>>REVIEW
LITTLE MERCY’S FIRST MURDER
Written by Morwyn Brebner
Music by Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli
Directed by Mark Bellamy
Ground Zero Theatre
Runs until March 12
The Studio
(Vertigo Theatre)
Things start off strong. The atmosphere is both raw and well-cooked. On the way to our seats, we pass a corpse with the bloodied knife still in it. We sit on an assortment of crates and benches skirting the very edges of the action (at one point, drops of a thrown drink will land on an audience member’s coat).
The set is an evocative rendering of back-alley New York in the ‘40s. We feel like both participants and voyeurs. The music is jazzy and cool. The overall effect is sort of dinner-theatre-meets-Brecht.
Little Mercy (Elinor Holt) is a dirt-poor, 31-year-old spinster in a really bad sweater. The corpse, for which the police assume she’s responsible, belongs to her alcoholic, one-legged mother, who by Mercy’s accounts was a horrible piece of work ("after the leg came off, she told me I was the leg’s ugly twin"). When the action begins, Mercy is fielding both a crime photographer named Weegee (played with perfect weight-of-the-world noirishness by Doug McKeag) and a cop (a hilariously belligerent, occasionally tap-dancing Hal Kerbes). The self-obsessed cop seems to notice his suspect only when, with Weegee’s help, she gives him the slip.
Mercy’s big musical number comes almost right away, and it lets us know the kind of cerebral weirdness we’re in for. After invoking (and rejecting) Proust and his Madeleine, she turns to her own life: "A hundred knives and razor blades would taste to me like lemonade; but the taste of my past – that’s like drinking piss from a glass."
It isn’t entirely clear what makes Weegee take Mercy along with him, but at first, we’re happy to just go with it. A series of vignettes ensue – snapshots, if you will – of a gritty New York night, Weegee’s flashbulb always at the ready. The best of these is based on an actual photograph taken by the real Weegee, celebrated photographer Arthur Fellig, of grotesquely bejewelled society women accosted by a beggar (an unobtrusive slideshow of Fellig’s photographs is projected on a brick-wall backdrop throughout the play, to great effect). As the idiotically condescending society woman, Onalea Gilbertson, who has several small roles throughout, seriously threatens to steal the show. "Would-a-like-a pwetty penny?" she half-minces, half-sings, and Holt’s horrified expression is so priceless that I spend the rest of the play wishing it weren’t in the round so I could see Mercy’s face at every moment.
The entire second half of the play takes place in Sammy’s Bar, whose denizens include drag queen Norma Devine and her tortured admirer, Sammy himself. Both Tyler Rive as Sammy and Christian Goutsis as Norma are engaging, and their flirtation generates the heat that a "film-noir musical" desperately needs. Goustis’s Norma has real star presence and some of the best lines, too, including this assessment of Weegee’s new friend: "That’s quite a fluffy bit of lint you’ve picked up."
Unfortunately, and despite a great rumba number that nicely highlights writer Morwyn Brebner’s talent for the surreal, the long night in Sammy’s feels like deliberate stalling. When the cop finally storms in and precipitates (the admittedly very moving) climax of the play, we feel like we’ve been drinking as long as the characters have, and have forgotten the way home.
The character of Little Mercy herself is a strange brew of strengths and weaknesses. We’re clearly supposed to take her as a kind of waif-savant, a woman whose self-administered book-knowledge is so great her head’s about to explode, but who, because of her sheltered, shabby life, is almost completely naive about actual people. But she works as a cleaner and cash-out girl at the library, and maybe it’s just me, but I see a greater cross-section of humanity in 20 minutes at the Calgary Public Library than I do almost anywhere else in a week. The play seems as confused about Mercy as we are, and so it’s hardly Holt’s fault that neither Weegee nor the audience is really able to fall for her the way we should.
That said, the most exciting thing about this play is Brebner’s unusual writing and absurdist humour. There are just enough fresh, funny lines and grotesque, un-clichéd details to mitigate direct theme-stating (true to noir as it may be), like "the Book of Job is the book of life; once you realize that, it’s like your whole body is made of witnessing eyes." Little Mercy’s First Murder is flawed, but not fatally – the animated and animating cast of this production make it well worth your pwetty pennies. |
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