kindly let Gerhartsreiter live in the guesthouse of her San Marino, California property. Sohus had been bludgeoned to death, stabbed multiple times, cut up and buried in the yard next Sohus’s mother’s house. Gerhartsreiter was on the lam for almost thirty years before he was caught, tried and convicted.

It’s really worthwhile checking Gerhartsreiter out before seeing True Crime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Gerhartsreiter. It will get you into the story much quicker.

Campbell, the son of the late, much-celebrated Canadian actor Douglas Campbell, is himself on stage as well as various Gerhartsreiter personas. It’s not immediately clear who these others are and it’s only as the show progresses do the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place.

Campbell, as himself, is completely transparent: he tells us that he lives in the shadow of his famous father, smokes dope, has a psychotherapist and, mostly, wants us to like him: “I have an existential need to please you”, he says, looking pointedly at us. “It’s all your fault”, he only half-jokingly adds.

Some very interesting things begin to happen during True Crime. We are reminded how fascinated many of us – including Campbell – are with violent crime. Why are we so obsessed? Do we in our quiet, law-abiding lives wonder if we could do what Gerhartsreiter did? Are criminals our surrogates in some healthy or unhealthy way?

Campbell also explores the connection between the actor and the audience in a way that is nakedly personal – not textbook. The actor, he says, craves attention and the audience is complicit: without an audience, an actor is not an actor; they feed off us. And don’t we feed off them, too?  The experience of making theatre (the actor) and ‘receiving’ theatre (the audience) is to be locked in some kind of embrace.

Do actors and criminals perform similar functions? Doing what we don’t have the courage to do ourselves? True Crime seems to suggest it’s possible.

“You’re still here!” Campbell exclaims enthusiastically, almost incredulously, partway through True Crime. “Hold tight,” he tells us, “it doesn’t get any easier.” And it doesn’t.

On stage with Campbell is composer/musician and co-creator of True Crime Julian Brown who provides not only incidental music but accompaniment to a few songs – inspired by Gerhartsreiter. Composed and sung by Campbell, the songs are full of angst and bewilderment, one punctuated with a dog’s bark: “Ruff”.

Fascinating, enigmatic, provocative, True Crime runs ninety-five uninterrupted minutes. It takes work but the premises are interesting. Criminals, actors and the rest of us: whose fault is it anyway?