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by Brandon Crone, directed by Luke Brown

safeword and The Lone Wolf Collective, The Storefront Theatre, Toronto

March 26-April 11, 2015

Francis: “I’m not building a bomb down there”

   

Brandon Crone’s latest play, Nature of the Beast, has an intriguing premise but despite a running time of over two hours, he fails to explore it fully.  The first act of the play at 90 minutes moves along at too leisurely a pace and threatens for far too long to become a one-joke scenario.  The second act, however, at only 45 minutes opens up several new directions for the action which in its last 10 to 15 minutes plays out so quickly we are uncertainly what exactly has happened and what its implications are.

Claire Hill has designed quite a complex set for the play.  After you enter the unprepossessing lobby of the Storefront Theatre, you walk past what is the exterior of the house that the character Francis has built for himself somewhere in the backwoods of northern Ontario.  You then enter by the same door that is the front door of Francis’s front room to find your seat among the 32 available facing the interior of the room.  Hill has created a main living-room kitchen area with exactly the haphazard, worn-down look of a room that a mainly solitary man with more interest in comfort than style might live in.   

Francis (Nicholas Rice), an elderly man in a denim shirt and worn jeans, fits right in.  The one who doesn’t is a younger man with tweedy look of an urban professional.  This is David (Clint Butler), a man who has got in contact with Francis through the internet to pay for a service Francis provides.  Folksy and loquacious like a small-town car mechanic, Francis is explaining the liability contract that he makes all his clients sign.  Only when David asks to go into some of the details do we realize he hasn’t come to Francis to have his car repaired or house re-roofed.  Instead, Francis is a dungeon-master and David is signing up to be his slave for a week.  When he hands over his car keys and phone, Francis gives him a sedative saying, “You’re mine” – with the first and nearly last inkling of malice entering his voice.

In the following scene, Francis is going about making a sandwich all the while listening to the sounds of suffering David is making in his cage in the basement through a baby monitor.  Unexpectedly, Francis’s 17-year-old nephew Mike (Jakob Ehman), turns up having been kicked out the house by Francis’s sister, Mike’s conservative, religious mother.  Angered by his mother’s violently anti-gay vituperations, Mike told her he was gay, even though he really doesn’t know what his orientation is.  Now he has nowhere to go and has travelled all the way north to be with Francis. 

At this point, the play becomes the one-joke comedy of how can Francis hide what he is doing to David while Mike is there.  When will Mike find out?  How will he react when he finds out not only that his uncle is gay but, as Mike would think, a sexual pervert?  Luckily, Crone has tempered this long portion of the play with Mike’s tale of the one inconclusive sexual experience he has had.  Eventually, the truth comes out and the initially terrified Mike calms down.

Act 2 begins with a conversation with David, having now completed his week and ready to go home, having a conversation with Mike.  At this point, we realize that Crone’s first act has been so general that his second could go in any direction possible.  The most obvious scenario would be that a relationship would develop between David and Mike and David would take Mike away with him.  Crone toys with this idea by repeatedly having David flirt with Mike, and Mike not minding, and then has David suddenly change his mind.  David’s flirting has become so blatant that his sudden turning off feels false. 

That is because Crone has a different ending in mind which is not necessarily determined by what has gone before.  Two possibilities we hope will not happen are that Mike becomes romantically involved with Francis, or worse, that he begs Francis to put him through the same experience as David.  The second would be more typical of Michel Marc Bouchard, who tends to favour symbolic symmetry over realistic probability.  What Crone has devised will likely satisfy no one.  It is staged in a series of seconds-long scenes separated by blackouts so that it’s very difficult to know what precisely is happening.  It also occurs so quickly it’s over before we’ve had time to process it. 

Despite all the characters’ talk, the one topic Crone curiously avoids is gayness.  Here he has a naive young boy trying to figure himself out confronted with a dungeon-master uncle and his slave client.  Given this situation, the more nature discussion Mike could have would be to find out why Francis and David do what they do, how they came to know that’s what they wanted and whether what they say has any resonance for Mike or not.  Instead, Crone has both Francis and David shut down not only any broaching of the topic of BDSM but also any general discussion of what it’s like to be gay.  Francis actually discusses the importance of an education more than sexuality, and all we get from David is that BDSM is like a game, but nothing more.

A great virtue of Crone’s writing is that his dialogue is so natural.  Much humour derives from the contrast between the matter-of-fact way Francis and David discuss his contract and the what the contract actually entails.  Crone is great at capturing the mass of confusion that is the mind of a less than articulate 17-year-old runaway.  Listening to such realistic dialogue is a pleasure in itself but given the length of the first act and the rushed conclusion of the second, the play would only be improved if Crone could make the two acts roughly the same length – cutting much of the repetitive dialogue in Act 1 and adding more discussion between Mike and David and Mike and Francis in Act 2. 

Jakob Ehman gives a wonderfully warm performance as Mike.  Even without speaking, we can see in his face the conflicting thoughts tumbling about in his head.  His smile when he talks with David reveals embarrassment, curiosity, awe and attraction all at once.  He shows us a young guy who has reached the age of 17, but is completely innocent of the world.  He does know what to does with his life, he has no clue about his sexuality and his language is punctuated with so many “likes” we see that he can’t really assert what anything actually is.  His performance is so sympathetic we really need to know how much he is or is not compliant in what happens at the end.

Clint Butler’s David is naturally off-stage for most of the play.  He needs to speak at the same volume level as Rice and Ehman to be heard clearly.  It seems Crone wants the character to be an enigma, but it would certainly help give Butler more to work with if he weren’t.  What Butler does convey, almost as an afterthought in Crone’s text, is that the fastidious David is a hard-driven businessman who suffers from the pressure of always having to be in control.  Becoming a slave for a week is a kind of vacation and release.

There is no doubt that for the majority of its running time Nature of the beast is highly entertaining even if we don’t really know where it’s headed.  All the elements for a more effective play are latent in tis one.  Crone simply needs to edit his text down and explore the interactions of the characters more to bring the potentially more effective play out in the open.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Jakob Ehman and Nicholas Rice; Jakob Ehman and Clint Butler; Jakob Ehman. ©2015 John Gundy.

For tickets, visit www.safeword.ca.