REVIEW
MIDLIFE
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites ’02
Runs until March 3
Martha Cohen Theatre
Sometimes when you go to the theatre, you want your world view to be challenged. You want earth-shaking insights and ideas that rattle around in your brain for weeks before you finally feel like you understand them. Then again, sometimes you just want to laugh until your legs go numb. If you’re in that latter kind of mood, you can’t do better than Eugene Stickland’s Midlife, at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites festival.
Stickland has written some very funny plays in the past, but this new work is a completely different creature, like something of a hybrid of what’s best of what’s gone before. It has some of the craziness and the "it’s funny because it’s true" quality of Some Assembly Required and A Guide to Mourning, and some of the reflective bits of Closer and Closer Apart, but it's the hint of a real human fear of mortality that paradoxically makes it all that much funnier.
I read the play over a year ago, and it was a gem even before a year’s worth of tweaking. The design and staging are perfect, and the cast of three are collectively excellent. But what takes this show into the realm of remarkable theatre is Ric Reid’s performance as the central character, Jack. Faced with his unavoidable middle age, a passionless marriage and a job as the mid-level manager of an oil company, Jack stirs things up by having an affair with a new young employee, Amber (Daniela Vlaskalic). It’s not the ideal pairing, of course, since they have little in common apart from being horny, and there’s a fly in the ointment – Johnny Delvecchio (Kevin Kruchkywich), a young landman in Jack’s department, who spends his days flirting with Amber, hanging around Internet chat rooms, and generally making Jack’s life difficult.
None of the characters is a hero on the page, but Reid brings a frustration and vulnerability to the character of Jack that draws you into his story – you find yourself rooting for the cheating husband, even as you despair that he'll never sort out his life.
I can’t say whether the play strikes a chord with middle-aged men in particular, but I know I'm still finding myself laughing out loud days later. In a word: intoxicating. |
