Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Mark Crawford, directed by Ann-Marie Kerr
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
August 16-September 8, 2018
Ray: “If you don’t change, you just stay the same, and where’s the fun in that?”
Mark Crawford has certainly been having a successful summer. His latest play The New Canadian Curling Club has been held over by popular demand at the Blyth Festival to September 21. His 2016 play The Birds and the Bees has been making the rounds of Drayton Entertainment’s theatres and is now playing to September 1 at Huron Country Playhouse II in Grand Bend. Now his 2015 play Bed and Breakfast has been mounted by Soulpepper and it has been held over by popular demand until September 8.
Crawford’s success is due to his natural ability to write comedies of substance that are also wildly funny. Bed and Breakfast has the additional advantage of being the most theatrical of his plays so far in that it requires its cast of two to play more than ten different roles each. Bed and Breakfast, as evidenced by Soulpepper’s spirited production, draws you in not just through its story and its humour but also through the dazzling ability of its actors to transform themselves often in a split-second from one character to another.
The play is overtly presented as a play. The gay couple Brett and Drew (played by real-life couple Gregory Prest and Paolo Santalucia) want to explain to us, the audience, how two men with good jobs in Toronto came to be running a bed and breakfast in a small town in Ontario three hours away from the big city. As we discover there is a simple answer and a much more complicated answer.
The simple answer is that Maggie, Brett’s favourite aunt, has suddenly died and has left him her house in her will. Brett and Drew had been trying unsuccessfully to move from their condo into a house in Toronto. Now they think that they can fix up Aunt Maggie’s house located in a small tourist town and use the sale to finance buying a house in Toronto. Once they see the huge house, they realize that fixing it up will be a major project. Besides, the house has memories for Brett since he used to spend every August there when he was growing up.
Flashbacks to Brett and Drew’s jobs in Toronto – Brett an interior designer with a television show and Drew an assistant hotel manager – reveal that neither is particularly happy in their work and that they work so hard they hardly have time to enjoy living in a big city. Gradually, the thought dawns on them that with Brett’s skills in design and Drew’s skills in managing, they could move into Aunt Maggie’s house and turn it into a B&B. The major problem they face is whether the residents of this small town will accept a gay couple living in their midst. After a few minor homophobic encounters, a major homophobic incident at Christmas causes the couple to reassess their commitment to stay.
Since the premise of the frame is that they do stay, the question of Act 2 becomes “Why?” The answer to this is much more complicated. Partially, it is because Brett discovers that as Maggie’s nephew the town expects him to take on some of the duties she performed, such as organizing the town’s Santa Claus parade. Partially, it is because they have found they really like the new friends they have made. And partially, when the nearly inarticulate Cody asks to spend the summers with them to get away from his parents, Brett sees that he is taking on Maggie’s role of providing a safe haven for a confused young man.
There are, however, even more complex reasons that I cannot reveal. I will only say that as well as being a comedy, the play is also a mystery and when Brett gradually unravels it he feels even more committed to living in the small town than before.
While most people will simply focus on the humorous story of the struggles of anyone trying to open a B&B in a small town, Crawford’s seemingly simple story has subtly subversive implications. The most notable one has to do with the mystery at the heart of the play. On reflection, an astute viewer will realize that the out gay characters have no secrets. Hiding the truth is the preserve solely of the main straight characters in the play. This is a major reversal of the clichéd view of gay people having a secret life while straight people live an open life.
A second important side of Crawford’s play is that he does not provide an homogeneous view of gay people. Brett and Drew, two professionals in a might-as-well-be-married relationship, represent only one type of gay person and indeed the type most palatable to heterosexuals. Drew’s friend the real estate agent Ray (Prest) represents an old-school gay male, dripping with wit and sarcasm and in the habit of calling guys “girls”. The play also has an example of an older gay male who assumes that because a younger man is gay and out and he must also be promiscuous. On the other hand, the play has an example of a gay man from the younger generation who sees Brett and Drew’s habit of pigeonholing people according to their sexuality as “old-fashioned”. The subtle point of portraying such a range of views is to demonstrate that there is at least as much diversity of attitudes among gay people toward gayness as there are among straight people toward straightness.
While making Brett and Drew feel like real, rounded characters, the chief delight of the show is that the two play such a wide range of different subsidiary characters and keep them absolutely distinct. they may use a small prop – earrings, beads, a cane – to suggest a character, but mostly they each use changes of voice, posture and gesture to define their characters in a virtuoso display of acting.
Prest plays Brett’s own unassertive mother, Brett’s macho brother Steve, Drew’s elderly gay real estate agent Ray along with two quite different female guests at the B&B. Most memorable among Prest’s characters is Alison, an endearing woman who is happy to unleash her inner looniness and runs the only espresso shop in town, and Alison’s teenaged son Dustin, who is very shy and can only show his liking for people by baking them presents.
Santalucia play’s Brett’s tight-lipped dad Martin, the couple’s strangely resentful contractor Doug, the couple’s kindly elderly neighbour Harold, Alison’s tough Irish partner Chris, a horny newlywed B&B guest Chuck and a slimy British B&B guest Travis. Santalucia’s two most memorable characters are the wildly expressive local real estate agent Carrie and Steve’s incommunicative teenaged son Cody, who answers “I dunno” to every question. The wild scene in Act 2 of the opening night of the B&B where Prest and Santalucia play Brett and Drew and their five guests is a masterpiece of comic timing.
While there is a practical reason for having two actors play so many characters, the emphasis of this kind of structure is the power of transformation. No one, including the two gay characters who play all the other roles are stuck in a single role. Good plays, like this one, where one or two actors play a host of characters suggest that the power of change and a diversity of possibilities lie within every person. Crawford is aware of this idea as Brett’s epilogue to the play suggests.
Bed and Breakfast is funny, intriguing and brimming with complex implications one might not expect from its simple premise. Prest and Santalucia’s multiple transformations are deft and inspired and provide the energy that makes this comedy not merely humorous but uplifting.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Paolo Santalucia and Gregory Prest; Gregory Prest as Ray and Paolo Santalucia as Drew; Paolo Santalucia as Carrie and Gregory Prest as Dustin. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit https://www.soulpepper.ca
2018-08-23
Bed and Breakfast