Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Johnny Wideman
Theatre of the Beat, Toronto Fringe Festival, Randolph Theatre, Toronto
July 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 2014
After his neo-absurdist play last year, The Prison Or: He Came Through the Floor, Johnny Wideman returns to the Fringe with quite a different comedy in A Bicycle Built for Two. If the previous play was abstract and disturbing, Bicycle is realistic and uplifting. The two plays show what a wide range Wideman and Theatre of the Beat is capable of.
The theme of imprisonment continues in Bicycle albeit under quite a different form. Prison focussed on an inmate who did not want to be rescued. Bicycle focusses on a young couple, William (Wideman) and Sarah (Kimberlee Walker), who have begun to look on their impending marriage as a kind of trap. The recent death of William’s grandfather means he is preoccupied with cleaning out his grandparents’ house while Sarah is preoccupied with the minute details of the wedding. She is frustrated that he doesn’t seem to care about these details. He is frustrated that she wants to involve him in decisions that don’t seem important at the moment. Premarital counselling with their local pastor (Benjamin Wert) only seems to emphasize their differences. William is an auto mechanic while Sarah is an environmentalist. William’s job depends on keeping fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles on the road, which Sarah opposes.
Through the play requires only four actors, Wideman uses them to play other couples whose interactions help put the tensions between William and Sarah in context. The prime example of a sound marriage that has withstood various ups and downs is that of William’s own parents, Arnold (also Wert) and Janet (Jen Pogue). Superficially, they too would appear to have little in common. Arnold is a football coach and Janet is a librarian. But their differences – the one emphasizing the physical, the other the intellectual – are complementary so that they as a couple are more complete than they would be apart.
On the opposite side, the marriage between Sarah’s friend Rhonda (also Walker) and Arnold’s friend Jim (also Wideman) is falling apart. Not only have sexual relations come to a halt but, worse, they two have stopped speaking to each other.
Faced with these contrasting examples of marriage, William and Sarah begin to see more clearly what makes a marriage last. William wants a marriage like that of his parents or that of his grandparents who were seen riding around town even as seniors on a tandem bicycle that William has found in the basement. This bicycle built for two becomes a symbol of the ideal marriage, not because of the popular 1892 song written about it, but because of how it works. As Arnold explains, the only way two people can ride a tandem bicycle is if they can reach a compromise cadence of pedalling.
Bicycle is listed as a “comedy” in the Fringe programme but it is quite unlike most comedies at the Fringe that depend on one-liners, or outrageous language or plots for their humour. Bicycle is a comedy in the most general sense. It does not depend on jokes but rather on a general movement from conflict to resolution, from disorder to order. The play succeeds because of its keen observation of how real people interact in everyday situations.
While Wideman portrays realistic situations, he constantly breaks the fourth wall method of portraying such situations. Not only does the doubling or tripling of roles break the conventions of naturalist drama, but Wideman has each of the actors also function as a narrator, with the duties of narrating evenly divided among the four. Wideman never has the narrators speak at once or in succession as a chorus, but the fact that all four do narrate has a similar effect in suggesting that the story of William and Sarah is one in which a whole community of people is involved.
There are two particularly imaginative scenes in the play. In one Walker, Pogue and Wert mime working out at the gym. While on the treadmill when Pogue as Kate reveals the cracks in her relationship, Walker and Wert repeatedly slacken their pace as they try to take in the details of this upsetting information. In another Pogue as Janet and Wert as Arnold mime a series of car trips from when their children were just infants until they are all grown up and the couple becomes empty-nesters. This is extremely well done and the gradual changes from youth to age are well marked. We also see why the Janet/Arnold relationship works so well because they trade off driving the car since they both trust each other.
While the acting is realistic director Rebecca Steiner’s staging emphasizes the theatricality of the show. Five locations are indicated by minimal means and cardboard boxes and plastic crates are combined in inventive ways to become all sorts of objects from a dining table to an automobile.
Of the cast, Wideman and Wert are much better at differentiating their characters than are Walker and Pogue, even though Pogue’s Janet is a wonderfully amusing creation. She makes us understand Janet and Arnold’s mutual attraction since her Janet is not quite as staid as people think librarians are.
Bicycle is a warmly comic play that never loses sight of how complex marriage is and is recommended to anyone who has experienced or who may experience the anxiety of what it means to commit oneself to living with another person for “as long as you both shall live”.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (centre) Benjamin Wert, Anna-Laure Koop, Johnny Wideman and Rebecca Steiner in the original production of A Bicycle Built for Two.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2014-07-10
A Bicycle Built for Two