Tuesday 15 March 2016

WODL Festival 2016 # 1: An Uproarious Suburban House Party

This is the first of a set of reviews of plays entered in this year's WODL (Western Ontario Drama League) community theatre festival.  There are five entrants in all, although I shall (with regret) be missing the third one in the sequence due to a conflicting engagement.  

Suburban Standoff
Written and Directed by Michael Grant
Presented by Elmira Theatre Company


In recent years, it's become more and more common to find new plays by local authors being entered in community festivals.  As I myself have had the experience of directing a play I wrote for a festival, I applaud Michael Grant for having the nerve to tackle this dual role.  I know only too well from experience that the playwright doesn't like tinkering with the script, even when the director can see that it has to be done!  

The story unfolds during a single evening in Hank and Nancy's living room.  They are a retired couple, and Nancy is actively enjoying retirement while Hank is stubbornly disenjoying it in every way possible.  At first glance, it looks and sounds like a very tedious scenario, with Hank dumping cold water on Nancy's every suggestion for him to become more active.  But then, there comes a knock on the door and Ty and Candy come into their lives with a bang -- and the fat is in the fire.

Grant's script here shows a remarkable level of skill as the retirees proceed to undercut every possible response you would normally expect from two older people who suddenly find a much younger man pointing a gun at their heads.  

From this point on, the twists and turns just got wilder, and Grant and company had the entire full house rocking in an uproar of laughter.

This play in fact is a fine example of the "borderline case", the script which stubbornly refuses to drop into one of the "conventional" categories of plays.  To do this play successfully, you have to cultivate a rapid-fire rate of dialogue which is more often found in farce, short lines all but overlapping for very long passages of the script.  But farce is usually driven by a far higher level of physical activity (they're called "door-slamming farces" for a reason), and apart from two scenes the humour here tends much more to the verbal.  Also, it has aptly been said, by the great British author John Mortimer, that farce is tragedy played at 130 rpms.  But Suburban Standoff has only one tragedy in it, and we don't even find out what that is until 3/4 of the way through the show.  

The best approach?  Forget the categories!  Call it a comedy, play it like a farce, full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes!  And that's exactly what Grant and company did.

The set, designed by Phil Dietrich, was plainly designed to fit onto a wide, shallow stage with low headroom.  The back wall of the living room had some intriguing angles to break it up, and an arched alcove leading to the front door which gave a nice sense of depth to a set.  There was also a cheated staircase leading ostensibly to the upper floor, but the cheat simply didn't work for me.  The stairs were so close to the alcove that the alcove ceiling would have had to be dropped and angled to make room for the stairs above -- and that would have cut off the window.  Nor could the stairs have turned aside by 90 degrees just out of our sight, because that was the house's exterior wall.  I wish I knew why the designer chose not to put the staircase leading off into the stage left wing instead of pointing it at the centre of the back wall.  My only other thought on the set was that the bookcase was too damn neat and half-empty for a pair of retirees.

Lighting was very effective, especially the single tight spot on the framed case of medals on the mantel.  That was the last light to go out at the blackout before each act and certainly drew our attention to the medals.  Later, we found out why.

Tom Bolton turned in a good strong performance as Hank, the retired special forces soldier.  His face typically wore a deadpan, expressionless look which added considerable punch to his lines (he gets most of the really great reversals in the script).  His manner, always brisk without usually sounding precisely military, kept us all guessing about exactly what career he had retired from.

Chris Grose was splendid in the role of Nancy, the retired housewife who looks conventional and turns out to be anything but.  She made excellent use of all registers of her speaking voice, from a deep bark to a lightweight almost-little-girl.  She generated plenty of laughs with her knack for physical business, such as sitting down on Hank's chair.  If nothing else, she deserves the Pedal-to-the-Metal Award for her astounding, outrageous, and courageous performance in the dancing scene that ends Act 1!  But that was only one aspect of a diverse and totally believable character.

Brandon Maxwell did fine work as the young-tough-wannabe home invader, Ty.  He had a good range of facial expressions in varying degrees of bewilderment as his victims kept on subverting his grand plan and refusing to be intimidated.  His finest moment came in the transition when the tough guy crumbled to reveal the sorrowful older brother of the unseen victim in his life tragedy, his younger brother Jake.

At this point, though, Maxwell had a bit of trouble sustaining the character believably.  He has to play that grief for quite a long spell.  I couldn't help feeling that, point made, the script could have moved on a little more quickly at this time.  It was really only one of two spots where I was feeling the urge to swing the proverbial blue pencil (the other was the detailed explanation of the apparent deus ex machina ending of the plot).

Jaime Doucet had some fine moments as Ty's sidekick, Candy.  Her portrayal had something of the airhead, something of the femme fatale, something of the mother-in-training, and something of the young rebel, all mixed in.  Doucet's expressive face worked to particularly fine effect in the dance scene and after her nasty little misadventure in the garden at the end.

This rip-roaring night of comedy definitely got WODL Festival 2016 off to a fine flying start!

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