A play driven by millennial rebellion
Kill Your Parents in Viking, Alberta (out of 4) By Bryce Hodgson and Charlie Kerr, directed by Rachel Cairns. Until Sept. 25 at Storefront Theatre, 955 Bloor St. W. Thestorefronttheatre.com. From the title onwards, it’s clear that this new play is driven by a spirit of millennial rebellion.
The theatrical cocktail here is kitchen-sink drama dosed with anarchism, acted at ever-increasing levels of intensity and volume — Tracy Letts’s dysfunctional family dramas Killer Joe and August: Osage County seem clear precedents. The hipster clubhouse vibe of the 67-seat Storefront Theatre — tall cans are on sale in the lobby to swig during the performance — creates the perfect setting for this Blood Pact Theatre/ Storefront Arts Initiative co-production.
Thanks to excellent acting under Rachel Cairns’s attentive direction, Bryce Hodgson and Charlie Kerr’s plot line compels from the get-go. Twenty-something siblings Frank (Michael Eisner) and Perry (Libby Osler) have travelled from Vancou- ver to their slightly older, married sister Susan (Allie Dunbar)’s house in rural Alberta to get her to sign off on their recently deceased grandmother’s will.
The detail in Hodgson and Bri Proke’s set design and the costumes (for which no designer is credited) is impressive: Susan’s kitchen clearly communicates striving-for-middleclass domesticity, as does her cardigan-and-cooking apron ensemble — an effect that, we discover as the play goes on, she’s laboured hard to create.
The packaging-fold creases in Frank’s ill-fitting shirt and chinos signal that he too is attempting a respectability that does not come naturally, while the androgynous city chic of Perry’s skinny jeans and hoodie, as well as Osler’s convincingly disaffected manner, set her up as the rebellious one. Exactly what’s made Perry so angry and resentful is one of the secrets the plot eventually offers up.
The final extended family member is Susan’s husband Paul (Jimi Shlag), whom she married when she was 15 and pregnant, and he was significantly older (something the script has to tell us, because the age difference between the actors isn’t par- ticularly apparent). This is the fall from grace from which Susan’s been trying to recover. We never hear about the siblings’ mother and father, which raises a question mark around the play’s title — has the family reassembled here to slay some kind of overwhelming absent-parental demon?
Such intriguing questions about why we’re here and what’s at stake build up at a well-handled, accelerating pace, with character and relationships established as each sibling reveals their darkly funny strategies for dealing with mounting tensions: for Frank, it’s obsessive reference to the movie The Crow, while Susan power-cleans to pop music and Perry channels Insane Clown Posse (the Urban Dictionary may be necessary for audience members over 35 to grasp all the references here).
And just when we think we’re heading toward revelation, catharsis and conclusion, Hodgson and Kerr throw in a deus ex-machina that sends the play careening in a totally unexpected direction. This clearly seems on purpose — like a punk-inspired dramaturgical “f--- you” to any kind of rules, including the established conventions of naturalistic theatre. At the same time, though, Hodgson and Kerr remain committed to playing out the drama of family truth-telling, so that the play’s final minutes become a clashing cacopho-- Kill Your Parents in Viking, Alberta. ny of tearful confessions, absurd conspiracy theories and a whole whack of well-choreographed stage violence (Nate Bitton is the fight director).
The cast’s level of commitment is impressive: this is an extreme sports version of performing that leaves them sweaty and panting at the curtain call.
Asking what it all adds up to may be just the kind of old-skool question that the playwrights are attempting to satirize. I was left with the lingering impression, however, of a questing sincerity competing with the shrugging spirit of “whatever” that the play — particularly its ending — otherwise communicates.