EVERY PARENT’S NIGHTMARE
Friends partying in a garage makes for an angsty, angry play that you won’t be able to look away from,
If there was ever a play to bring out your parental instincts, it’s probably Geoffrey Simon Brown’s debut piece The Circle, about a group of teenagers spending a typical night of debauchery in a garage. On more than one occasion, I found myself (very embarrassingly) thinking, “My god, if these kids don’t settle down, somebody’s going to poke an eye out.” If only it were that easy. Brown, a Calgary native whose hometown (and the people he knows there) formed the inspiration for The Circle, made his playwright debut at Alberta Theatre Projects last year to audience and critical acclaim with this story of six high-school-aged friends in search of a party and, like many young people, something bigger without the vocabulary to articulate it nor the financial or social means to go after it.
Perhaps the strongest aspect of di- rector Peter Pasyk’s production of The Circle, on now at Tarragon Theatre in its Toronto premiere, is the way he captures how the misdirected energy of youth manifests in their bodies, exerting itself in swings, shoves, punches, leaps and gasps with the confidence of, as one character describes it, Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.
And then he places it within the confines of a small household garage in Tarragon’s intimate Extraspace.
Patrick Lavender’s wonderfully bare-bones set design covers half the theatre in black, plastic insulation behind a wooden wall frame. On opening night, the theatre felt as cold as this makeshift living space would in this chilly fall.
There are a few signs of human life in this space: a mini fridge, a camping mattress bed, a table made from four overturned plastic buckets and an old piece of wood covered with bongs.
This is the home of Ily (Jakob Ehman), who lives in the garage of his girlfriend Amanda’s (Vivien Endicott-Douglas), where she lives with a brother and a neglectful mother.
That evening, the couple is joined by an unlikely crew — Amanda’s younger friend Will (Daniel Ellis) and his new boyfriend Daniel (Jake Vanderham), a friend from Ily’s childhood, Tyler, now going by Mutt (Brian Solomon) and his maybe-girlfriend Kit (Nikki Duval).
The Circle’s moments of humour often come from the inherent awkwardness of such a group of friends, especially when reality-altering drugs are introduced.
Duval in particular can draw laughs with Kit’s monosyllabic answers and the ability to laugh at her unstable family situation. That attitude is a good measure of The Circle’s tone, which fluctuates between harmless angst and a much deeper and troubling sense of isolation and anger.
Vanderham’s Daniel performs a similar function, as the most cleancut of the six but the sufferer of a recent family trauma.
Ehman, a young actor who’s made a significant impact in Toronto theatre only a few years out of theatre school, gives Ily a goofy charm as he weighs his desire to be the life of the party with the responsibilities of a life he has planned for himself and Amanda. It’s an interesting foil to Amanda herself, an advanced student and parent to her brother, who already knows who and what is a waste of her time and energy.
It’s unclear what Brown is trying to do with this tragicomedy, outside of giving life to recognizable, relatable characters. Much like the party itself, The Circle is a wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes brutal expression of anger and angst without a specified target. You might want to look away, but you probably can’t.