These voices should stay lost

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The evening turned completely ridiculous after the GPS went off.

Opening night of playwright and director Ed Roy's Lost Voices at Toronto's Theatre Centre was like a comic sketch about badly behaved audiences. Cellphone after cellphone rang before, eventually, an electronic voice hidden away in someone's purse instructed loudly: "Turn right!"

Now that's a first. Though perhaps the GPS had simply had enough and was just trying to direct its owner out of her seat and toward the exit. An understandable impulse, given how excruciatingly earnest and poorly written Lost Voices is.

There's a popular perception that theatre critics really enjoy panning a show. Not true. And so, I'd much rather write more about the unruly audience than get into how hellish this good-intentioned play was.

At the end of the performance in question, after the bows, one self-righteous spectator took it upon herself to loudly berate the crowd for the lack of respect signalled by the barrage of ring tones. Truthfully, however, she should have directed her rage at Roy and producer Jim LeFrancois for not including a preshow announcement asking audience members to turn off cellphones, pagers and any other electronic devices (a catch-all to cover the unexpected, such as global positioning systems).

Even I, an ostensibly professional theatregoer, forget to turn the ringer off on my BlackBerry about once every 100 performances until I am reminded by an announcement. If you're performing in front of 100 people, then, odds are pretty high that at least one person won't have turned off their phone.

This may sound like blaming the victim, but any theatrical production that doesn't include a preshow announcement is basically asking for it.

Okay, I suppose I've beaten around the bush here long enough. Lost Voices concerns two children's aid workers, hardboiled Terri (Soo Garay) and rookie Phil (Shaun McComb), handling the refugee claims of two minors who arrive at Toronto's Pearson airport unaccompanied from India and Pakistan.

Wakeed (Owais Lightwala) and Nabeela (Sarena Parmar) seem not to understand English at first, but as soon as that becomes dramatically untenable they begin to speak it pretty fluently. After almost two hours of undramatic stalling, Wakeed eventually explains that he's been sent away from his small village by his parents after his sisters died in an attack on the local school, and Nabeela reveals that she was sold to a child trafficker by her poor, abusive father.

Lightwala, a third-year student at York University, and Parmar of TV's How to Be Indie are pretty good, but they have little to do other than stand around and look vulnerable. Meanwhile, Garay and McComb are dealt some truly terrible dialogue and an antagonistic relationship that makes no sense at all.

Roy, who won a Dora Award for directing Agokwe a couple of seasons ago, directs his own work at a glacial pace, inserting plenty of expressive movement between the scenes to further bog down the production.

In case you haven't got the message and are headed toward the theatre to see this, I'll give it to you in GPS: "Turn around as soon as possible."

Lost Voices

• Written and directed by Ed Roy

• Starring Soo Garay, Owais Lightwala, Shaun McComb and Sarena Parmar

• At the Theatre Centre in Toronto until April 17.

Editor's Note: An earlier online version of this story and the original newspaper version of this story provided incorrect information about actor Sarena Parmar's previous roles. This online version has been corrected.