Crowsnest opening production gleams
The Wedding Party Streetcar Crowsnest, Toronto
In light of the axe that’s just been taken to the arts down south, it’s heartening to be in at the start of a joint publicprivate theatrical initiative in Toronto’s east end. Crow’s Theatre now has a permanent home, Streetcar Crowsnest. Its main performing space is comfortable, flexible and reasonably intimate. This Streetcar is also notable for its street front: a long wall of windows wrapping the corner of Carlaw and Dundas, giving onto a lobby that’s gleaming and welcoming.
The opening production gleams too, at least some of the time. The Wedding Party is a new play by Kristen Thomson, staged by Crow’s indefatigable artistic director Chris Abraham: the duo who gave us I Claudia and other good things. It was apparently inspired by Abraham’s plan to support his new space by renting it out for wedding receptions. Six actors, including the author, got together to improvise around that idea. Thomson then went away and wrote the play. Six actors — not quite the same as the original troupe but nearly — now bring it to the stage, in a coproduction with Barrie’s Talk Is Free Theatre. The results are sometimes hilarious, sometimes laboured.
The hilarity comes from each of the actors playing multiple roles, and making quicker changes than would seem humanly possible. Between them, these intrepid souls conjure up a truly nightmarish nuptial bash. One hopes that Crowsnest’s future real- life celebrants will take it as an exorcism rather than an omen. We never truly meet the bride and groom, but we see a lot of their relatives, and you can take that last phrase either way. The two families don’t like one another very much, and rapidly tire of pretending to. There are rifts, too, within the individual clans, and these also burst wide open.
Witness the principal roles taken by Tom Rooney. This consummate actor appears as — by my count, but I may have missed a few — seven separate characters, but is chiefly deployed as Jack Sr., the rich and tyrannical father- of- the- groom, as well as his diffident and impoverished identical twin brother Tony. He plays the bombast of the former and the awkwardness of the latter up to but never beyond the hilt. Then, when one dresses up as the other with the expected farcical results ( and some unexpected ones as well), he cunningly blends them. “I now realize,” one or other of him says, “that we two can never be in the same room.” It is a perfectly played selfreferential line that the audience rightfully laps up.
This reality is delightfully tweaked when we watch Jack Sr. proposing a loathsomely patronizing toast, while simultaneously seeing Tony’s cringing reaction via pre- recorded video. That’s lovely. Less lovely is a scene in which the brothers come to blows and Rooney has to play them both at once. That’s the play breaking faith with its own convention, and it comes over as desperate. As does the ending, in which we see four of the actors dancing, when we’d rather see all or none.
One of the dancers is Rooney, now playing the bride’s sister in a red off-theshoulder number in which he towers physically over everyone else on stage. There’s a fair amount of acting across gender lines, most notably from Trish Lindstrom as shy Tony’s withdrawn young son. Moya O’Connell pulls off a grand double as Jack Sr.’s discontented spouse and a conciliatory friend of the bride who seems to be English, or at any rate has an English accent. Jason Cadieux softpedals, admirably, the role of a fixer who gets fired, twice. Virgilia Griffith goes sympathetically to pieces as a wedding planner whose plans get bent way out of shape. Falling more spectacularly off the social plane and off the wagon is the mother-of-the-bride, a role in which Thomson as author tempts Thomson as actress to abandon nearly any attempt at nuance. She also plays a talking dog, which is another breach of faith and one that compares poorly with the articulate canine in Father Comes Home from the Wars.
All the actors have to dash on regularly but unobtrusively as wait staff, videographers, and other help; the real heroes of this show may be the dressers. At its best, the play is Canada’s answer to Alan Ayckbourn, riotous farce in the service of sharp social observation. At its worst: well, the occasion makes it joyous. Abraham’s staging is impeccable; for him to have got this production and this facility ready for the same night is a phenomenal achievement.
The Wedding Party runs until Feb. 11.
BETWEEN THEM, THESE INTREPID SOULS CONJURE UP A TRULY NIGHTMARISH NUPTIAL BASH. — ROBERT CUSHMAN