>>REVIEW
CONFESSIONS OF A PAPERBOY
Runs until April 15
Ghost River Theatre
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
Like a sunrise, Ghost River’s latest production can be interpreted as either a profound metaphor or a simple expression of beauty. Unfortunately, while Confessions of a Paperboy is certainly beautiful, its striking production and near-religious reverence for its own words aim for profundity the script doesn’t support.
In many ways, Confessions is a companion piece to Ghost River’s previous offering, While My Mother Lay Dreaming. Both are semi-autobiographical accounts of Ghost River artistic director Doug Curtis’s early life, and both possess a sprawling sense of untethered nostalgia. But where the collective result of the first production conveyed a tangible sense of Calgary in its last major boom, Confessions is amorphous and undisciplined, pretty but ultimately empty.
Adapted from a 170-page manuscript whose prosaic style is still acutely evident in the script, Confessions of a Paperboy is the story of a 10-year-old paperboy improbably named Christopher Columbus (Jennie Esdale) navigating his suburban patrol. Curtis has also thrown a spiritual twist into Christopher’s daily travails, with his sudden ability to hear the voice of God. Lacking much in the way of a plot, Confessions is perhaps appropriately a circuit, a limited route that explores existential angst and the question of why suffering can still take place in a beautiful world. Curtis even includes a literal devil whose house fills Christopher with unnameable, shorthand dread.
There is no denying that the production is a model of simple beauty, with miniature, lighted houses dwarfed by Beautiful, Christopher’s gorgeous bike. Accompanied by David Rhymer’s lilting piano score and lit in rich colour, the play’s whimsical esthetic evokes a darker Mr. Rogers’ neighbourhood, a magical place still grounded in reality.
While the play does include other characters, none are explored in any depth. Christopher himself is essentially a cipher, an utterly generic child character who exists only to move between a succession of images. We learn far more about Curtis’s spiritual politics than we ever do about our protagonist.
As a result, director Ron Jenkins’s otherwise seamless staging occasionally amounts to a base sequence of figure-eights done around the neighbourhood. While Esdale delivers a strong performance framed by the quirky beauty of Cimmeron Meyer and Carla Ritchie’s set and lighting design, it is not enough to overcome the frustration of watching the production’s uninterrupted reverence for Curtis’s words.
Certainly, like its esthetic, everything about Confessions suggests that it is a nonstop stream of beauty and whimsical profundity, and yet the play’s ultimate message is nothing but an obvious – even elementary – exploration of why, if He exists, God allows suffering to take place in the world. Sunrises, a cross-generational friendship and suburban marriage angst are all familiar at best. At worst, they are clichés.
For example, a scene where Christopher helps his disabled veteran friend rediscover the beauty of his first dance has a twist so telegraphed that astute audiences should have no difficulty filling in this blank – the following day, Christopher arrives at the retirement home to find ___.
Even the play’s final line, an airy piece of flotsam treated with typical wide-eyed seriousness, is lazy, a "resolution" that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
"What does God tell you," Christopher’s father finally asks. "Everything," responds Christopher, unquestionably channelling a panicked last-minute rehearsal/creation moment as the play’s creative team tried to tie the original manuscript’s rambling narrative threads together. Yes, "everything" implies a certain resolution, and yet nothing in the play itself bears this sudden conclusion out. Like much of the play, the moment has all the momentary appearance of truth and none of its substance.
Confessions is not a poor work by any stretch. Its production and performance are uniquely beautiful, and despite its earnestness, there are genuinely beautiful elements to Curtis’s text. Rather, it is competent prose masquerading as transcendent poetry, wrapping itself in beauty that belies an undisciplined sprawl. Its failure lies in its own expectations, trying to find meaning in a beautiful piece of fluff. Unfortunately, like its early morning imagery, Confessions of a Paperboy is beautiful but fleeting, best contemplated in moments rather than as a whole. |
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