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by Scott Dermody, W.J. Colford, Brandon Crone & Justin Haigh, directed by Joanne Williams, Jakob Ehman, Brandon Crone & Justin Haigh

Soup Can Theatre, safeword and Aim for the Tangent Theatre, lemonTree studio, Toronto

November 7-23, 2014

“Four Writers Rub One Out”

Circle Jerk is an evening of four plays presented under the combined auspices of three independent theatre companies – Soup Can Theatre, safeword and Aim for the Tangent Theatre.  As with any quadruple bill, some plays will be better than others.  In this case Maypole Rose by Brandon Crone stands head and shoulders above the others both in writing and in acting.  Yet, it, like the other three, also suffers from a lack of editing.  The strange constraints that the three companies agreed to have forced the companies to present the four plays in an uncongenial order so that the otherwise upbeat sequence ends on a downer.  Thus, just as most of the plays eventually outstay their welcome, so does the entire production. 

Last summer members of the public were invited to submit original bits of dialogue that the participating playwrights would have to use as the opening and closing lines of their new creations. After receiving almost 300 submissions, four intriguing lines were selected and assigned to the writers: “Subtlety is not your specialty”, “What’s Bulgarian for slut?”, “I think it’s time we talked about your filthy rituals” and “I fucking hate potatoes”.

As an added twist, each of the lines of dialogue was assigned to the playwrights in order to serve as both the closing line of one play and the opening line of the following play. This structure with the first play starting and the last play ending with the same line puts the “circle” in Circle Jerk.  The parlour game aspect of this process may provides challenges but they are pointless ones that militate against the production of serious work.  As the production demonstrates, the linking of beginning and ending lines is no guarantee that the themes of the plays will be linked or that will form a cyclical or even satisfying sequence.

First up is Dust Peddling: Part II by Scott Dermody directed by Joanne Williams for Soup Can Theatre.  With a mattress as the only prop, Dermody enters and proceeds to perform sun salutations in yoga after which he readies restraints for his arms.  Lisa Hamalainen enters and at first appears to be some sort of dominatrix.  What the two say to each other is unclear both in terms of the writing and in terms of the actors’ diction.  Why for a play like this should a character have to read out the Wikipedia article defining “orgasm” as if that, rather than experience were the ultimate source of information?  What we can only guess from their movements that they are preparing for a sexual encounter in a room with an audience (that’s us) of voyeurs.  The joke of the piece, since this is more of a comic skit than a play, is that for all the disrobing and sensual foreplay, the two turn each other on not by physical contact but be reciting poetry. 

The following short play, Sex and This by Wesley J. Colford for Aim for the Tangent, is more substantial.  Tiffany Deobald and Carys Lewis play two twentysomethings who are supposed to be going to a costume party.  Their argument about whether to go is interrupted by a phone call telling them that the host of the party has died of a drug overdose.  What follows is a satire of how the present generation for all its savviness with maintaining virtual lives online is completely stumped when having to deal with a brutal fact of real life.  Both young women tie themselves in knots over how to tell this information to their friends, what the appropriate platform would be and how to say something that will have an irrevocable effect on those who hear it.  The two immediately rule out posting the news on the dead woman’s Facebook page, but neither can muster the courage to have an actual phone call with anyone about it.  They try to let themselves off the hook by convincing themselves that they really didn’t like the woman anyway, but to no avail. 

Colford wants to show how the two women go in circles in dealing or not dealing with  what should be a simple duty, but to do so inevitably involves repetition of the same information and ultimately the show goes on long after it has made its point.  Though Colford wants to focus on the two women’s self-imposed agonizing, it is not clear why they are the ones who have to spread the information of the woman’s death.  After all, someone phoned them about it at the start.  Will people at the party not notice that the host is not there?  Despite these basic questions, Sex and This with its redundancies edited out could be a very smart critique of a generation so ill prepared to deal with life, and even less with death.  Though Deobald is the clearer speaker of the two, both Deobald and Lewis are excellent at expressing not only their characters’ cluelessness but their frustration with their own cluelessness.

The hit of the evening is the third play Maypole Rose by Brandon Crone for safeword.  This is probably the most realistic glimpse into the lives of an ordinary gay couple I’ve seen on stage.  The play is hilarious, not because the couple happens to be gay, but because their interactions as a couple are so well detailed.  Alexander Plouffe plays the breadwinner of the two who has a job with regular but long hours.  G. Kyle Shields is his artist partner who spends most of the day at home.  To relieve the stress of the day the breadwinner wants to have wild sex with the artist as soon as he gets home.  Their argument, though, is that Plouffe’s character wants to get high beforehand because he thinks it makes sex more intense, while Shields’ character wishes his partner could have sex without smoking up. 

Eventually the artist gives into the breadwinner with the disastrous result that when high all he can think about is eating rather than having sex.  Once the artist’s high wears off, the two engage in the most imaginative gay sex scene involving a banana that I’ve ever seen in the theatre.  You may think you know all that a banana can represent, but, this scene will change your mind.

Maypole Rose is the best of the four in terms of the sharpness and naturalism of its writing and its creation of characters who sound and behave like real people.  Yet, even this playlet has its flaws.  The breadwinner’s predilection for speaking in a coarse, misogynist fashion to the artist, despite the artist’s displeasure at this, is never resolved.  Just when we think the action is winding down, Crone has the artist bring up a new topic that Crone doesn’t have the time to explore adequately.  The new topic also completely alters the mood from comic to serious.  Then, just when that play is about to end, Crone does it again, by having the artist bring forth even more new information. 

To deal with the artist’s two important revelations, Crone really needs a Maypole Rose, Part 2.  Let’s hope he is contemplating that because these two characters are ones we would like to know better.  Plouffe and Shields have an amazing chemistry and lack of inhibition and their sense of intimacy with each other seems so real we almost feel like we’re illicitly peeping into the other people’s private lives.

The surge of energy generated by Maypole Rose is dissipated immediately by the final play, The Session by Justin Haigh for Soup Can Theatre.  Haigh’s play is the most tightly written of the four but it is also the most conventional.    

In it the safety supervisor for a nuclear power plant (Allan Michael Brunet), who has shown some disturbing behaviour, is sent for counselling with the company’s resident therapist (Matt Pilipiak).  At first the supervisor’s truculent attitude seems due to anger management problems, but it eventually becomes apparent that he thinks therapy is a waste of time for an entirely different reason.

Haigh tries to begin the play with a comic tone with the newcomer therapist totally out of his depth with such a difficult client.  Eventually, the utter earnestness of the supervisor destroys any attempt at humour and the action stomps on to its melodramatic, not entirely believable conclusion.  A prime difficulty with the play is the shift in interest from the plight of cheery therapist to the off-putting character of the supervisor.  To tell the supervisor’s story, Haigh devolves the therapist’s role from that of a quirky character to simply the supervisor’s story-prompter.  Haigh is not interested in the therapy session as a battle of wills between two people as much as he is at depicting the total domination of the therapist by his client.  Brunet and Pilipiak are well cast in their roles, but we are sorry to see the comedy, at which Pilipiak is so adept, is completely sidelined by the depressing tack of the play.

As if four plays were not enough, each play is preceded by an original musical composition for a classical chamber ensemble.  All four of these are enjoyable and cohere to a far greater extent than do the four plays.  The first and fourth pieces, by Marla Kishimoto and Patricia Stevens respectively, are both fun examples of humour in music.  In her piece Kishimoto uses an unruly clarinet that wants to shine in its own riffs despite what the others are playing while in the other piece Stevens features an uncooperative pianist.

Overall, the evening feels too long and in need of someone with general oversight to give it shape and structure beyond the parlour game stunt that led to its creation.  If Wesley Colford could edit down Sex and This and Brandon Crone either shorten or expand Maypole Rose, this collaboration of three theatre companies will have helped create at least two plays that could have a life beyond that of mere components in a quadruple bill.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Alexander Plouffe, G. Kyle Shields; Lisa Hamalainen, Scott Dermody; Tiffany Deobald, Carys Lewis; Alexander Plouffe, G. Kyle Shields; Matt Pilipiak.  ©2014 LV Imagery.

For tickets, visit http://soupcantheatre.com.