Note: Do not go looking for a missing post # 3.
I skipped the night of the 3rd show and went to Toronto
to see my nephew dancing with the National Ballet.
That post will be ready in a day or two. And on we go with WODL!
This is the review of the fourth-night show at the Western Ontario Drama League community theatre festival. Unlike many festivals I have attended, this one has tilted very heavily towards comedy and this show was no exception.
Whole Lotto Love
Written by Kevin Arthur Land
Directed by Matthew R. Willson
Presented by Simcoe Little Theatre
With the production of Whole Lotto Love, I've once again landed in a dilemma: the difficulty of giving a fair review of a production when the script rubs me thoroughly the wrong way.
Kevin Arthur Land is an experienced playwright, with numerous scripts and performances to his credit. This particular script, though, I would have to rate as a near-disaster. My opinion, by the way, was shared by five other people with whom I discussed the show.
The play is a two-hander. The basic problem is that the female character, Lenore, is so actively mean and nasty and disagreeable throughout the first act that I could not feel any sympathy or connection with her, nor even care to know any more about her. She's the kind of person that I avoid as much as possible in real life. Sarcastic one-liners and putdowns are a common mode of expression today, but they are almost Lenore's only mode of expression. The first few slams and jabs are funny, but then I found the the rest of the first act increasingly unfunny and indeed tedious.
The tilt of the writing is so pronounced that her former husband, Dwight, appears as practically an angel by comparison, and he certainly isn't free of faults!
The second act did make both characters seem increasingly human and real, but the overwhelming impression I was left with at the end was that Dwight was a fool to ever marry Lenore, and even more of a fool to try to win her back after a 10-month separation.
That feeling was strongest for me when Dwight revealed to us that he was unable to father children because of a painfully low sperm count, and her only reply was, "I don't know why that's such a big deal!" -- or other words to that effect. That line, for me, was totally unbelievable. Lenore might be a nasty piece of work but I couldn't believe she was that stupid -- certainly she wasn't played as stupid by Deanna Stevens.
Well, enough about the script. Let's get to the production.
The set was a simple box set with an upstage door, a stage right door, and a stage left window. The walls were painted in a disagreeable and dreary yellow. There was a large sofabed centre stage, and a few other pieces of furniture. Every available inch of space was covered with litter, junk, and piled up this, that or the other. As soon as we entered the hall, the stage was brightly lit and Dwight (played by Kym Wyatt McKenzie) was already roaming around the room, looking at things, fidgeting with things, aiming the remote control at an imaginary TV on the fourth wall, walking in and out of the kitchen through the swinging door, etc. It's certainly not uncommon to have an actor appear before the lights go down and the show begins, but to have him onstage for the entire period of the preset was both unusual and clever.
Once the show proper began, it was no time at all before Lenore arrived and the fat was in the fire. It was a clever touch to have the opening dialogue conducted through the apartment's intercom. Lenore's sole reason for returning is to try to find and take the $31.2 million winning lottery ticket from their regular string of numbers that they played every week during their marriage. Stevens had a whole range of sideways glances, little hesitations, and the like, which conveyed clearly to the audience that Lenore was very much a scheming manipulator. At key moments when Dwight left the apartment briefly she spoke on the phone with Micky, her new partner, and with her mother, and in each case put on an entirely different voice and manner than she used with Dwight. If you have to play a scheming manipulator, Stevens certainly showed how well it could be done. She faithfully brought to life the nasty piece of work which the playwright gave her as a character.
McKenzie, as Dwight, found a whole different range of notes to play. He occasionally let her provoke him into a sharp retort of his own, but more often found the way to undercut Lenore with a smooth little compliment that took the wind momentarily out of her sails.
McKenzie also allowed the realization to grow slowly on the audience that he was fully aware of what Lenore was seeking. This was a matter of subtle little touches of voice and face. Certainly he wasn't sending us semaphore signals!
At the beginning of Act 2 there was a very long blackout before the lights came up. This sort of lengthy pause could easily lose the audience, so it was a risky choice. The payoff came when the lights did come up and we saw Dwight and Lenore all tucked up together in the unfolded sofabed. It hadn't been unfolded when the lights went down. Kudos for a smooth job of resetting the sofa without giving the game away with loud bangs and thumps!
Kudos, too, for the actors successfully showing us different sides of their characters in a completely natural manner which professionals might well envy.
From this point on, the stakes were raised higher by both actors as the characters' real vulnerabilities began to come out, one by one.
Dwight's best moment in the second act was his perfect comic timing when he asked Lenore about Micky. Lenore's sudden silent double-take in the middle of her sentence was equally fine.
Both were purely natural -- and purely human -- during the climactic revelation of the place where the lottery win was hiding all the time that Lenore had been searching for it -- a lovely moment.
The ending was pure My Fair Lady, where the woman tells the man she doesn't need him and she leaves -- only to sneak back in and surprise him moments later. But there was one final comic touch, with another exchange of speeches through the intercom (as at the beginning), and it got some of the biggest laughs of the evening.
So in the end, the actors were able to go quite a way to redeem a script that threatened to sink them.
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