>>REVIEW
FALL BILL VOL. 3
Runs until October 28
Theatreboom
Motel Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Two for one, buy one, get one free – it’s always nice when the second offering turns out to be more than just garnish for the first.
For the third year in a row, Theatreboom has opened its season with Fall Bill, a double-bill showcase of young playwrights. Previous productions have included Hunting for Cat Kids by Ethan Cole, The Drop by Jason Patrick Rothery, Gary by Scott McAdam and Joel Smith and Intervention by Ethan Cole.
This year, with Aaron Coates’s The Frozen Limit, directed by Nathan Pronyshyn and Ellen Close’s The Stranger Series, directed by Evan Rothery, the young company has hit on a sublime combination. A heady mix of traditional theatre and surreal character portraits, the two shows are perfect complements for the third volume of Fall Bill.
Placing its characters in Canada’s frozen north and confining them in a claustrophobic cabin basement, The Frozen Limit sees sisters Vera (Tammy Metvenko) and Brandy (Stacie Harrison) playing emotional fisticuffs. While the play’s bittersweet rapprochement between the estranged sisters is by no means weak, its momentum thaws with the speed of vodka-induced wellbeing after the arrival of Oleg, played with endearing Ruskie charm by Patrick MacEachern. Toeing the delicate line between comedy and family melodrama, Coates’s play manages to excel at both, even if its ending brings a dash of the tragic that seems to come too suddenly.
First produced by Rothery’s Birth of a Brachiosaur company during the Calgary Fringe, The Stranger Series’ dreamlike character study is a perfect complement to the earthiness of Coates’s play.
Three one-man shows layered like 3D Venn diagrams, The Stranger Series allows its narratives to overlap without ever tying them into a single ensemble piece. Each are fascinating in their own way – the Vaseline-covered former mattress salesman pining for a woman who busks ukulele-style for Jesus, the market research assistant obsessed with a statistically anomalous child, and the mail carrier whose own obsession has caused her to accumulate over 5,000 misappropriated letters.
With a uniformly excellent cast of Arielle Rombough, Ellen Close and Jordan Schartner, The Stranger Series adeptly navigates Close’s abstracted text, bringing a quirky humanity that is no simple novelty or overwrought lyricism. Though only three young actors populate the stage, their considerable talent and Rothery’s haunting production manage to provide a seemingly complete world from only three disconnected lives. In contrast to the relative claustrophobia of The Frozen Limit’s amply appointed stage, the bare, demarcated stage of The Stranger Series provides an alienating vastness that would otherwise be impossible in the close quarters of the Motel theatre.
It’s nice that the boys and girls of Theatreboom were clever enough to name their double-billed, fall showcase Fall Bill. It’s even more refreshing that their exceptional taste extends to their productions as well.
Two for one? It’s a deal. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.