>>REVIEW
BLOWFISH
Sage Theatre
Runs until November 26
Pumphouse Theatres
>>REVIEW
A LINE IN THE SAND
Downstage Performance Society
Runs until November 26
Dancers’ Studio West
It’s said that Petronius, Roman tastemaker and author of the Satyricon, when ordered by the emperor Nero to slit his wrists, chose to spend his last hours feasting and entertaining his friends with gossip and trivia.
Vern Thiessen appears to have taken a page from Petronius with his 1996 play Blowfish, now at Sage Theatre.
Unwitting audience members arrive at the Pumphouse’s Joyce Doolittle Theatre to find, not a play, but a dinner – long banquet tables draped in white linen, the room tastefully lit by a chandelier, formally attired waiters serving appetizers and pouring wine. And as we sit down and tuck in, our gracious host, the caterer (Philip Warren Sarsons), begins to regale us – not with gossip and trivia, but with entertaining stories about his life. Although his name is Lumière, he keeps us in the dark as to his purpose for some time, but given that he’s the son of morticians, his past has been scarred by tragedies, and he’s fond of equating food and death, we know something sinister is up.
Lumière’s sad life makes for a morbidly humorous and weirdly topical tale, touching on such frightening ’90s phenomena as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Edmonton tornado and the popularity of Mila Mulroney. But Sarson’s dapper, darkly gleaming caterer is so charming that he has us eating, almost literally, out of the palm of his manicured hand – even when he’s chopping up and serving us parsley while slyly remarking how similar it is to hemlock, the poison that polished off Socrates.
Although the caterer is a former philosophy student (hence the choice of Socrates, not Petronius, as his classical model for self-slaughter), in the end Thiessen’s play isn’t deep, merely clever – a theatrical hors d’oeuvre, seasoned with twilit melancholy. But Sage’s production furnishes a welcome showcase for the talented Mr. Sarsons, an engaging actor who knows how to cast a spell on an audience (and one we really should see more of).
He’s assisted by Kelly Reay’s decorous direction, Terry Gunvordahl’s elegant set and lighting, and a supporting cast of multi-talented waiters (Christopher Austman, Jessica Dollard and Liza Rhymer), who are required to both serve and act – in what may well be a subtle send-up of a certain dinner-theatre chain. A special bouquet of parsley goes to musician-sound designer Cameron Falkenhagen for his role as onstage accordionist, helping to set the blue mood both with his mournful, Paris-bistro strains and his hangdog expression.
A LINE IN THE SAND
The murder of Somali teenager Shidane Arone by Canadian soldiers in 1993 remains one of the most ugly and disturbing episodes in Canada’s modern military history. Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef’s A Line in the Sand, which won Toronto’s 1996 Chalmers playwriting award, borrows heavily from the incident, while relocating it to 1990 Qatar, where Canadian forces were stationed in the months before the Persian Gulf War.
Mercer (Kevin MacDonnell), a 20-year-old soldier from Vancouver, passing his off-hours in the desert, encounters 16-year-old Sadiq (Masud Khan), a poor Palestinian who sells contraband to the troops in the hope of making enough money to join his uncle and aunt in the U.S. Over the course of time, they continue to meet and slowly graduate from buyer and seller to friends, swapping personal experiences and discussing their different cultures. Finally, the likable Sadiq succeeds in penetrating Mercer’s stoic, emotionless façade, cultivated in response to a fucked-up family life – but such tenderness proves to be the Arab boy’s undoing.
Act 2 fast forwards to the war. Sadiq, caught trespassing on the Canadian base, has been tortured and killed by a brutal gang of soldiers and now an angry colonel (Joe-Norman Shaw) is questioning Mercer about his role in the crime.
Verdecchia and Youssef balance antiwar commentary with an admirable effort to understand the Canadian military viewpoint (voiced by the colonel) and a credible psychological profile of a troubled young man capable of killing the one who loves him. They don’t come up with any great revelations as to why atrocities like the one in Somalia take place, but they do create the overwhelming impression that war is an unnatural state, which brings out the worst in human beings, regardless of what they’re fighting for.
Downstage’s production is a bit slow to warm up, due to the inexperience of young actors MacDonnell and Khan, but by the second act things start cooking. The appearance of Shaw brings added dimension and dramatic weight, as he plays a career soldier by turns hard-assed, avuncular, frustrated and haunted by his own shameful past. Meanwhile, MacDonnell’s edgy, stuttering, stone-faced Mercer becomes both scarier and sadder. And director Simon Mallett’s staging kicks into high gear, with a fourth-wall-busting transition scene introducing the war and blasts of jet-engine white noise that occasionally drown out the colonel’s interrogation.
Dancers’ Studio West’s vast stage is the perfect space for a desert, but it seems to me J. James Andrews’s lighting and Anton deGroot’s decor could do more to suggest the glaring sun and gritty sand. Still, this is a strong start to Downstage’s first season of plays. |
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