>>REVIEW
JOHN DOE/JACK RABBIT
Ground Zero Theatre and FireBelly Theatre
Runs until November 20
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
Checklist of necessities for the Great Canadian Play:
1. One snowbound cabin in the woods;
2. Two pot-smokin’, beer-chuggin’, hockey-lovin’ dudes;
3. Copious knowledgeable references to the Group of Seven;
4. Even more copious and more knowledgeable references to the NHL;
5. One half-crazed killer granny with a bloody axe….
Wait – strike that last one. Neil Fleming’s John Doe/Jack Rabbit isn’t the Great Canadian Play, but a messy collision of Canadiana with a gory B-grade movie thriller.
The Calgary playwright’s new full-length work, getting its première from the Ground Zero and FireBelly companies, isn’t quite sure what it wants to be – Bob and Doug MacKenzie in Cabin Fever? An NFB documentary on the Group of Seven as conceived by Quentin Tarantino? In the end, it even stoops to the sketchy gambits of trying to shock us with a Harold and Maude relationship and elicit our sympathies for a pair of serial killers. (It may be the first play to treat serial killing as if it was simply a dangerous addiction, like smoking.)
The setting is aforesaid cabin, where two longtime buddies, artist Mike (Curt McKinstry) and mill worker Gordie (Christian Goutsis), have come to hole up after pulling off the robbery of an armoured car full of classic G7 paintings. Their scheme is to ransom the pictures for a half-million in insurance money.
The cabin is owned by another old friend, nicknamed Pooj (not sure of the spelling, but it rhymes with "spooj"), and unbeknownst to Mike and Gordie, Pooj’s grandmother Mae (Valerie Ann Pearson) is on the premises. She’s an unpredictable old lady, one minute amiable, the next trying to poison and electrocute the guys. Turns out she’s in the wholesale homicide business and has been offing victims for the criminal Pooj for years – only now she’s getting senile and starting to forget who she’s supposed to whack and why.
Then another member of the clan arrives – Vicki (Abby Charchun), Mae’s granddaughter and Mike’s old crush. He banged her on the kitchen floor when they were teenagers and has never got over her. Unfortunately, she’s an assassin, too, so it’s a toss-up if Mike’s going to get lucky again or get iced instead.
Fleming tries to walk the tricky tightrope between black comedy and drama, but keeps slipping. One minute, the play’s a funny Canuck riff on horror and thriller conventions. The next, it’s asking us to take its characters and their lives seriously. Fleming is most in his element when he’s adopting a comic tone. He crafts some amusing dialogue – terse, Brad Fraser-style exchanges like, "I want you to kill me." "Maybe later" – and gets a lot of mileage out of a running joke in which Gordie and Mike use hockey players and plays as analogies for everything. ("She’s Eric Lindros, man!" says Gordie to Mike after vicious Vicki reveals her battle-scarred body.) But by the end he seems to be grasping for ways to keep his audience on edge.
The play’s lurid aspects invite a surreal touch (like the similar Killer Joe, seen at GZ several seasons ago), but director Ian Prinsloo has decided to ground it in realism, staging most of the action on a set by Deitra Kalyn that carefully replicates the interior of a cozy-grungy backwoods cabin, complete with out-of-date furniture and appliances. Brian Pincott’s time-sensitive lighting and Andrew Blizzard’s restrained sound design follow suit.
The actors also play it straight – with one notable exception. As Mike and Vicki, McKinstry and Charchun are glib but earnest, while Pearson turns down the "axe-wielding crazy" in Mae and turns up the "crusty eccentric" – she may be irascible and muddled, but she seems more like a female Don Cherry than a career killer.
It’s Goutsis who makes the most of the role he’s been given, stickhandling it with hilarious skill straight into the end zone. Seemingly the most ordinary of Fleming’s four characters, Gordie turns out to be the wild card and Goutsis plays him like an ace. Starting off as just another mindless small-town party animal who can drink twice his weight in moonshine without keeling over, Goutsis’s skinny, lank-haired hoser discovers a trashy pulp romance novel in the cabin and becomes so absorbed in it that, before long, he’s re-imagined himself as some kind of lone hunter-writer, stalking jack rabbits in the woods with axe and hockey stick while composing ludicrous, sub-Hemingway prose at the same time. And that’s before Mae mistakes him for her old flame, Gordie’s granddad, and he winds up in her bed, learning the pleasures of denture-less fellatio.
Goutsis can’t quite save this confused play, but he does keep it entertaining when he’s onstage. Ground Zero and FireBelly have stuffed the programs with their own hockey-style trading cards, featuring members of the show’s cast and crew, and at the opening performance a fellow Fast Forward scribe sitting next to me was coveting my precious Goutsis card. I don’t blame her – in this production, Goutsis is the MVP. |
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