Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Bryce Hodgson & Charlie Kerr, directed by Bryce Hodgson Blood Pact Theatre with Storefront Theatre, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto
March 1-18, 2018
Leah: “We’re never gonna be okay”
After Wrestling is one of those plays that makes you wonder whether anyone read the script before deciding to stage it. Playwrights Bryce Hodgson and Charlie Kerr take the risk of allowing the play to make almost no sense for more than 45 minutes before they give the audience any hints as to what is happening. Unfortunately, by that time we are no longer interested in the action or the characters and could care less about how the parts of their puzzle fit together. The authors and the director have also not determined what the tone of the play should be. It seems that they assumed it would have the effect of an absurdist comedy, but so little in the writing or in the action is even amusing that the play mostly comes across as just dull.
The action begins with Hogan (Charlie Kerr), half-naked and covered in dirt – duck faeces to be specific – rushing into his apartment pursued by Jaggy (Gabe Grey), a policeman. Hogan’s sister Leah (Libby Osler), dissuades Jaggy from taking any action because her brother has had mental problems ever since his best friend committed suicide. Hogan, who is taking meds to control his paranoia, sometimes does odd things like this, like burning his clothing and sleeping in the park. Once Jaggy leaves we find that Leah is furious at Hogan and tells him things have gone too far now and that he must make an appointment with a therapist.
Hogan does see someone about his problems. He seems to be Gilbert, called “Gibby”, the same best friend who is said to have committed suicide with a starting pistol. This Gibby even has a red wound on his left temple where conceivably he could have shot himself. The puzzle is that he appears very much alive and, not only that, quite busy as the DJ and on-air advice counsellor for a radio station in Dayton, Ohio. It’s peculiar that the call sign for his station east of the Mississippi starts with a K instead of a W, but we take this as the authors’ means to avoid using any station’s real call letters.
When Hogan returns home he tells Leah that he saw a therapist, and as the action progresses Leah comments on how much good the therapy seems to be doing. This leads us to believe that the Gibby Hogan visits either cannot be to the same friend who committed suicide or that Gibby attempted suicide and failed but that the attempt was enough to push Hogan over the edge.
Meanwhile, in total breach of police protocol, Jaggy asks Leah out on a date. Leah, who presents as frightened and reclusive but who also claims to be a schoolteacher, overcomes her apprehension and does join Jaggy at the hot spot he suggests. In conversation she discovers that this good-looking, very polite policeman has two peculiar hobbies – one, he loves to sing karaoke and two, he loves professional wrestling and does amateur wrestling himself under the nickname The Blue Shield.
Soon Leah is in a relationship with Jaggy just as Gibby is counselling Hogan about how to get back together with Hogan’s old girlfriend. Things would seem to be going well until the authors surprise us with information that they had quite artificially withheld. The authors do provide clues to at least two of their three big surprises but not enough to prevent us from having tried to make sense of the confusing action by thinking of other narratives. Without revealing these secrets, I can only say that because Leah and Hogan live with each other, it is highly improbable that the two could not know the information that is meant to shock both them and us.
Although Factory Theatre claims that After Wrestling is a “dark comedy”, it really is quite humour-free for two reasons. First is that three of the four characters have mental health issues and we have luckily moved on from the time when such things were thought amusing. Second is that the writing is very flat and seldom rises to the level of cleverness, let alone wit.
One result of the authors’ hiding key information from us about Leah and Hogan is that they have left the actors playing those roles very little to work with. Charlie Kerr, in particular, is given almost nothing to make Hogan anything more than a puppet who is moved about by the needs of the plot. What Hogan is like as a person other than simply a “nice guy” is almost totally obscure.
Libby Osler as Leah is given more to work with and at least gets to show a wider range of emotions than does Kerr as Hogan. That doesn’t mean that her range of emotions is logical or effective. Osler speaks her lines in the first half of Act 1 in an annoyingly dull monotone so that it’s hard to believe that Jaggy could possibly be attracted to her.
In contrast with the siblings, the characters who come off best are Jaggy and Gibby. Both Gabe Grey and Anthony Shim speak more clearly than do Kerr and Osler, who are prone to mumbling, but both also have a greater sense of authority on stage. Gabe Grey turns Jaggy the policeman into a quirky, loveable character. Grey has Jaggy tell Leah about his odd hobbies with an amusing mixture of shyness and enthusiasm. We can understand how such a guy would bring Leah out of herself, but that makes it harder to understand Leah’s final treatment of Jaggy which doesn’t even seem necessary to the plot.
Anthony Shim makes Gibby seem right at home as a radio show host and has the fine, resonant voice and faux-intimacy of a professional down pat. The authors, perhaps realizing they painted themselves into a corner by presenting Gibby as so outgoing, are forced to use a flashback to show us what he used to be like when he was taking anti-psychotics. In that scene Shim shows Gibby in hospital as a man so defeated by life, and so medicated, that he hardly seems to be the same person. A second flashback between Gibby and Hogan, preferably not in hospital, would certainly have helped explain the peculiarly mixed feelings Hogan has toward Gibby which otherwise remain a mystery.
The action is played out on one of the more awkward sets I have seen at Factory Theatre. While director and designer Bryce Hodgson and co-designer Bri Proke very realistically make the apartment look like a trash heap, they have clearly not been able to solve the problem of how to depict a kitchen with four entrances in its back wall in the narrow Factory Studio Theatre. They are forced to make use of one half of a louvered double door as an entrance that actors have to squeeze through. At one point Jaggy has to exit the kitchen when Hogan enters and only has the choice of going into Hogan’s room which under the circumstance makes no sense.
On the floor in front of the set are two playing areas – one representing a table at Jaggy’s favourite bar, the other Gibby’s radio station. Actors enter the bar by using the theatre’s exit door stage right. Hogan, however, to visit Gibby, has to slide under the set and through its front skirting to enter the radio station. This is probably supposed to appear magical, but it looks uncomfortable and awkward every time, especially when Hodgson could more simply have Kerr step off the front of the set.
One has a vague idea of what the authors are trying to portray in their own surrealist way. A brother and sister are struggling, or should we say wrestling, with the aftermath of a friend’s suicide. Yet, the authors do not depict their path from denial to acceptance at all clearly. In fact, Leah’s affair with Jaggy and Hogan’s attempt to woo back his ex-girlfriend confuse matters. Besides this, if the play is about mental health, which the forward in the programme claims it is, rather than the natural grieving process, even acceptance of a friend’s death does not mean the end of the siblings’ mental health issues.
There is no physical wresting in After Wrestling, the authors choosing to portray only one of Jaggy’s hobbies, karaoke, but not the other. That’s very disappointing but then so is the play as whole along with two of the four performances. Hodgson and Kerr should take hard look at the play to decide what it is they really want it to do, what its tone is meant to be and revise it accordingly. Or, better yet, they should simply move on to another project.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Charlie Kerr as Hogan and Anthony Shim as Gibby; Gabe Grey as Jaggy and Libby Osler as Leah (background) and Charlie Kerr as Hogan and Anthony Shim as Gibby (foreground). ©2018 John Gundy.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2018-03-03
After Wrestling