>>REVIEW
MY NARRATOR
Runs until September 30
Lunchbox Theatre
As a voice that cuts to the story’s point without the muss and fuss of allowing the play and its characters to unfold for themselves, the narrator has a bad rap. But in Norm Foster’s amusing My Narrator (the playwright’s second exclusive play for Lunchbox Theatre), those delivering the narration are at least as important to the play as those whose lives they observe.
Introduced by a narrator named Barb (Karen Johnson-Diamond), Lacy (Jamie Konchak) arrives in the city with girl-about-town flourish looking for a men’s shirt. A chance encounter in a clothing store sees the struggling landscape artist endure the fumbling salesmanship and romantic advances of Miles (Curt McKinstry), a chronic loser whose social skills leave everything to be desired. Against the advice of Barb, whose narration Lacy has contracted specifically to avoid poor dating decisions, Lacy and Miles meet for a date so disastrous that only the advice of Miles’ own freshly employed narrator, Bob (David Trimble), can pull it from the brink.
What follows is a relatively straightforward romantic comedy twisted with a charming conceit, sometimes hurrying the traditional narrative to fit it into its 50-minutes. Both explicit presences in the play’s world, Barb and Bob’s own growing attraction causes the two observers to become active matchmakers, forcing the obviously incompatible Lacy and Miles together. But, while the narrators-turned-meddlers’ own love story runs parallel to their narrative subjects, their incessant advice and desperate pleas serve mainly as complements to the central story between Lacy and Miles. As written, the two seem utterly wrong for each other, with Miles verging on unsympathetically irredeemable for so much of the play. Ultimately, Foster is only able to resolve the situation in a time-lapsed conclusion that feels tacked on.
And yet, with Foster’s frantic interplay between his narrators and protagonists and the production’s stellar cast, no romantic comedy can be a loss when packed as completely with laughs as My Narrator.
Trimble is, as always, a scene-stealing presence, exasperated and impassioned as he tries to temper the quick mouth and slow wit of McKinstry’s bumbling Miles. Konchak brings an effortless physicality to her performance, an easy confidence that endears her even as her decisions fly in the face of common sense, and the persistence of Johnson-Diamond’s increasingly frustrated pleas for reason.
Produced with an economical sheen, the play’s settings are furnished by a series of trapdoors and modular set pieces, transforming Lunchbox’s seemingly bare stage variously into a diner, a bachelor suite and art gallery. Across Kimberly Delude’s set, director Rona Waddington has staged a production that moves gracefully through the familiar motions of the romantic comedy trope, lending an endearing charm that is impossible to deny.
If the text’s rougher edges show anywhere, they are more than offset by the elegance of its production, and the skill of its cast. Fifty minutes may be a scant time to compress a familiar archetype, but like the much-maligned narrator, My Narrator is able to make it work just the same. |
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