PARENTHOOD COMEDY DELIVERS
Montreal-set adaptation of the Parisian hit Le Prénom provides a fertile marriage between the Segal and Just For Laughs, Jim Burke writes.
The publicity poster for the Segal’s last production of the 2016-17 season, What’s in a Name?, would seem to promise — or should that be threaten? — a cutesy summery farce about impending parenthood.
And while this dark comedy doesn’t quite turn out to be a profound Chekhovian dissection of stalled lives, it’s a lot more acerbic and cerebrally witty than that picture of an adorable stork delivered cherub, or indeed that title, would suggest. Yet thanks to a taut, often very funny script and a quintet of sharp performances under Jennifer Tarver’s direction, it still delivers as an endlessly entertaining, not-too-demanding holiday treat.
What’s in a Name? is the English version of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière’s Parisian comedy Le Prénom, which has become an international hit since its 2010 première.
The story revolves around the, to say the very least, highly questionable choice of baby name revealed by a proud dad-to-be during a dinner party attended by old friends and spouses.
Can he be serious? Can even solid friendships withstand such a serious lack of judgment?
Playing here both as a Just for Laughs co-production and one of 11 plays in Montreal 375 “À nous la scène!” festival, it’s been smartly adapted by Michael Mackenzie to a Montreal setting, with frequent, but not too obtrusive, references to local streets, institutions, mores, etc.
Olivier Landreville’s beautifully detailed set design places the action in a chic Mile End apartment with a spectacular view onto St-Joseph’s Oratory, while Robert Thomson’s lighting delicately transitions from the flush of early evening to luminous twilight throughout the intervalless 100 minutes of real time.
Like those other smash-hit boulevard comedies, Art and
Nos femmes (the latter played at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe last fall), Delaporte and de la Patellière’s play springboards off a moment of apparent madness to plunge into the dark eddies swirling beneath the veneer of bourgeois smugness.
As well as that titular question, the play is also asking: How well do we really know friends and family? How well do we know ourselves?
Characteristically for this kind of play, there’s also a dash of half serious cod-philosophizing in there, as represented by Concordia lecturer Peter, played with convincingly absurd, corduroy clad seriousness by Pat Kiely.
There’s good work too from Amanda Lisman as bolshie momto-be Anna, from Erika Rosenbaum as Peter’s CEGEP teacher wife, Elizabeth (though perhaps she’s not quite as dowdy and ground down as the script would suggest), and from Matthew Gagnon as family friend Claude, an OSM flutist whose apparently retiring demeanour unleashes merry hell.
Andrew Shaver, artistic director of the renowned SideMart Theatrical Grocery, grabs most of the limelight, appropriately enough, as the smarmy, attention-seeking Vincent, who launches that prospective baby name like a hand grenade.
Shaver proved himself a splendid farceur in Segal’s production of Noises Off earlier this year. Here he’s clearly mastered the art of comedy-of-(bad)-manners. His Vincent is a preening dynamo coiled around the bewilderment of a little boy who never grew up. In MacKenzie’s up-tothe minute adaptation, Vincent’s hero is, of course, Donald Trump.
As for the ultra-toxic name Vincent claims to have picked for his offspring, the Segal has sworn critics to silence on the matter, even though you’ve most likely already guessed it. I can only reveal here that it’s not “Donald Jr.”