✭✭✭✭✩

written & directed by Gord Rand

Bloodreign Products & Poor Tom Productions, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

November 17-December 18, 2004

With Pond Life, a hit at the 2004 Fringe Festival, Gord Rand seems to have written a sequel to Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Rand has changed Albee’s biology professor Nick and his mousy wife Honey to a doctor, Dick, and his mousey wife Sandy living dull suburban lives.  Sandy has invited a former highschool friend Daisy and her boyfriend Richard over for dinner.  In Albee the hosts play mind games with the guests; in the Rand it’s the reverse.  Both plays hinge on secrets about babies.

Rand gets the Albee-esque surface tension right as the guests test how much rude and lewd behaviour their hosts can take.  The difference is in Albee there’s an underlying point to the aggression in his party-from-hell.  In Rand there isn’t.  The relationship of the characters is never clear.  Neither are the metaphors of frogs, the pond and stasis nor the dark secret involving abortions and selling ova.

The best performance comes from Kerry McPherson, hilarious as the sultry self-absorbed performance artist Daisy turned on by colonics and anything in pants.  As Dick, Ryan Blakely seems to be channelling Kevin McDonald at his most artificial.  Jeanie Calleja uses an all-purpose hyperactivity to skip over the inconsistencies Rand has given Sandy.  Ryan McVittie’s Richard is supposed to seem menacing but comes off as merely smug.

If Rand could wed the outrageous humour and undeniable vitality of Pond Life to stronger structure and greater substance, he’ll be a playwright to contend with. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-11-25.

Photo: Ryan Blakely, Kerry McPherson, Jeanie Caleja and Ryan McVittie. ©2004.