Review
PERVERT
Ground Zero Theatre
Starring Christian Goutsis, Jamie Konchak, Ryan Luhning, Cherie McMaster and Grant Reddick
Written by Stephen Massicotte
Directed by Ian Prinsloo
Runs until May 29
Pumphouse Theatres
After attending the opening of Ground Zero’s Pervert at the Pumphouse, I happened to drive by the XXX video store where playwright Stephen Massicotte used to work, which was the source of inspiration for his new play. Looking as clean and well lighted as a furniture store, it hardly fits the sleazy stereotype of a porn emporium. The only unusual thing about it is the windows, all of which are covered so that you can’t peer inside – a lingering vestige of Victorian prudery, acknowledging that many people still feel shame and embarrassment at being seen indulging their erotic appetites.
That shame and embarrassment figure largely in Massicotte’s candid black comedy, as do their opposites, a sated apathy and cynicism about sex.
Mike (Ryan Luhning) is the play’s prude, a young, clean-cut realtor whose two-year marriage to Lisa (Jamie Konchak) has become boring in the bedroom. At her urging, he seeks some marital aid at an all-night porn-video palace, staffed by Tim (Christian Goutsis), who is equally young but thoroughly jaded after more than a year of peddling smut. His knowledge of porn cinema is encyclopedic, but he prefers to bury his nose in a book. Their first encounter is very funny, with nervous Mike, the rookie renter, whispering and fumbling with his ID, while Tim rattles on insouciantly about the differences between soft-core and hard-core and the latest trends in on-camera ejaculation.
At first, the video foreplay works for Mike and Lisa, allowing him to reveal a secret fetish for sodomy. But, while Lisa is game for sexual adventure, Mike remains hung up, his desires jarring with his self-image as a "good" guy.
Meanwhile, Tim is experiencing shame and identity issues of a different kind. As much as he denies it, what was supposed to be a temporary job is becoming a vocation. His girlfriend Trish (Cherie McMaster) has seen the change and doesn’t like it, nor does she like the idea that her guy spends eight hours up to his eyeballs in porn.
Then things start getting ugly when Tim becomes convinced that Mike has stolen a video. He obsesses over the theft, replaying the store’s security-camera tape over and over, while Mike becomes equally obsessed with convincing Tim – and himself – that he’s not that kind of person.
Much of Massicotte’s play is wickedly humorous, written in a terse, Mametian style that’s riddled with overlaps and ellipses, the characters not so much engaging in dialogue as exchanging fire in staccato bursts of words. But beyond the obvious sniggering comedy of his subject matter, Massicotte offers a shrewd observation of relationships both in and out of the bedroom.
However, his plot has a significant flaw. He never makes it clear whether Mike has really lifted the video. If he hasn’t, the play’s violent climax is dubious. If he has, then to use a hackneyed phrase, what’s his motivation? His wife is already more than game for sodomy. Does he have another "perversion" he doesn’t want her to know about?
The other weak spot is the character of Tim. While Massicotte is sympathetic towards his other characters, he’s unduly hard on the one that may be closest to a self-portrait. Glib and well-read, his porn clerk certainly gets some of the play’s best lines, but in his scenes with Trish he proves emotionally immature and so heavily in denial that it’s hard to feel for him. Some of the fault may lie with Goutsis’s portrayal of Tim as just a mouthy little shit, never offering a hint of whatever lovable quality his girlfriend must have once seen in him.
Luhning, in contrast, starts out as likably mild-mannered and awkward, so that the final frustrated explosion of his repressed feelings is unexpected and shocking. The good guy as a ticking time bomb, his Mike could have stepped right out of one of Neil LaBute’s plays.
With his secondary characters, Massicotte has fun overturning the stereotypes about porn users and his actors gamely follow suit. Konchak’s playful Lisa gets a taste of hard-core and before you know it she’s renting strap-on sex flicks and acquiring her own dildo (which looks fearsome in a dimly lit sex scene between her and Luhning’s Mike). Tim, meanwhile, passes the time on his shift kibitzing with one of the store’s regulars, the elderly Kurt, played by the charming Grant Reddick not as a dirty old man but as a kind of Ebert of sleaze, lovingly appraising his favourite porn stars and comparing their latest performances with their earlier work.
Ian Prinsloo, on loan to Ground Zero from Theatre Calgary, directs the show resourcefully in what must be a throwback for him to the days when he staged new plays by Jason Sherman on a tight budget in Toronto. If this were TC, they’d probably build a sedulous replica of a porn store, right down to real video boxes for Cummy Cubbyholes and Great Grandma Gets Her Cookies (to quote a couple of the titles mentioned). Instead, designer Jenifer Darbellay, trying her hand at décor as well as costumes, has simply papered the entire set, including the floor, with glossy pages from skin mags to convey the store’s wall-to-wall smut. There is also a bed for the couple (and coupling) scenes. These Prinsloo has cleverly merged with the store scenes during transitions, as though Mike and Lisa’s sex life were a video being viewed by Tim.
Luke Dahlgren supplies what used to called "tasteful" lighting for the erotic bits, while Peter Moller brackets scenes with pants and moans of ecstasy (possibly processed bites from actual porn movies) in his typically witty sound design.
In the end, Massicotte’s play remains ambivalent towards pornography, recognizing its usefulness but also its addictive power. One thing is clear, though: Pervert shows us that to deny your sexual tastes, however kinky, can be just as perverse as indulging them. |
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