>>REVIEW
HARVEST
Runs until April 14
Lunchbox Theatre
Bow Valley Square
Sometimes it takes the benefit of time for tragedy to become comedy. After all, returning to your home to find it destroyed by a clandestine grow-op isn’t likely to put a smile on anyone’s face unless the growers left a copious amount of their product behind. Thankfully for Lunchbox Theatre’s latest production, years have passed on a chapter that began as trauma. What remains is a comedy satisfying in both its execution and as the capstone for Lunchbox’s season.
Developed through Lunchbox Theatre’s Petro-Canada Stage One Series, Ken Cameron’s Harvest is a semi-biographical story based on the unfortunate true-life experience of Cameron’s parents, Allister and Carolyn, who found themselves victims of a marijuana grow operation. After selling the family farm and renting out the remaining farmhouse, the two returned to Cameron’s childhood home to find mould and ruined fixtures, an experience that had to wait for retrospect to be funny.
Directed handily by Ian Prinsloo, former artistic director of Theatre Calgary, Lunchbox’s production is a simple comedy exploring the difficulties of letting go. With Cameron’s parents replaced by Allan (Peter Strand Rumpel of Obscene But Not Heard) and Charlotte (Elinor Holt), Harvest uses its actors, and the occasional scarecrow, to populate the play’s small town.
Though Holt’s continued and impressive presence on Calgary stages has made her one of the city’s most dynamic character actors, male or female, both she and Rumpel are well cast in a production that calls on a pair of comic actors capable of sudden and absurd facial gymnastics. Jumping between their stubbornly naïve central roles as a retired farming couple and a neighbourhood of masquerading drug lords and rat-like insurance agents, the pair render an entire town with the aid of Terry Gunvordahl’s simply beautiful set and lighting design.
Wading through the abstracted field of Gunvordahl’s set, the only puzzling feature of the production’s simple elegance is the constant changes made to the minimal "walls" of its rows. While the play’s constant changes are an essential part of its versatile characterization, transforming its two stars into a host of characters, the adjustments to the set’s already minimal features are so subtle as to be unnecessary. After all, does a pair of parallel sticks appear more like a house’s foyer than a pair of perpendicular ones?
In a comedy about the cultivation of one of Canada’s most lucrative cash crops, it seems especially appropriate that Harvest’s laughs come light and frequent, with a moral simple enough to take in while in an altered state. Elegant by design and breezily comic in its execution, Lunchbox Theatre’s final production of the season before its two remaining showcase events is a fine conclusion to an equally fine season. |
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