Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by Kat Sandler
Theatre Brouhaha, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 4-15, 2012
LoveSexMoney proves that Kat Sandler is a talented writer and director with a keen ear for modern everyday speech and for the humour that arises from miscommunication. In constructing plots dramatic convenience tends to trump probability, but most people will not notice since the situations she creates are so funny.
On the model of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite (1968) and California Suite (1976), LoveSexMoney presents separate vignettes that all take place in the same room of the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto. Sandler goes Simon several times better by interrelating her three vignettes in terms of character and theme. Her theme, as the title suggests, is the commodification of love and sex in a world where everything has become commodified. While her three vignettes are satires, they are not glib, like Simon, but focus squarely on the moral and emotional toll such commodification exacts.
The first vignette finds 22-year-old Olivia (Gwenlyn Cumyn) waiting in her hotel room for Simon (the very funny Scott Clarkson). Their verbal tiptoeing around the reason they both are there is beautifully managed but since the Fringe Festival website reveals the reason, I will too. Olivia has sold her virginity online, but not to the highest bidder. Why she chose Simon and what he attempts to infer from that make for delicious comedy of male romanticism encountering female practicality. Just when it seems all this talk about sex will finally graduate to the real thing, Olivia’s boyfriend Jim (Daniel Pagett) bursts in to implore Olivia not to carry out her scheme. While its dramatically convenient to introduce a new character at this point, it also doesn’t make much sense. If Jim followed Olivia to the hotel as he says, then he would more likely have confronted her before Simon even arrived. If he did not follow her, it’s hard to know how he could discover when and where she was planning to keep this assignation, information only Simon is privy to. Ignoring this problem, the first vignette is the wittiest of the three since its humour derives from close observation of human behaviour.
The second vignette takes place six years after the first and finds Jim (Daniel Pagett again) waiting in the hotel room. There a large wooden crate is delivered and what should be inside (the Fringe Festival photo reveals this) but a life-sized robot (Gwenlyn Cumyn again) in sexy lingerie that looks exactly like Olivia. The humour Sandler tries to wring from the situation doesn’t really ring true. She wants us to believe that the robot looks so much like Olivia that Jim believes it actually is Olivia who is pretending to be a robot to take revenge on him. This setup might possibly work if the robot were a surprise. But as Sandler reveals, Jim ordered a robot to be built in Japan to his specifications and gave the manufacturers Olivia’s picture as their model. Thus, Jim’s surprise and belief that the real Olivia is play acting just don’t make sense. Others like Jim’s co-workers Sandra (Brooke Morgan) and the slimy Marcus (Len Silvini) are not taken in, so why should Jim be? The essential question that Sandra raises and that Sandler does not fully develop is why the seemingly normal Jim would ever do something so sick as to order a sex robot based on his ex-girlfriend. The primary highlight of this section is amazing performance of Cumyn, whose ultra-precise control of voice and body make “Olivia” appear like the very latest in humanoid robotics.
The third vignette is unfortunately the weakest. It is mean to link the themes of the first two stories, but feels more like a repetition of the two than new ground. The scene begins with Sandra (Brooke Morgan again) waiting in the room for Marcus (Len Silvini again). There’s a convention in the hotel and Brooke is drunk and horny and has invited Marcus, who is always drunk and horny, over for sex even though she can’t stand him as a person. The situation soon devolves into a replay of scene one--all talk, no sex--only with less sympathetic characters. Either the alcohol wears off too soon or Morgan and Silvini forget too soon that their characters are supposed to be sloshed. In any case, Marcus happens to discover a device (which I will not describe) that Sandra has invented. The device is meant to balance the “Olivia” robot in theme and purpose, but somehow the scene and the play end abruptly and inconsequentially rather than on the warm note Sandler must have intended.
Sandler must be tired of people referring to her as “one to watch”, but with her potential so clearly on display that’s exactly what she is. With some reworking LoveSexMoney could become a success at the many summer theatres in Ontario. Meanwhile, I look forward to her next play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gwenlyn Cumyn and Scott Clarkson. ©2012 Theatre Brouhaha.
For Tickets, visit www.fringetoronto.com.
2012-01-05
LoveSexMoney