All ideas, no flesh and hazy

BREATH IN BETWEEN Streetcar Crowsnest

Breath in Between, by Anton Piatigorsky, is about human connection or the lack of it. How, literally or figuratively, do you get inside another person? The play and its two characters, Roger and Amy, have various suggestions. You have sex with someone. Or you get pregnant, and feel both protective and resentful of the demanding creature you are carrying. Or, most radically, you stab someone to death and are then possessed by the spirit of your victim(s).

That’s Roger’s way. He placed an ad on-line, offering his services to anyone wishing to be killed, and got two takers. One was Maxim, a cop from Tennessee; the other was Laura, a woman. (I’m sorry, but we aren’t told anything else about her.) Roger relates all this in an opening monologue, also telling us about his father, a gentle person best remembered by his son for stomping a bird to death. (He claimed it was a mercy-killing.)

Roger meets Amy in a bar, and she is so turned on by his story that she moves in with him. Or maybe she wants to redeem him. We see her serving him a four-course dinner, the centrepiece of each dish being a heart, the last of them her own. At which point, as with the recent production of Five Faces for Evelyn Frost, we give up believing in the play on any realistic level. Unfortunately, in this case there are no other levels to hang on to.

To be fair, Roger has already told us that, when he was a youth, his father had killed him, but that was early on and I thought I might have misheard. Anyway, whether in life or in limbo, both Roger and Amy find their minds and bodies invaded by the dead Maxim and Laura. Or they enjoy playing these roles and put on masks to do it.

Roger is in jail for the play’s last scenes, which seems realistic enough (and is where Shannon Lea Doyle’s brick-wall set finally comes into its own); he’s also a proud or at least possessive father, surprisingly permitted conjugal visits. Some of the writing is stylish, and there are even a few jokes. The two actors, Kyle Gatehouse and Julia Krauss, do well by it; he has a meekness that’s paradoxically effective, she sometimes strains for toughness. But the author, who is also the director, hasn’t found a style that would carry us with him.

It’s all ideas, no flesh, and the ideas are hazy. Richard Feren’s sound design provides the only thrills Breath in Between runs until March 11.