EDGY PERFORMANCES CREATE THEATRICAL DYNAMITE
The word is definitely out.
The Major Matt Mason Collective’s production of Premium Content is a unique, unconventional experience.
This world premiere, which runs in the Pumphouse’s Joyce Doolittle Theatre until June 30, played to a turn-away crowd on Tuesday night, a remarkable feat indeed.
There were people in the audience who’d seen an earlier performance and had returned to catch it again because they knew it would be a different experience.
Director Geoffrey Simon Brown has asked his actors to play different characters at different performances, resulting in some potentially edgy permutations and combinations.
In Edmonton playwright David Gagnon Walker’s relationship drama, the character of Alex has recently asked his new love interest Charlie to move into an apartment shared with longtime friend Blair. These three people know another couple, Devon and Eliot, and before the 65 minutes is up, four of them will share the bed positioned at the front of the stage.
On any given night of the show’s run, Alex and Charlie could be a same-sex couple or male and female, which is also the case with the second couple. On Tuesday night, Joe Perry played Alex to Jay Northcott’s Charlie with Mikaela Cochrane as the interloper in the apartment, and relationship. Evan Medd was Eliot to Vanessa Jette’s Devon.
Cochrane is the first person invited to join Perry and Northcott in their emotional, psychological
and physical relationship, which eventually included Medd. Jette ended up as confused and bewildered as many people in the audience when she discovered the menage a quatre and Cochrane’s true motive in making up the original threesome.
The audience is in on Cochrane’s scheme from its inception so much of what happens before Jette unravels it for Perry, Northcott and Medd has an unsettling feeling about it.
Initially, Perry plays Alex as a sexual and emotional innocent. He can’t believe the more worldly Charlie is as infatuated with him as he is with Charlie. There is a wonderfully telling moment when, after sex, Alex asks Charlie if he will listen to a poem he wrote because Charlie is a writer and that’s intimidating to Alex. The whole scene is idyllic, but you just know it’s not going to last.
On the other side of the stage, the audience gets to peer into Devon and Eliot’s relationship. Because there are similar emotions involved, these scenes could feel repetitive, but not so with Brown’s staging. He has dialogue and movements unfold at rapid speed with Medd and Jette projected as animated figures on a screen at the back of the stage.
Medd plays Eliot like a wannabe mystic with Jette as the grounding force in his life until something happens to separate them, leaving Eliot vulnerable to the suggestion of joining the threesome.
That welcoming scene is pure theatrical dynamite as Cochrane does the coaxing and Northcott the seducing with Perry seething at the other end of the stage. When Alex does join in the lovemaking, it’s not out of passion, excitement or curiosity, but anger and resentment. It’s to the credit of these fine young actors that the scene plays as honestly as it does.
There are several other achingly real moments in the production, but Brown does allow his actors to dabble in stereotyping as well.
Alison Yanota’s production designs are a knockout as is Tori Morrison’s music and sound and the play wouldn’t be nearly as dazzlingly without Tyler Klein Longmire’s animation sequences.
A production this inventive and reckless deserves to run for months with people returning not once but three and four times, but unfortunately it ends June 30. Those who do wish to see an alternative interpretation need only return with their program to get $5 off the already bargain priced $20 tickets.
A word of warning though, you’d best reserve your seats because available tickets to the remaining performances of Premium Content are at a premium.