✭✭✭✭✩

by Mike McPhaden, directed by Patrick Conner

Poochwater Collective/Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

February 4-27, 2005

Poochwater is back and better than ever.  The little play that could started out at the SummerWorks Festival in 2000.  A longer version staged at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace in 2002 won it two well-deserved Dora awards, one for Outstanding New Play and one for Outstanding Male Performance for playwright/actor Mike McPhaden.  Now the Poochwater Collective and TPM present a new production of the 70-minute work in the TPM Mainspace.  Patrick Conner directs as before and Jeff Miller (the husband in One Good Marriage) replaces Brendan Wall as Man 2.  The simple advice is, “If you missed it before, don’t miss it this time.”  Poochwater may be a new work but it exudes the confidence and depth of a classic.

A comically prissy Man 1 (played to perfection by McPhaden) arrives at a dingy flophouse apartment in an American city in 1950 to return a lost wallet.  To his consternation, then horror, he discovers he can’t remember his name.  Worse he can’t remember much of what happened before finding the wallet.  The one thing he sure of is that he’s a genius, but all of his abilities of scientific deduction can’t help him determine his identity.  When the violent Man 2 (Miller in an edgy performance) bursts in claiming Man 1 is a madman and a thief, the mystery deepens.

The brilliance of the play is the way McPhaden keeps forcing us to re-evaluate the nature of the two men, the situation and our reactions to them.  Is Man 1 an amnesiac, lunatic or merely an eccentric?  Is Man 2 motivated by justified anger or madness?  When the end arrives we find we have to reassess our judgmental attitudes completely to recognize how close tragedy can lie beneath the surface of comedy.  Sort and sharp, Poochwater is a marvellous achievement.             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-02-10.

Photo: Shadow of Jeff Miller. ©Michelle Ramsay.