Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Kat Sandler, directed by Ashlie Corcoran
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto
February 10-March 13, 2016;
January 4-28, 2018
Bug: “What happens if he loses his whomever?”
With Mustard, the prolific Kat Sandler, darling of the Fringe and indie theatre scenes, moves up to the biggish time with her first show at the Tarragon Theatre. Mustard will no doubt be a hit. Sandler’s previous plays have attracted fans devoted to her natural ability for creating outlandish situations and hilarious dialogue. With Mustard she shows she can also plumb deeper into emotion to uncover the gentler humour of human fallibility and this is very good news indeed.
The action begins when Mustard (Anand Rajaram), the imaginary friend or “boon” of 16-year-old Thai (Rebecca Liddiard), introduces himself. As one might guess, Mustard has stayed with his person for far longer than a boon should. This is a fact of which the boon police, represented by Bug (Tony Nappo) and Leslie (Julian Richings)*, are fully aware. They have pursued Mustard and are using physical torture to force him to leave his person.
As we discover from the mythology about boons that Sandler creates, people need boons when they cannot find love any other way. Thai’s mother Sadie (Sarah Dodd), addled with drink and drugs, still talks to Bruce, the husband who walked out on her a year ago and she still refuses to sign the divorce papers. Plus Thai has her own problems. She has been secretly seeing a 20-year-old university student Jay (Paolo Santalucia), telling him she is 18, and now she discovers that she is pregnant. Will Thai’s love for Jay cause Mustard unwillingly to depart, or will the boon squad get to him first? Or, stranger that these outcomes, will Mustard become Sadie’s new boon?
In Mustard, Sandler’s typically sharp hilarity is tempered with sadness. This is exactly the time when Thai and her mother should be communicating, but Sadie has cut herself off in her haze of depression and Thai is lost in confusion. Only Mustard seems to be holding the lives of both together and fears the end of his existence that he knows is coming when he will be cast into the “Boon Swallow” with other forgotten imaginary friends.
Sarah Dodd and newcomer Rebecca Liddiard are well matched as mother and daughter. What they get across best is how there is a sadness underlying even their fiercest arguments. Thai wishes Sadie would stop wallowing in depression and being useless and Sadie wishes Thai would understand her. Both, however, are willing to force themselves into action – Thai to see Jay and Sadie to go on a date with Mustard. Dodd’s comic timing is as masterful as usual and Liddiard is able to project Thai not as a clichéd rebellious teen but as a multilayered young woman caught between childhood and adulthood.
Tony Nappo and Julian Richings are menacing as member of the boon police, with Nappo the amusing and more dull-witted of the two and Richings as the more insidious. Paolo Santalucia is very funny as the overly earnest, hopelessly romantic Jay, who is so preoccupied with his own thoughts he has trouble taking in what others say.
Michael Gianfrancesco has been ingenious in creating a realistic set with two rooms, four doors, three windows and a hallway all crammed into the small stage area of the Tarragon Extraspace. Lighting designers Graeme S. Thomson and Nick Andison have been very creative in altering light levels to reflect mood and in using a special gobos for the times when only the imaginary characters are on stage.
Mustard is, of course, not the first play to feature an imaginary friend. The most famous of these is Harvey (1944) by Mary Chase, but Harvey is a character we never see or hear from. Alan Ayckbourn has written two plays about imaginary friends that deal with aspects of the phenomenon that Sandler combines. In Woman in Mind (1985) a wife makes up an imaginary family to compensate for the failings of her real one and in Invisible Friends (1989) a girl’s imaginary friend refuses to leave and starts to take over her life.
Sandler’s play is different enough from all of these that it should be able to go on to be frequently produced. To open the play up to a wider audience, especially to teenagers who might well identify with Thai’s challenges, Sandler should be willing to sacrifice some of the play’s fringier elements. Toning down the characters’ language would be easy and would make a figure like Mustard more believable. For someone whose been with Thai since infancy, we can see why he would use “poop” as a bad word but the F-word really doesn’t seem in character. Also, do the tortures that Bug and Leslie inflict on poor Mustard really have to be so gruesome? Isn’t it possible that imaginary beings can be made to suffer in less conventional ways?
Sandler has now moved beyond the bounds of fringe and indie theatre and Mustard shows she can write plays that can move beyond the bounds of Toronto. Now that her wildly quirky comedy also has real emotional resonance, there should be no limit to where her prodigious talent can take her.
*In the 2018 revival, Travis Seetoo played Jay and Conrad Coates played Leslie. Otherwise, the cast and creative team were the same.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Anand Rajaram and Sarah Dodd; Anand Rajaram and Rebecca Liddiard. ©2016 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2016-02-11
Mustard