Play doesn’t quite satisfy
My Dinner with Casey Donovan (out of 4) Written and directed by Sky Gilbert. Until March 22 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529.
It’s no replacement for Koreatown’s soon-to-be-defunct porn cinema Metro Theatre, but one of the world’s most iconic pornos can be found at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. The latest production there opens with a clip from Boys in the Sand, revealing a beach, rich in the saturated hues of early 1970s film, as the star, Casey Donovan, leaps through the water towards the camera like a nude, flaxen hybrid of Hercules and Poseidon.
“He is a God!” exclaims Calvin, the protagonist in Sky Gilbert’s half-realized play My Dinner with Casey Donovan, a dramatization of the true story of an impromptu dinner between Donovan, his closeted superfan Calvin, and Calvin’s conservative Lutheran parents.
The Boys in the Sand clip is brief, ending with a bare hand on a bare chest, but visually stunning and quietly intense. The film did, after all, propel Donovan into cult-celebrity status and break the barrier from genre hit to mainstream success. But once Donovan steps out of the frame and onto the stage to begin this atypical evening with strangers in Connecticut, the dramatics unfortunately never come off as enrapturing again. It goes for laughs, and gets them, but unlike Donovan in Boys in the Sand, never really dives in.
Gilbert, who discovered this story while researching for an upcoming book, plays the first scene like a farce, then slides it into melodrama. The initial humour comes from the polar opposites between 25-year-old Calvin, played by Michael De Rose as an insufferable pile of neuroses and anxiety, clenching his fists and pratfalling in front of the man of his dreams, and Donovan, played by Nathaniel Bacon as the epitome of 1970s cool in a Canadian tuxedo (chest hair exposed) and aviators, who perplexingly doesn’t run away immediately.
Instead, he smirks and offers im- possibly simple pieces of advice, such as “Maybe you should make everything you say something right,” and promises not to reveal Calvin’s sexuality to his religious parents.
Bacon is immediately likeable, suave and naturally at ease, and it’s quite fun to watch him seduce anyone in his path — including Charles and Rita Limehouse, played by Ralph Small and Elley-Ray. At the dinner table, the tightly choreographed theatrics of the first scene loosen into something that resembles improv, mostly because of Elley-Ray’s flare for ad-libbing to keep the conversation from going from civil to civil war, thanks to her husband’s prodding questions about bisexuals in the arts industries. Bacon and Elley-Ray actually prove their chemistry in the play’s turning point — a touching plea from a loving mother to a kind ear.
There is a lovely story somewhere in My Dinner with Casey Donovan, but the script could use both tightening and expanding
From that point on, the play seems to go through an identity crisis, semia-bandoning its humour for character development that comes too late, feels too forced and is left too unresolved. My Dinner with Casey Donovan is all the better for resisting a happy ending, as a reminder that it didn’t always get better, but surely it deserves some kind of ending at least. There is a charming, sad story here somewhere, but the script could use both tightening and expanding. In only 70 minutes, characters are able to repeat the same conversations over and over again and leave frustrating pauses in their speech, while others remain virtually expendable (Small as the Limehouse patriarch does little but dispense just enough close-mindedness to live up to Calvin’s description of him). With some soul-searching and a rewrite, it could be a story worthy of Gilbert (the co-founder and original artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre) and his writing ability.
On the bright side, I think I might watch a gay male porn film for the first time.