Comic thriller takes intrigue to the cleaners
Local business district an unlikely setting for surprises, suspense
Cause and Effect Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine Starring: Jeff Haslam, Davina Stewart, Beth Graham, Eric Wigston Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83rd Ave. Running: through June 15 Tickets: 780-433-3399 or Tix on the Square (780-420-1757)
A man. A dry cleaner. A menswear outlet store. A well-travelled urban retail artery of such undistinguished commercial aspect that “boulevard” seems just a bit florid — the latter a nuance that will be explored in the course of the new comedy/ thriller that launches the Teatro La Quindicina season.
Even the title is innocuous. With Cause and Effect, Stewart Lemoine takes us to Edmonton and the stretch of Gateway Boulevard south of Old Strathcona and east of Southgate Mall. In one way, it’s a test case for international intrigue; in another, it’s one of those blank slates where oddities stick out (as Raymond Chandler once said) like a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Is “suspiciously innocent” an oxymoron? Cause and Effect declares No (in several accents) — but not at first. Preston (Jeff Haslam), a geography prof with a specialty in the aspen parkland, a landscape not hitherto known for its melodramatic escalations, goes to the cleaners to pick up his coat — only to find that the establishment is permanently closed. Everything, in the long, flat accumulation of small talk, Edmonton detail, and tiny glinting revelations that is Act I, depends on that. Preston is mildly puzzled, in a passing sort of way. Tim (Eric Wigston), the clerk in the outlet store, doesn’t rise to even mild puzzlement.
In Lemoine’s play Evelyn Strange, a coat is unexpectedly seminal, too. An amnesiac discovers a ticket to the Metropolitan Opera in the pocket of a trench coat, and developments, to put it mildly, escalate wildly.
Something like that structure happens here. The first moments of Cause and Effect are verbal shrugs. It’s a setup of unrevealing playing surfaces. You can thank Edmonton for that. You can thank Haslam and Wigston for being determinedly ordinary (if that isn’t an oxymoron) and offhand. And you can thank designer Bobby Smale for conjuring the chain-store chain-hotel esthetic so economically.
It would be naughty of me to spoil your fun with the chain of causality as it weaves dry cleaning into a surprising, suspenseful and knotted fabric of intrigue, conflicting claims, and misdirections. Vagueness is required of me, and I shall deliver. Participants include Preston’s wife Gwen (the highly amusing Davina Stewart), a tightly wound sort whose reactions to everything are pitched unusually high, in both vibration and timbre. Gwen’s single-minded devotion to PBS — she’s the local membership secretary for the Friends of 7 — may be driving a wedge in her marriage. But possibly, as one character proposes, it’s a result of listening to her husband “speak of the tamarack and spruce.”
And there is an exotic outsider “from Europe, I’d say, and not just one part,” as one character notes. Giuliana Hirsch is a seductress with mysterious, possibly sinister, angles to her allure.
She’s played with very funny flamboyance by Beth Graham, making her Teatro debut in Leona Brausen’s glamorous duds and a grand array of outrageous accents. For purposes of an article she’s writing, Giulana has been to dine at Earl’s, which she pronounces “Uuuurl’s” like a Finnish soprano getting her mouth ready to sing Schubert. Lemoine’s dry sense of humour provides gradated wit for all. “Life is short,” declares Giulana, who prefers lower floors in hotels. “We can’t use it all up on elevator rides.”
In the course of what I must refer to, unrevealingly, as events, starting slow and gathering speed and number in Act II, you will see every character except the self-possessed Tim reduced to panic and/or fury. You will see a character assume the fetal position while in a Boss suit, for example. Preston’s descent into the maelstrom where self-confidence goes AWOL, via dry cleaning, is smartly charted by Haslam.
A highlight of the evening is an out-and-out hilarious rant about the down sides of Edmonton. It is a true showstopper, and it will leave every one of our rah-rah boosterish commonplaces about this town legless, squirming, and helpless in the dust.
Wigston is droll as a fellow who, like the maids in French farces and the butlers in Masterpiece Theatre, knows more than he lets on. He has a certain appealing deadpan, even in matters of Edmonton cuisine. The pancakes at IHOP: you honestly “have to believe that one day they’re just going to be better … ”
Is that not a mantra for our lives together in Edmonton?