An X-ray look at four lives on the precipice
Crackerjack cast delivers one of the best shows of the year, Jerry Wasserman writes.
As we finally approach zero hour in the apocalyptic United States election, Vancouver theatre companies are holding mirrors up to our increasingly troubled neighbours next door.
The Arts Club’s Bakersfield Mist dramatizes America’s educational and class divide.
Now or Later, by Fighting Chance Productions, deals with the family of a presidential candidate on a fictional election eve.
Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, at Studio 16, isn’t about an election. But it tells us a lot about the electorate, the state of the union as seen through the microcosm of two couples desperately hanging on to the crumbling remnants of the American dream.
Director Lois Anderson and a crackerjack cast deliver one of the best shows of the year, a hilarious and devastating X-ray of lives on the precipice.
In the backyard of a suburb described in the program as Anywhere, USA, Mary (Jennifer Copping) and Ben (Joel Wirkkunen) are welcoming new neighbours, Sharon (Luisa Jojic) and Kenny (Aaron Craven), who have just come out of rehab. Kenny’s aunt has died and they’re living temporarily in her house without furniture or jobs, trying to keep their lives on track.
Ben and Mary are also in trouble, their middle-class status increasingly precarious. Ben has lost his position at a bank and is trying to set up an online consulting business before his severance runs out. Mary commutes to a job
she hates and drinks too much. The tension between them is palpable.
Which couple is worse off? Sharon and Kenny may be poor and messed up, but they smooch and pet with vitality that’s been drained from the older couple.
Despite serious undertones and desperation that leaks out of all four characters in nighttime confidences and daylight confrontations, the backyard barbecues are extremely funny, sprinkled with sweetly absurd conversations and the odd pratfall. D’Amour varies the tone of her script with impressive subtlety.
Sharon stands at its centre, good-natured and ingenuous, a motormouth whose favourite song is Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. She calls herself white trash but she has a pure heart, steady self-awareness and persistent optimism.
As Sharon, Jojic is extraordinary, her performance as detailed, exuberant and heartbreaking.
Copping is equally impressive as Mary, avoiding overacting and sentimentality while showing us the multiple dimensions of this overtly desperate character.
The men, meanwhile, tend to mask their true feelings almost to the end, when Ben blurts out a revelation and Kenny’s barely contained anguish explodes. Both actors do excellent work, as does John R. Taylor in a lesser role as an older relative regretting the lost neighbourliness and civility of the past.
Detroit is a contemporary Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf without the nastiness, a portrait of a culture in distress.
Detroit is a contemporary Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf without the nastiness, a portrait of a culture in distress.
Edward Albee described an earlier play of his as opposing “the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachykeen.”
In Detroit, that slipping land is anything but. The play itself, though, is definitely peachy-keen.