Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Rosamund Small, directed by Vivien Endicott-Douglas
Aim for the Tangent Theatre, Red Sandcastle Theatre, Toronto
February 5-15, 2014
Christopher: “Adam and Eve were real, of course, but this, right here, this is a play”
Rosamund Small’s Genesis & Other Stories is the most deliriously funny short play I have seen in a very long time. She scores more laughs in only 75 minutes than do many comedies in twice that time. The play was a hit at last year’s Fringe Festival. Now its back for an encore run with three new cast members. If you missed it last year like I did, now that it’s back don’t make the the same mistake twice.
The action follows an amateur Christian theatre group that is putting on a play based on the book of Genesis culminating in the story of Adam and Eve. First-time director Christopher is staging the play to honour the memory of his recently deceased father, an inveterate writer of church plays. Christopher’s father’s conceit is to set the story of Adam and Eve in Eden, USA, in 1965. Adam and Eve become an ordinary, but married, suburban couple, Satan becomes their sexy next door neighbour and the apple becomes an apple pie. Rather than ending in the expulsion of the primal couple from Eden, the play is an apologia of St. Paul’s cynical view of marriage. As Paul states in I Corinthians, “There is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband” the object being to “come together ... so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control”. Or as he puts it succinctly, “It is better to marry than to burn with passion” (I Corinthians 6:2-8). Christopher’s father’s plays demonstrates this literally by showing Satan vanquished by the marriage ceremony between Adam and Eve.
Despite its short running time, Small’s play manages to show us both the group’s final rehearsal and its disastrous opening night performance. The rehearsal process is hilarious enough. Gavin (a wild-haired Jared Bishop, who has perfected the vacant stare) is the show’s stage manager, prop master and sound man. Unfortunately, he is in the midst of mourning the loss of his wife by getting himself high on pot and refusing to cooperate. Each of the actors performs in a different style. Wesley J. Colford gives Andrew who plays Adam an amusing mixture of imperiousness and fallibility. Andrew is a veteran of church basement productions proudly having played Jesus eleven times. His mode is resonant-voiced pomposity.
Llyandra Jones gives Cathy who plays Eve a hilariously earnest desire to get her role right despite the limits of Cathy’s acting ability. Cathy is new to the church theatre scene and acts with utterly naive sincerity accompanying every important word with broad illustrative gestures. Hilary Scott lends Amber who plays Satan a heightened sexiness. Hilary sees herself as a Shakespearean actor and gives her character an overweening hauteur and intensity. Christopher (delightfully played by Cameron Laurie as a sensitive but humourless nerd) tries his best to keep the cast under control by explaining their roles to them in terms they can understand, but his authority is so weak we fear for what will happen in performance.
The idea of a play that goes off the rails in performance is not new, but Small gives the set-up extra weight because of the solemnity surrounding the production and because of the religious subject matter of the play and fervent belief of the actors. This gives Small ample room for good-humoured religious satire. She also gives the plot a clever twist by having Christopher find in staging the play rather embarrassing evidence of his late father’s sexual fantasies when Cathy questions the point of the lesbian bondage scene between Eve and Satan.
The staging of the show-within-a-show is is so funny it will have you gasping for breath. The prologue depicting the first six days of creation is priceless. During the play about Adam and Eve everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong – from missed cues, missing props, forgotten lines and wardrobe malfunctions to unexpected people on stage and wild attempts to improvise to make sense of the increasing chaos.
Farce is the most difficult dramatic genre to direct because the entire effect of the show depends on pace, timing and the utter seriousness of the characters no matter how ridiculous their situation. In this director Vivien Endicott-Douglas does an absolutely superb job. Laurie, Jones and Scott are the three actors new to the show, but they have made their roles so much their own you would think the play had been written with them in mind.
The fact that the show can withstand such a major change of cast only underlines the strength of Rosamund Small’s play. Small creates humour simultaneously from so many sources – situation, character, slapstick, wordplay and satire – that it presents an embarrassment of comedic riches. Seeing the play outside a Fringe setting makes me think that Small’s brilliant gem of a play will go on to have a long life. For the moment Endicott-Douglas and the cast have polished it to perfection. If you’re looking for a cure to the winter blues, this is it. It will keep you smiling for days afterwards.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Jared Bishop, Llyandra Jones, Cameron Laurie, Hilary Scott, and Wesley J. Colford; Wesley J. Colford as Adam. ©2013-14 Nicholas Porteous.
For tickets, visit www.aimforthetangent.com.
2014-02-08
Genesis & Other Stories