Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Mike Geither, directed by Karin Randoja
HopScotch Collective, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
September 20-October 7, 2007
Ohioan Mike Geither’s Living Tall, is that rarity--an American play receiving its world premiere in Toronto. A hit at this year’s SummerWorks festival in a workshop production, the hour-long one-man play stars the energetic Maritimes-raised Torontonian Ker Wells. Wells and director Karin Randoja do their best to get the most from an ultimately unsatisfying script.
The show’s premise of a motivational speaker’s seminar that goes awry has by now become a staple of fringe festivals around the world. The best of this comic sub-genre is probably The Power of Ignorance by Toronto’s own Chris Gibbs, first staged in 2003 and remounted earlier this year. In Gibbs’s play the motivational speaker not only reveals hidden aspects of his past as happens in Geither but undermines the whole basis of such seminars with the reductio ad absurdum that ignorance equals power.
Geither’s play comes nowhere near Gibbs’s in subtlety or humour. In the first half of the play Wells as super-salesman Jeffrey Weaver takes us through the seven steps of “Living Tall”. The first step is to “Live tall”, i.e. “Act like a tall person and be noticed”. The second step is “Be remembered”. The third is “Magic”. The problem is that Geither does so well at imitating such speeches that the result is just like watching a motivational speech by a not so fascinating speaker rather than a parody of one. From this nominally humorous section Geither makes a transition to Weaver’s memory of getting the break of a lifetime, blowing it, escaping and finding himself mistaken for someone else. According to the publicity, this is a tale of “loss and redemption”. In fact, the first half of the play is not exaggerated enough actually to be funny and in the second half we are not interested enough in Weaver to care what happens to him. Geither’s writing is so oblique that it is not clear what he means Weaver to learn by the end other than the cliché “Life is strange”, the last of his seven steps.
The prime pleasure of the evening is Wells’s performance itself. He is a dynamic, very physical actor whose movements are like a minutely choreographed dance. He is thoroughly adept at mime and mimicry keeping at one point several characters all with Italian accents absolutely distinct. His energy and the imagination of Randoja’s direction and Flavia Hevia’s lighting all make one wish that they and Wells had a script of real humour and depth to work with.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-09-25.
Photo: Ker Wells.
2007-09-25
Living Tall