Murder and mirth meet in brave black comedy set in Fort McMurray
Bust, a biting new comedy by Matthew MacKenzie, opens with the most Canadian of tableaus. Two sisters, dressed for cool weather, are having a little impromptu picnic in the forest that encircles Fort McMurray, complete with a box of Timbits and two big cups of coffee.
Don’t be misled, though, by the seeming air of normalcy. Something darkly wicked and wickedly funny is going on here.
Laura, played by a very tightly wound Lora Brovold, is the perfect wife and mother, the good, sexually repressed Catholic girl who grew up loving animals and wild flowers, who makes the very best pancakes. She’s a hockey mom who loves her son with a fierce protective passion.
Her sister Carmell, animated by a razor-sharp Louise Lambert, is a much tougher cookie: a smart-mouthed hairdresser with her own successful salon, a disillusioned pragmatist who keeps her head in a crisis.
“We’re not psychopaths,” Laura insists. “We’re sisters.”
But Laura has done a very bad thing. A terrible, horrible, no good hilariously bad thing. (MacKenzie spends most of the play waiting for us to figure out precisely what the very bad thing is, so I won’t spoil the horror, or the joke, by giving it all away now.)
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Laura’s husband Barry, played with quiet dignity by Christopher Schulz, and Ty, his irrepressible, irresponsible best friend, brought to life with sad-sack charm by Brandon Coffey, are digging what looks remarkably like a grave.
And it doesn’t take us long to realize that Laura’s little deviation from mild-mannered sweetness was a pretty big transgression indeed.
Black comedy is diabolically difficult to pull off. How do you write a play about terrible things that keeps people laughing? How do you subvert social norms enough to keep your audience off-balance, without having them recoil in disgust?
MacKenzie’s strategy is to give us a play that seems to have all the standard trappings of Canadian kitchen-sink naturalism — and then to undercut and upend those conventions at every turn.
On one level, he gives us Bust as a straight-up domestic drama.
Laura and Barry have lost their house in the great fire, and their marriage is feeling the strains, especially as Barry becomes increasingly obsessed with Fort McMurray’s impact on the natural world — shocking his wife by signed up for an entomology course.
Carmell has divorced Ty, having lost patience with his man-boy Peter Pan persona — and his cocaine habit. To add insult to injury, she’s left him for a hybrid-driving Greenpeace activist. And as they all wander though the woods, getting caught up in snares, both real and metaphorical, we seem to be invited to empathize with their pain.
But MacKenzie’s comedy of menace keeps unsettling us, with its mordant reminders that these two couples aren’t just dealing with conventional marital woes and the typical existential agonies of early middle age. They are, quite blithely, and surreally, covering up a murder.
It mostly works, in no small part because of the anchoring performances of Schulz and Coffey as ex-brothers-in-law Barry and Ty. Combining pitch-perfect Pinter-esque humour with surprising heart, they start off like Shakespeare’s comic gravediggers, wisecracking as they dig, and end up like Hamlet and Laertes, brawling in the burial plot.
But it works too, because MacKenzie and director Bradley Moss make the forest itself — dark, mysterious, eternal — not just a setting, but almost as a character.
MacKenzie’s play is no didactic debate about the consequences of global warming or the impact of tailings ponds on wildlife, though those issues lurk there.
Instead, MacKenzie and Moss use the forest — wild, unfathomable, enduring — to put the true absurdity of these four oddball humans in perspective. A masterful set and lighting design, by Cory Sincennes and Scott Peters, pull us right into the trees, with trunks of aspen poplars stretching right up to the night sky, a full moon shining overhead. And the evocative soundscape crafted by Darrin Hagen provides the wolves and the geese and the sonic cannon blasts that make the boreal forest come alive with eerie menace. The set functions as an ever-present reminder that Fort McMurray is at least as vulnerable to the dangers of forest, as the forest is to the predations of human beings.
Unfortunately, MacKenzie seems to lose confidence in his own bleak absurdism, and wraps up his script with a sweetly sentimental coda, a tacked-on trite ending that seems to have escaped from some other, lessbrave play. The cosy conclusion may help to soothe his unsettled audience.
But it’s too bad MacKenzie didn’t have the metal truck-nuts he needed to leave us all in the darkness.