Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Matt Murray, directed by Stephen Gallagher
Offside Productions, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
January 8-18, 2015
Holly: “A day without expectations is a happy one”
Matt Murray’s Myth of the Ostrich was a big hit at the Toronto Fringe Festival last year and it looks likely to repeat that success at the Next Stage Theatre Festival, where it is already playing to sold-out houses. What’s the reason for its success? Well, quite simply, it is side-splittingly funny. The action starts out quite slowly but Murray masterfully builds it up to a gradual crescendo. From the seemingly straightforward initial set-up, you cannot imagine how far into the realm of the outrageous the story will travel – and in only 80 minutes.
The play begins innocuously enough with Holly (Astrid Van Wieren), a writer, trying to force herself sit down in front of her laptop and begin writing. This is amusing in itself since anyone who has ever had to write an assignment knows exactly how hard it is to trick oneself into just the right mental state.
Fortunately, Holly is saved from her task by the arrival of Pam (Alanis Peart). Pam is the mother of a boy in the same grade as Holly’s child Jody. The two women are comical opposites. The laundry basket on the sofa and the bottles of booze on the table behind it indicate that tidiness of environs, and by extension, morals, is not one of Holly’s prime concerns. In contrast, Pam’s thinness, angularity and conservative dress indicate that primness, physical and moral, are Pam’s dominant characteristics.
Holly and Pam have never met before and Pam has never seen Holly’s child who is such good friends with Jody that he is always over at Holly’s house. What has brought Pam to drop by unannounced is her discovery of a letter from her teenaged son to Jody, that she opened to pry into her son’s private life. What Pam found there was disturbing since it seems the letter was a love letter to Jody and implied sexual activity. Holly, of course, rebukes Pam for her snooping and says she wants to know nothing obtained by such methods. At first we think that Holly is taking a high moral stance.
That notion is shattered with the arrival of Holly’s friend Cheryl Renée Hackett), originally from Newfoundland, who looks like a cheerfully slatternly bicycle messenger. In contrast to Holly’s attempts to clean up her language when talking to Pam, profanity and obscenity are built in to Cheryl’s natural mode of expression and show she has no clue she might be disturbing Pam’s sense of propriety. Cheryl reveals, when Pam momentarily leaves the room, that she also thought that Holly was courting trouble by giving her son a girl’s name.
This is the first secret Holly and Cheryl have to hide from the daily mass-going Catholic Pam. The second secret involves what Cheryl delivers. We find that she custom bakes marijuana cookies for her clients and delivers them personally. She was between deliveries when she dropped by and has left a box of cookies on the coffee table. When Cheryl and Holly happen to be out of the room, Pam, who has been on a sugar-free diet, cannot resist temptation and eats one of Cheryl’s special cookies. From then on, Holly and Cheryl have to cope with Pam’s increasingly bizarre activities and to extend Pam’s visit long enough until the cookie’s effects wear off. They can’t let her drive and they don’t want Pam’s husband, a drug-prosecuting lawyer, to find out what has happened.
The set-up and style of The Myth of the Ostrich is very much like a sitcom where Holly and Cheryl are regulars and this is the episode “Holly Meets Pam”. Much of the humour is situational, as it is in a farce, where hiding the two secrets becomes increasing difficult as Pam and her actions start to spiral out of control.
Yet, even if Murray’s play seems like a sitcom episode, it still is an excellent sitcom episode since Murray’s humour relies more on comedy of character than on one-liners and superficial zingers. Holly and Pam are basically an “odd couple” of parents. Murray gives the formula a twist by the addition of Cheryl, who makes Holly’s laxness seems positively Pam-like by comparison.
Stephen Gallagher’s direction is very taut and he paces the action perfectly. Many directors would be tempted to start the build-up too soon, but he has an almost musical sense of when and how to ratchet up the rhythm and pace.
The cast, all returning from the Fringe run, is ideal. Van Wieren, whose Holly at first seems like the outlier, knows that her role gradually changes into that of the most “normal” character of the three, comically mediating between the outrageousness of Cheryl and the schoolmarmishness of Pam. Peart at first seems to be just as uptight as the character she is playing, but that is only an illusion. There is a treasure trove of zaniness lurking beneath that prim exterior and much of the play’s fun is seeing that trove burst out when Pam’s inhibitions are down. (By the way, Peart broke her arm just after the Festival started, but Murray has so cleverly written the accident into the piece and Peart derives so much humour from it, you would think it had been in the original.) Hackett is a great foil for both Van Wieren and Peart. Her Newfie accent sets her character apart and gives Cheryl and earthiness the other two lack, but so, too, does the devil-may-care attitude and the wilder gestural language she so naturally lends to Cheryl.
The Myth of the Ostrich is so well written, directed and acted and has become such a popular hit that I wouldn’t be surprised if a smart producer picked it up for a commercial run. A smart Canadian comedy like this deserves the widest audience possible. Murray is clearly a talent to watch.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: AstridVan Wieren, Alanis Peart and Renée Hackett. ©2014 Offside Productions.
For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.
2015-01-11
Myth of the Ostrich