Perhaps life in Canada was simpler back in 1995. How else can you explain the success of Colleen Wagner's The Monument, a G-G-winning play that raises such complicated issues as the dehumanizing effects of war, rape and violence against women and turns them into a sanctimonious improv game between a male and a female character?

Watching the final preview of Obsidian Theatre's histrionic production on Wednesday, much of what was there to applaud politically had more to do with the circumstances than the work itself.

It is, to elaborate, wonderful to see Obsidian -- a company committed to the "exploration, development and production of the Black voice on the world stage" -- not restricting itself to one skin colour and reinterpreting a work by a white, contemporary Canadian writer. Along the way, the company took on a play understood to reference Eastern Europe in 1995 and Africanized it quite plausibly -- give or take the odd detail about blue-eyed girls or sunburn weather.

With that in mind, the production, directed by actor Nigel Shawn Williams, begins quite powerfully with a long speech by Stetko (Garnet Harding), a young soldier facing execution for war crimes. War, he says, was just a job, and rape was "just part of it." It was his favourite part, from the sound of things as he recounts stories of the numerous, anonymous young women he raped and killed (to the approval of his fellow soldiers and superior officers). Things go downhill from that first scene until the penultimate one in which the titular monument to the dead women is touchingly erected. A woman named Mejra (Yanna McIntosh) enters the picture, and offers to release him on one condition: He must do as she says for the rest of his life.

This ultimatum becomes the albatross around the play's neck. It does not work on allegorical or ritualistic levels, and it certainly strains credulity on political and historical ones. The Monument then degenerates into a series of ludicrous exchanges of physical and verbal violence that are distinctly the author's and not her characters'.

Still, the faults in the writing are exacerbated by the production. Williams's direction is overwrought; he uncritically adopts Wagner's pious tone almost note for note. He fails to extract enough tension -- technically, we should be feeling dread, not ennui -- from the text's catalogue of horrors, or to make virtue of its contradictory nature by delivering a play that can work on multiple levels simultaneously. The physicality of the production also needs to be punched up if we are to believe in its violent and angry underpinnings.

John Gzowski's sound design is equally precious. One scene in particular, where every slap on Stetko's face is echoed by a woman's scream, underscores what has already been stated in bold and capital letters and in no unambiguous terms. We get it, we get it.

The casting of McIntosh, a can't-take-your-eyes-off-her kind of actor, as a woman "too ugly to be raped, too old to be impregnated," is a challenge that she, the single strong reason to see this production, responds to credibly. Naturally, there's a certain harshness to her performance, but that casts Harding's interpretation of Stetko as a war child himself in both positive and negative terms. On the plus side, it positions his character as both aggressor and victim. On the other, it's a complicated dynamic that neither the play nor the direction has allowed for. Like much else in The Monument, Harding's performance exists in a vacuum while standing on a soapbox. Sometimes, you just can't have it both ways.

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