The boundaries between cross-cultural exploration and capitalistic exploitation blur when artistic and empirical truths collide in Caught, a thought- and laugh-provoking production from Montreal’s Raise the Stakes Theatre. Lin Bo, a dissident artist from China who created a viral logo for an imaginary protest commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre, stands alone onstage and tells his American audience about his harrowing two years in a roofless prison, battling sewer rats for scraps of cabbage stew. We Westerners are naturally empathetic for what he’s endured in the name of freedom — and duly impressed by his lightly accented English — but then the scene abruptly switches to a three-handed interrogation of journalistic integrity, as the show begins to peel away its onion-like layers in the first of several disorienting shifts.
I hesitate to divulge any more of Caught’s confounding turns, other than to say it fluidly evolves from a simplistic story of suffering into a complex confrontation with the fictions that underlie what we call reality. Director Anton Golikov has deftly engineered a tone which starts out starkly realistic, then builds into Samuel Beckett-esque dark absurdity — and had me cackling out loud while some audience members squirmed in uncomfortable silence. There were a few moments when I feared it was becoming heavy-handed or self-righteous, but Christopher Chen’s razor-sharp script was always one step ahead of me, its barbs aimed to skewer white guilt and po-mo doublespeak alike.
Ironically, although Caught is centered around lofty sociological and philosophical issues, the narrative’s ultimate conflict between Bo and co-star Wang Min (both putatively playing themselves, and displaying impressive dramatic and comedic range) revolves around the inscrutability of more prosaic personal relationships. Along the journey, I found Caught to be infuriating, insightful and utterly engaging — all the things you want a Fringe show to be. Perhaps the greatest tribute I can pay to this troupe is that even after they finally tore off the masks and explained the truth behind their tale, I still exited half-suspecting that everything they said was a lie.
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This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2024.