Review
FALL BILL, VOL. 1
HUNTING FOR CAT KIDS
THE DROP
THEATREboom
Runs until October 30
Dancers’ Studio West
(2007 - 10th Ave. S.W.)
Somewhere along the way, playwrights stopped being influenced by other plays and started being influenced by movies.
The two new one-acts in THEATREboom’s Fall Bill, Vol. 1 are pure creatures of the cinema. Ethan Cole’s Hunting for Cat Kids is a satirical mockumentary that owes a debt to Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, while Jason Patrick Rothery’s The Drop is a theatrical variation on a screen genre that stretches back from American Pie to Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti. So neither play scores points for originality.
But how do they stack up as movies made for the stage? Cole’s send-up of a small-town drama queen turned cult hero doesn’t quite work, but Rothery’s take on the valedictory hijinks of graduating high school buddies is fresh and funny, with some great dialogue and well-drawn characters.
The Drop opens on the day after one wicked after-grad party, with a living room in ruins and a pale, skinny guy flaked out on the couch and puking into a pail. He’s Wilson (Evan Rothery), the once-virtuous captain of the basketball team, who got trashed for the first time the night before on umpteen beers and a bottle of sambuca, and just may have got lucky with his good buddy Bentley’s ex-girlfriend – his memory of the incident is understandably hazy. Then in comes Duncan (Pat MacEachern), his other pal, whose final ambition before leaving Grade 12 is to make that last ritual drop of a watermelon from the high school’s third tier into the foyer. Only there’s a hitch – Bentley (Tyrell Crews) has been busted trying to smuggle the watermelon into the school and now the resident cop is after him. When he also shows up seeking refuge in Wilson’s house, the three guys end up doing what you’d expect teenage boys to do – talk about girls and sex, smoke some weed, even watch a porn video (albeit inadvertently).
Gradually, amid their humorous banter, playwright Rothery reveals their dynamic as friends and their fears that they might not remain so after they leave school. And when the inevitable elegiac mood finally takes over and they make that last watermelon drop together, he manages it with a minimum of sentiment.
Rothery has also directed his modest script, which benefits a good deal from the entertaining performances of the three leads. MacEachern is engagingly chilled as Duncan, the philosophical underachiever, who waxes eloquent about love and lust like a junior Casanova while scrounging for loose change and the odd roach amid the detritus of the party. A handsome, uptight Crews provides the perfect contrast as straight-A-student Bentley, who has managed to lose his longtime girlfriend and smirch his hitherto spotless conduct record on the last days of his senior year. Evan Rothery, meanwhile, is hilarious as the gangly, enigmatic jock, slumped on his couch and gazing into space in a saucer-eyed daze, as if his first hangover was The Day After Tomorrow (and, if you remember, that’s often what it feels like).
There are some weak spots in the writing, including the introduction of a sketchy-looking older dude (Bruce Mitchell) whose identity (a dealer, maybe?) and relationship to the guys remains unclear. But Jason Rothery and his actors are talents to watch.
Mockumentaries can sometimes be unexpectedly poignant (think of moments from This is Spinal Tap, or Eugene Levy’s burnt-out folkie in A Mighty Wind), but Hunting for Cat Kids makes the mistake of trying too hard to say something. Cole’s play, which opens the double-bill, is a bogus biography of Mickey Abagoush (Tyler Rive), a misfit from Lethbridge who pens a play about Ritalin-crazed cat people for the Edmonton Fringe that goes on to New York, becomes a Broadway musical, then a Hollywood action film and finally a ballet – this despite the fact that it’s a dismal failure. But Mickey inspires inexplicable devotion from a coterie of followers, including a billionaire who bankrolls his projects (Chris Austman), a wacko Method actor (Gemma James-Smith), a mousy academic (Kelly Dawson) and a jealous folksinger (also James-Smith) who carries a torch for him. So far, so funny, except that Cole seems to want to genuinely address the psychology of egotistical artists and how fame is often more about luck than merit, and his serious intentions wind up dampening his satire.
Besides, the mockumentary is a film-based form of parody that doesn’t really translate onstage. Director Joel Smith uses occasional projections of titles and newspaper clippings to suggest a movie, but a lot of the things that can make a spurious documentary clever – the "interviews" with people in their own environments, the fake footage of performances – are only dimly suggested in his staging.
It also doesn’t help that Rive’s pretentious Mickey isn’t very compelling and some of the other actors (notably Jed Tomlinson as Mickey’s Christian fundamentalist brother) go over the top. But James-Smith and Dawson (who also plays a Courtney Love-ish starlet) tackle their dual roles with comic zest, while Heather Kolesar as the filmmaker-narrator chronicles Mickey’s absurd story with amusing gravitas. |
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