Contemporary comedy provides food for thought

Although his plays only started being produced four years ago, Mark Crawford has taken stages by storm in Ontario and beyond. This summer, three theatres in the province are putting on his shows: The Birds and the Bees at the Huron County Playhouse, The New Canadian Curl

ing Club at the Blyth Festival, and now Bed and Breakfast at Soulpepper — the first sustained run of one of his shows by a Toronto company.

The sweet spot he’s hit is populist comedy with a contemporary sensibility. Crawford writes believable, likeable char- acters in situations that resonate with a broad public and who may not have been seen on mainstream stages before.

Bed and Breakfast is about a gay couple who check out of the Toronto housing wars to start a guest house in a place that could be Gananoque (where the play premiered in 2015) or Stratford (where Crawford lives).

The extra element that takes this script to the level of classic farce is that two actors, Gregory Prest and Paolo Santalucia, play not just the couple but about 20 characters between them.

The theatrical conceit, easily and elegantly established, is that Brett (Prest) and Drew (Santalucia) are acting out the story of renovating the B&B and navigating their new nonurban lives for the audience, jumping back and forth between playing the other folks who figure in their adventures.

More is at stake than whether they’ll have all the towels folded and scones baked by opening day. Crawford has taken on big themes of homophobia (societal, familial, internalized), acceptance and belonging. The play goes further than you might expect, introducing deepening levels of intrigue and identity challenge for its central characters that made me feel, at the end of its 2.5-hour running time, that I’d been on a significant and satisfying journey.

Director Ann-Marie Kerr’s production finds its heart in a beautifully evoked central relationship while still going for it with all the slamming doors and quick changes. Alexandra Lord’s two-level set creates a flexible playing ground, enabling swift moves between settings and situations. Real-life couple Prest and Santalucia give technically adept and deeply humane performances, particularly as they navigate Brett and Drew’s crux moments of decision-making, crisis management and sharing joy at life’s milestones.

But perhaps in trying to counter the more heightened farcical passages, the actors sometimes downplay the quieter scenes to the point where audibility becomes a concern — there were lines in Prest’s crucial final monologue that I simply couldn’t hear.

The secondary male characters are written and played with skill and empathy, from Santalucia’s gruff contractor Doug and monosyllabic nephew Cody to Prest’s queer teen Dustin and larger-than-life city friend Ray. But the female characters are less thoughtfully observed. However much I wanted to love them, the real estate agent Carrie (Santalucia) and the café owner Alison (Prest) come across as slightly hysterical sketches rather than real people.

In the three years since the play premiered, awareness around questions of intersectionality has increased dramatically, and as such, recognition of the characters’ white privilege could have added to its timeliness.

Overall there is a lot of richness to savour here in Crawford’s acute comic observations, which of course are going to land differently in Toronto than they would in a smalltown context. A place where people read newspapers “made out of actual paper” and order larges, not grandes, Bed and Breakfast draws on the allure of such environments but doesn’t sugar-coat them either. I hope that there are more plays to come out of Crawford’s generous engagement with the changing Canada.