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One weird little play

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hgpnbjufpx One weird little playThere are black comedies that smack their lips over horror. There are black comedies that buff the shiny surfaces of things, then skin them. There are scab-picking black comedies. There are black comedies that are sitcom funny, and then trip over the curb and end up in the abyss.  The odd little black comedy that’s running at the Living Room Playhouse, in a Rabid Marmot production directed by Nicholas Mather, isn’t like any of the above.

Maybe it isn’t a black comedy at all. Sean Reycraft’s  One Good Marriage, which first came to notice at the 2002 Summerworks new play festival,  is a highly unusual combination of wistful and grotesque. It’s part thriller, part Our Town, part soap, part tragedy. It’s all about the nuances of ordinary lives, in the face of grand, melodramatic events – which gives the script over to the two actors. What makes it eerie is that we don’t know who the two characters are talking to, or why. If it’s us … who are we, anyhow? It’s a question that resonates in the course of the play.

You have to be a bit mysterious about One Good Marriage, because there are large-scale events, disasters actually, to be discovered in the course of it. And I don’t want to wreck it for you. We meet Steph (Kate Jestadt) and Stewart (Nathan Coppens) on their first wedding anniversary. They’re smiling but nervous; the two performances are deliberated ramped up to near hysteria, which I think somewhat  blows their cover before it should.

The cliche about marriage is that it’s “a big step.” In the case of Steph and Stewart, a small-town Ontario couple with modest dreams, that would count as understatement of the year. They tell us – and it’s not clear whether we’re meant to be guests at their anniversary party, acquaintances, out-and-out strangers – the story of their lives, from “we met, we dated” onward. Steph is an English teacher, Stewart is the school librarian, though as his wife says “not much of a reader.”

Solicitous with each other about the shared storytelling duties, they tell us about their lives at school, the ribbing they took when they started being a couple, the plans they made for a wedding, with the reception at the Legion. They thought about the food, including the obligatory roast beef and “a selection of salads; we wanted ample vegetarian alternatives.” They booked the ’70s tribute band. They wanted a small wedding; somehow they ended up with a guest list of 86. You know how these things go, in a small town.

The honeymoon, a modest affair at the Motel 6 in Pembroke, had a few glitches, which Steph and Stewart concede, with that sort of shared smile that couples have when they’re remembering the times that love had to conquer aggro. The interplay between the two changes colours every once in a while when Steph is overcome by nerves.

The two performances have moments of charm and poignance, but this mysterious rhythm of escalating tension and release, of ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure,  hasn’t quite settled into something convincing in the Rabid Marmot production. It will probably get tuned in the course of the run. As it stands, you sense actorly energy at work, and working just a bit too hard. And the effect smudges small-town portraiture with something that feels more like a satire of these conventional people, thrust by a bizarre circumstance, into unconventional isolation.

It’s an intriguing choice, though, and a weird challenge in both the writing and the performance, to populate a small-town world, and then explode it, in the most unexpected way. The first line, after all, is “everybody died.”

One Good Marriage runs through Sunday, and March 1 to 4 at the Living Room Playhouse (11315 106 Ave.). Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca). Photo: Jenna Greig



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