>>REVIEW
THE KNOWING BIRD
Runs until March 3
Written by Ron Chambers
playRites Festival
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
In the program’s introduction, playwright Ron Chambers says that in writing The Knowing Bird he was aiming for the "elusive broader audience." No doubt. This is humour and characterization than is broader that its morbidly obese protagonist. Simply put, in The Knowing Bird Alberta Theatre Projects has produced a low-rent, two-hour sitcom episode, aiming far too low to fail but certainly disappointing anyone who actually left the house to avoid standard TV schlock.
Like any good/painfully mediocre sitcom, The Knowing Bird begins with a wacky premise: Walt (Brian Dooley) is far too fat and his business school cliché daughter, Diana (Gemma James-Smith), is too shallow. So, straight out of the sitcom vaults, the two make a bet: Walt will lose 100 pounds in exchange for Diana taking an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy where she will presumably become a more rounded person.
Hijinks ensue and everyone learns their lesson.
Ostensibly there’s a theme about guilt in there somewhere, but Chambers treats his subjects with unceasing simplicity, so let’s just call it what it is: a moral. No play that literally ends with its protagonist learning his lesson and giving a thumbs up to the assembled cast can lay any claim to the nuance of the word "theme."
The play is a variety of easy jokes playing on the stupidity of the play’s characters and the fat suit that transforms Dooley into a morbidly obese punchline. At one point, Walt is put on an improbable diet of multivitamins and juice. Predictably overdoing things and giving himself liver toxicity, his urine sample is later revealed to look exactly like… juice. Yes, a man drinks a lot of juice and then pees juice.
Re-read the previous sentence. Did you laugh? If so, please call ATP’s ticket line at 294-7402. Without sarcasm or irony: if that sentence made you laugh you cannot afford to miss two hours of the same.
All that’s missing is a laugh track. No, wait. The production did have pre-recorded applause as Dooley parked his massive, fat-suited ass on a small stool after all. Large ass, small stool and a round of applause. Again, that number is 294-7402.
In the sitcom vein, The Knowing Bird’s characters are uniformly one-note and downright stupid. Walt is the familiar bumbling father; Diana is a type-A business school ice queen utterly without an artistic soul until the transformative magic of Europe turns her into an equally clichéd bohemian; Walt’s doctor, Lucy (Elinor Holt), is an angry woman who delights in heaping abuse on Walt; and two others, Lyle (John Kirkpatrick) and Jimmy (Ryan Wilkie), are utterly disposable walk-ons who exist to act like lecherous and hopelessly naive buffoons, respectively. Perhaps Holt’s doctor is meant to be an indictment of society’s intolerance for the obese, perhaps Dooley himself is a metaphor for our own insecurities and personal weaknesses. Just kidding – they’re all easy, easy characters meant to move the play’s feeble premise along.
Going to battle with the script she had, director Marianne Copithorne’s production cannot be faulted. Its cast each take their roles as written and ham it up, with Dooley milking his absurd appearance and Holt lending a screeching intensity to her sadistic doctor. Even Kevin McGugan’s soundscape makes its connection to sitcom goofiness explicit with mopey bassoons and a chirpy ’60s-style theme at intermission. But a skilled production cannot change the essential fact that The Knowing Bird is a sitcom being performed on one of Calgary’s mainstages.
In a festival of new Canadian work, Chambers has written a play that offers precious little that can’t be seen on American television. ATP’s motivation for producing a play like The Knowing Bird during playRites is clear: with a lineup including a play about suicide in the wake of the Montreal Massacre and a period piece about Victorian sexual politics, Chambers’s play is light fare for audiences who simply want to unload their intelligence at the door. Even so, humour this dumb deserves an audience advisory. |
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