✭✩✩✩✩

by Rob van Meenen, directed by Harry Judge

Company Kid Logic, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

December 7-15, 2013

Guy: “How come no one can tell when I’m kidding?”

It’s quite a risk for a new theatre company to make its debut with a new play directed by a first-director.  For Company Kid Logic, the risk doesn’t pay off.  Rob van Meenen’s new play, Repetitive Strain Injury, suffers from serious problems in plot, character and language.  The cast works hard but no amount of effort can make sense of the script’s multiple improbabilities.   

The story follows Julie (Amy Matysio) and Dave (Pat Kiely), both procrastinators, as they rush to prepare for their impended wedding.  The pressure brings out the worst in both to the point where they begin to wonder whether they should be marrying at all.  To get away Dave hangs out with his best friend Guy (Robin Dunne), a shameless womanizer, who gives Dave a display of his aggressive technique when, in a barely credible scene, he picks up a young woman, Candice (Ava Markus), right in front of him.  Meanwhile, Julie gets a routine phone call from a credit card call centre from Pia (Imali Perera), a Pakistani-Canadian, that ends up, quite unbelievably, in a real conversation with both parties hoping to meet each other.

The plot then proceeds with a series of coincidences.  Candice works in a shoe store and sells shoes to Pia.  Candice and Guy have a fight about tomatoes on a sandwich so Guy takes Pia, whom he’s only just met, as his guest to Dave and Julie’s wedding.  There Pia and Julie meet and becomes best friends.  A year later, Dave gets an injury to his groin area playing soccer and Candice, now a physiotherapist, has him as her first client.

What worsens the credibility issues in the plot is van Meenen’s failure to create fully rounded characters.  All we know about Dave is that he goes about in a perpetual mental fog.  Until near the end all we know of Guy is that he is a macho jerk.  Until near the and all we know of Julie is that she is annoyingly argumentative.  The character of Candice, driven mostly by plot exigencies, really has no cohesion especially when the play nears its conclusion.  And van Meenen unfortunately turns Pia into the stereotype of the wise Eastern guru, albeit female, who dispenses words of wisdom – until another bizarre plot twist near the end.

Van Meenen describes his own style as “Neil LaBute meets How I Met Your Mother”.  That remark is a bit inflated since all van Meeenen gets from LaBute is the subject of frictions between the sexes and all he gets from HIMYM is Barney Stinson as the template for his character Guy.  It’s possible that the frequently farfetched situations and the numerous arguments characters have over nothing are supposed to be funny, but, at least the night I attended, they did not come off that way.  It is also unclear whether van Meenen is trying to satirize the way that twentysomethings speak with their lack of precision, tiny vocabulary and reliance on Dr. Phil-like psychobabble.  Since characters use this speech even when serious, van Meenen perhaps means it as a reflection of real speech.  Only Pia with her sibylline statements and Guy with his elaborately offensive come-ons appear articulate.

Van Meenen seems to want this failed sitcom-cum-soap opera to have a deeper meaning.  Throughout the play he has characters ask whether what is happening to them is purely accidental or due to karma, which he mistakenly uses to mean “fate”.  Perhaps, this is a way for him to account for all the coincidences and unbelievable plot twists in the play.  The answer to this question is always “séauton gnothi” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν in the original Greek) or “know thyself”, which the characters, including Pia, attribute to the 1999 movie The Matrix.  Is van Meenen again satirizing twentysomethings lack of knowledge or does he, too, not know that the phrase is Socrates’ maxim in many of Plato’s Dialogues?  In any case, how “know thyself” is an adequate answer to the fate-versus free will problem is never clear.

The cast tends to have more credits on the big and small screens that in the theatre.  This is most apparent in Pat Kiely, who makes no effort to project and mumbles his way through the play.  The others do know how to project, but often their efforts are hindered by Harry Judge’s direction which has several key scenes played with characters seated in close proximity at one side or other of the stage and moving only minimally throughout the scene.  The impression was that he conceived these scenes as if played in close-up, even though there is no such thing in the theatre.  Nevertheless, in two of these scenes – the one between Guy and Candice at the end and the one between Pia and Julie near the end – Judge drew more complex acting from the cast than at any other time in the play’s two hours. 

The action plays out on Trevor Schmidt’s very attractive set under Jamie Monteiro’s effective lighting that is key in setting the mood of each scene.  Company Kid Logic has a lot of potential.  Repetitive Strain Injury is just not the right play to showcase the cast’s talent.  I can imagine the actors doing well in a real play by Neil LaBute rather than by a Neil LaBute wannabe and look forward to their next project.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Imali Perera, Pat Kiely, Amy Matysio, Robin Dunne, Ava Markus; Michell Monteith and Ian Lake. ©2013 Farrah Aviva.

For tickets, visit www.rsitoronto.com.