COURT JESTER JUGGLES EMOTIONAL UPS AND DOWNS
Whimsical play Mustard a serious, silly mishmash of style and story
For her second offering as the Arts Club’s new artistic director, Ashlie Corcoran has programmed a play in many ways resembling her first.
Like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mustard is a surreal comic drama about an adolescent with parent problems. Instead of a boy with his father, it’s a girl living with her mother. This time dad has left home to be with someone else.
In Curious Incident the boy has a pet rat and his kindly teacher’s voice in his head for company. Here, 16-year-old Thai has an imaginary friend she calls Mustard. He dresses like a court jester, lives under her bed and looks remarkably like her dad.
Thai acts out violently and has sex with her older boyfriend, Jay. She’s especially angry with her mom, Sadie, who drowns her sorrows in wine and prescription drugs. When Mustard stages an intervention, Sadie too can suddenly see and hear Mustard, and they develop a relationship.
Because Mustard’s time is apparently up, two hit men from the land of imaginary friends come to take him back but he doesn’t want to go. He’s as lonely and yearning for real human connection as the real humans. And did I mention that Thai is pregnant?
Kat Sandler’s script offers no shortage of incidents in a mixed bag, a mishmash, of styles. Mustard complains that grown-ups have lost their sense of whimsy, and Sandler makes every attempt to be whimsical. We jump from abortion debate to comic-gothic torture, inter-dimensional romance to farce and back again. Stephen Drover’s production sometimes feels like theatre for young audiences, sometimes like an Arthur Miller domestic drama with f-bombs.
Andrew McNee plays Mustard, the creature who wants to be human. This is a Robin Williams role if ever there was one, and McNee comes closest of any Vancouver actor to Williams’ comic genius. His Mustard is exhaustingly manic, full of funny physical and verbal tics. When the playwright insists on the sad clown with tears, this Mustard can be as cloyingly sentimental as Williams’ characters often were.
Heidi Damayo’s Thai and Jenny Wasko-Paterson’s Sadie carry the play’s dramatic weight. Damayo is compelling as the confused kid on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with serious adult problems. Wasko-Paterson not only has to act the single mother dealing with her troubled teen, but a needy woman dating an imaginary man. Helped by McNee’s comic chops, she keeps that scene from becoming entirely ludicrous.
Shekhar Paleja and Brett Harris as the thugs come to retrieve Mustard also have it tough, each of their appearances essentially alike. The actors develop a nicely ominous shtick, but a running gag involving their pedantic wordplay stops being funny after about the third repetition.
Thai’s goofy college student boyfriend Jay lives most comfortably on the theatrical border between the silly and serious. Played with charmingly blithe comic innocence by Chirag Naik, Jay navigates the play’s grotesque contrasts without worrying too much about consistency, which is probably the best way to experience this play.