Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Tracy Letts, directed by Ted Dykstra
Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Avenue, Toronto
February 8-26, 2017
“Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.”
Langston Hughes, 1936
Sweet and warm are not exactly terms that Toronto audiences would associate with Tracy Letts. Yet, except for an intrusion of violence in Act 2, those terms best describe the mood of Letts’s 2008 play Superior Donuts, now receiving its Toronto premiere by Coal Mine Theatre. Superior Donuts is the play Letts wrote the year after his masterpiece August: Osage County, a fierce excoriation of the American family and the American Dream. It’s not surprising that Letts would want to write a play in a more traditionally comic vein after a depiction of such devastation. Under Ted Dykstra’s insightful direction Superior Donuts becomes a vivid slice of life of in a changing Uptown Chicago neighbourhood featuring top-notch performances from the entire cast.
When you enter the door to the auditorium of the Coal Mine Theatre, designer Anna Treusch has you enter the front door of Superior Donuts itself with seats crammed around two sides of the narrow acting space. The shop has been broken into and trashed and a wall graffitied all of which Treusch has rendered in great detail.
The action begins with two police officers, Randy Osteen (Darla Biccum) and James Bailey (Michael Blake), questioning Russian-born Max Tarasov (Alex Poch-Goldin), owner of the neighbouring store, about who he thinks may have done this. It is Max who reported the break-in because Arthur Przybyszewski, the owner of Superior Donuts, has not been opening the shop very often since he heard the news that his ex-wife had died.
When we finally meet Arthur (Robert Persichini), born in 1950 and a former ‘60s radical who still sports an earring and a ponytail, we see a man in deep depression who is barely aware of the world around him. He’s opened the shop even though he has no coffee or donuts to sell. The police have to go to the nearby Starbucks, the competition who has taken away his business, to take out coffee to bring back to Arthur.
Arthur has advertised for an assistant and the first applicant shows up in the form of Franco Wicks (Nabil Rajo), a 21-year-old African-American. The two are complete opposites. Just as Arthur is old, white, large, slow, taciturn and pessimistic, Franco is young, black, wiry, quick, talkative and optimistic. Franco proves to be such an unstoppable presence that Arthur seems to hire him just to stop the youth’s unceasing flow of words and ideas.
Franco soon expands his ideas to cover every aspect of Arthur’s life – how to fix up the shop, how to attract new customers, how to change the menu, how Arthur should change his appearance, how he should be more sociable to customers and how he should realize that Randy is interested in him. The one area totally off limits is any discussion of Arthur’s past or of Arthur’s daughter Joanie.
In Act 1, Letts has Franco talk so much about Arthur that we learn very little about Franco. The most salient detail is that Franco has written what he believes is “The Great American Novel” with the title America Will Be, a positive response to Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America be America again” (1936). The other is that Franco owes more than $10,000 to a bookmaker Luther (Ryan Hollyman) who does want to send his thug Kevin (Jon Lachlan Stewart) to punish the youth.
The primary weakness of the play’s first act is that it so closely resembles a sitcom. (In fact, a sitcom based on the play and with the same title was launched on CBS on February 2.) The set-up pitting a grumpy old white man with peppy young non-white youth is quite a lot like the 1970s series Chico and the Man. Letts’s dialogue is filled with one-liners, exit lines, touché lines, running gags and other ways of composing dialogue most often heard on screen than in real life. Mannered as the dialogue is, what does set it apart from the average sitcom is its cleverness and high level of observational humour.
To break the faux realism of the show, Letts intersperses scenes of dialogue with scenes of monologue with Arthur breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience. The monologues basically cover Arthur’s life from childhood to the present day in chronological order. By creating a main character who doesn’t talk about his past, Letts has forced himself into this technique. While the monologues initially seem irrelevant, eventually we find that the more we know about Arthur’s past the better we understand his present behaviour and frame of mind. Once events in Act 2 turn nasty we feel at least until the ending that we are finally in more familiar Letts territory.
Ultimately, what makes Letts play come alive is Ted Dykstra’s incisive, detailed direction and the engaging performances of the entire cast. Robert Persichini has played so many supporting roles it is great to see him in a principal role and one that suits him so well. Over the play’s two hours Persichini shows how Arthur gradually changes from a man who has almost become a ghost – all hope gone, all ideals lost – to a man who finally has something to believe in again and sees that there is a goodness in the world worth fighting for. The changes come about so subtly that it takes a battle in Act 2 to show us definitively how Arthur now lives his life actively rather than passively accepting whatever ills befall him.
As the youth Franco who inspires this change, Nabil Rajo is a wonder. His acting is so natural and his enthusiasm so infectious you could could easily think he was improvising. It is seldom that you see an actor convey such spontaneity and energy. This makes Franco’s sudden change in mood toward the end feel all the more devastating.
Darla Biccum is well cast as Randy, a female cop whose father is a cop and and all of whose brothers are cops. Biccum shows from Randy’s first interaction with Arthur that she would like someone, preferably Arthur, to think of her as a person and more than just a helpful police officer. But Biccum shows with great sensitivity that Randy is used to being unhappy almost as much as Arthur is and takes a risk while already preparing herself for defeat.
The surrounding menagerie of unusual characters is all well played. Michael Blake manages to convince us that a tough policeman can also be a Star Trek nerd. Alex Poch-Goldin makes Max, the volatile Russian owner of a DVD store come vividly to life. Ryan Hollyman makes Luther, a conflicted debt-enforcer, also a fascinating coward, while Jon Lachlan Stewart as Kevin is the main source of menace in the play, a man who looks forward to causing pain as a form of amusement. Diana Leblanc has a wonderful turn as Lady, an elderly alcoholic whom Arthur is always ready to give a free donut and coffee. Leblanc makes her frequent misunderstanding of what people say comic, but underneath she conveys an unknown sorrow. Arthur’s care of her helps underscore his basic humanity, seeing perhaps in her a future image of himself should he lose what little grip he has on life.
The cast’s fine acting helps elevate the more sitcom-like aspects of the first act and really blooms in the second act that Dykstra guides into almost Chekhovian territory. Praise must also be given to Simon Fon for staging an incredible man-to-man fight in the narrow playing area that is by turns comic and frightening.
While Superior Donuts may be lighter in tone than August: Osage County or Letts’s first play Killer Joe, staged by Coal Mine last year, it is still informed by Letts’s concern that the ideals that United States once stood for have vanished. America’s favour of corporations over individuals is seen on a street level in Starbucks’ drawing away trade from a little shop like Arthur’s where making donuts by hand is still an art. But, unlike the two Letts plays mentioned above, Superior Donuts does offer a glimpse of hope. While Langston Hughes’s poem prays that America will once again become the ideal it once was, a young man like Franco, despite all the setbacks in his life, firmly believes that America Will Be.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Ryan Hollyman, Diana Leblanc, Nabil Rajo, Robert Persichini, Alex Poch-Goldin and Paul Dods; Nabil Rajo and Robert Persichini. ©2017 Shaun Benson.
For tickets, visit www.coalminetheatre.com.
2017-02-09
Superior Donuts