>>REVIEW
TROUT STANLEY
Runs until May 12
University of Calgary Department of Drama, Ground Zero Theatre, Blacklist Theatre and Firebelly Theatre
Reeve Theatre (University of Calgary)
With a mainstream repertoire filled with drawing room comedy, historical drama and tales of urban woe, theatre needs the odd jolt of the unabashedly weird. Forget subtly drawn motivations or catharsis – give us characters who wallow in the morbid and speak as though they’d suffered some kind of whimsical brain injury. Weird, in its turn, is a fun ride. But as the University of Calgary’s sixth annual Alumni Show proves with Trout Stanley, it’s also "go weird or go home," because anything less than unabashed indulgence might as well go back to the drawing room.
Written by Canadian playwright Claudia Dey, Trout Stanley begins its dive into the bizarre as a track-suited Sugar (Abby Charchun) greets her coiffed twin sister, Grace (Brieanna Moench), like a dutiful wife. Insulated by the rural town they live in and Sugar’s decision to stay in the house for a solid 10 years, news of the outside world comes only through Grace, a sometime model for local stores. News broadcasts revealing the local murder of a stripper/Scrabble champion. But as the pair’s 30th birthday approaches, a shoe-sniffing vagrant comes lurking around the back door, eventually revealing himself as a man with the singularly unlikely name of Trout Stanley (Trevor Leigh).
"It’s a fish name," he explains.
A cloistered spinster, a murdered Scrabble champion stripper, all set in a junkyard – add in a lilting soundscape and fairy tale allusions and Dey’s rural world might have a chance at being optioned as the next Tim Burton vehicle. Simply, the play is ludicrous and unapologetically so, an exuberance that certainly didn’t work against it when it received a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for best play after its premiere. But with performances that don’t fully embrace the play on its own heightened terms, director Johanne Deleeuw seems to have lost the reins on a world that needs to maintain a constant sense of its own irrationality. In a play where trailer trash speak as if they’re poets obsessed with macabre details, Deleeuw has not compelled her actors to find the heights and depths of the bizarre.
Left sprawling, Dey’s script is authorial indulgence, an unending stream of similes, metaphors and dialogue heightened high enough to induce vertigo. Where Leigh relishes the hyperbole of his character, Moench only shows glimmers of Grace’s narcissistic chutzpah, while Charchun’s timid character seems downright familiar. A reclusive, deeply sensitive character, Charchun’s Sugar seems to be a single-note of naiveté. But Sugar is far more exaggerated than an ingénue. Simple wide-eyed naiveté is not enough to demonstrate 10 solid years of self-imposed exile and an abiding, pathological fear that her presence in the greater world would actually bring a literal curse.
Though Leigh was still fumbling the odd line on opening night, his unrestrained performances brought the most appropriate energy for Dey’s bizarre universe. A shambling, uneasy man not unlike his recent turn as a mentally disturbed killer in The Pillowman, Leigh’s Trout, with his drawling backwoods accent and impassioned misanthropy, was a perfect fit for trailer park eloquence. In a scene where Trout describes the process of snails making love, a poetic crescendo that is both sensual and alien, a moment of well-chosen lighting contrast by Ian Martens frames a genuinely beautiful moment of surrealism.
In its design, at least, Trout Stanley is a delightfully twisted success, with Lisa Roberts’s abstracted trailer set, a steel skeleton littered with knick knacks, natty furniture and Sugar’s handmade figurines. Along with Christian Goutsis’s original sound design, acoustic guitar combined with eerie digital effects and vocals and Juli Elkiw’s striking trailer trash costumes, the university’s production team has realized Dey’s world with a completeness that the production’s performances generally fail to find.
A showcase for past and current University of Calgary students, this year’s U of C alumni show is also a demonstration of the university’s significant impact on the theatre community at large. In addition to the university’s resources, Trout Stanley is being co-produced by no less than three alumni companies (Ground Zero Theatre, The Blacklist Theatre Project and Firebelly Theatre). While the presence of so many companies from a single institution speaks well of the university’s continuing impact, Trout Stanley shows that even talented performers can fall into familiar, safe archetypes. As in the canon, there’s nothing wrong with reaching for the heights of the surreal, and for Trout Stanley, it’s weird or nothing. |
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