Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✩✩✩
by Adam Pettle, directed by Vikki Anderson
DVxT and Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
November 22-December 13, 2003
Adam Pettle's latest play is a disappointment. His familiar themes are there--gambling, male rivalry, Jewish-Gentile misunderstandings--but Pettle has treated them with more complexity in previous plays.
Mosley and Me starts as if it were a pilot for a sitcom. Mosley (Randy Hughson), a convict on parole, gets a job at a failing Montreal bagel shop run by Nathan (Alex Poch-Goldin), who uses his inheritance to keep it going. Shambling Mosley comically learns bagel making and his laid-back advice helps spruce up worrywart Nathan's shop and personal life. Nathan lets Mosley in on his weekly poker matches.
Then for the last 20 of its 75 minutes, the amiable Odd Couple plot abruptly lurches into film noir territory involving mysterious meetings, multiple betrayals and a gun. To work, the ending requires a few practical improbabilities and, worse, the disregarding of all we've learned of the two characters up to that point. Pettle's obvious goal is to reveal gambling and bluffing at poker as metaphors for the game of life, but departing from characterization and logic isn't the way to convince us. Beside this, director/designer Vikki Anderson has made no attempt to suggest an unsavoury subtext lurking beneath the innocuous opening hour.
The main joy of the show is the fine acting of Hughson and Poch-Goldin. The naturalness of their delivery and their creation of a rapport between their dissimilar characters is a pleasure in itself. Their intensity almost makes you forget the hollowness of the melodramatic conclusion.
Anderson's detailed set covers only the right-hand two-thirds of the stage as you face it. This and her blocking treat the house left side of the audience as if they don't exist. The play's unoriginal moral is "You can't trust anyone". That would seem to include the playwright and the director.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-05-08.
Photo: Alex Poch-Goldin and Randy Hughson. ©2003 John Lauener.
2003-12-04
Mosely and Me