>>REVIEW
RECKLESS
Mob Hit Productions
Written by Craig Lucas
Directed by Lawrence Leong
Runs until October 1
Vertigo Studio (Tower Centre)
During a recent interview with actor Stephen Hair, star of Vertigo Theatre’s Stage Struck, he told me that "film ain’t stage, so why are we (trying to imitate it)?" He makes a strong argument, given that theatre, while often lacking the production-value splendour of the silver screen, is a more personal, immediate medium, affording it opportunities that are often diminished when competing with the polish of edited celluloid.
On the other hand, Mob Hit’s new production of Reckless, now running next door to Stage Struck in the Vertigo Studio, provides an excellent rebuttal.
Opening with a full-fledged credit sequence whose production crew gets a separate mention in the program, this revival of Craig Lucas’s painfully beautiful Christmas road show is realized by Mob Hit as a film set onstage. The black curtain backdrop becomes the screen for establishing shots, while assistant director Geoff Woods’s soundscape, so heavy that it can only be described as a soundtrack, sets the mood of every scene.
Lucas’s play lends itself well to Mob Hit’s stylized approach. It takes place in a surreal, picaresque world where Christmas can bring hit men, poison and endless bottles of champagne. Driven out of her house on Christmas Eve after her husband (Mat Mailandt) warns her that he has put out a contract on her life, Rachel (Micheline Pitre) begins a journey that takes her through the lives and hidden tragedies of an interconnected world of good Samaritans, criminals and well-meaning psychiatrists.
Punctuated by the bizarre, the sweet and the tragic in nearly equal doses, Lucas’s script is a hyperbolic portrait of life as a series of events that shape and test their victims. Rachel begins her journey as a soft-spoken ingénue, nearly a child herself as she babbles happily about Christmas and the idyllic permanent winter of Alaska. That she retains the beauty of this original naiveté while running from a killer and being repeatedly abandoned speaks to both the power of Lucas’s vision and Mob Hit’s strong cast.
Pitre’s Rachel is an endearing Alice in a wonderland with its fair share of horrors. She is able to seem cute and lost in a world in which she is nonetheless capable of maintaining her sense of self. From her flight to the living room of an altruistic physiotherapist named Lloyd (Corey Hogan) and his paraplegic wife Pooty (Christin McComb), to the gloom of a homeless shelter, we empathize with her losses with a sympathy that is more than simple pity.
Conjuring up a world of nearly perpetual Christmas, many of Reckless’s cast do double and even sextuple duty. As the obnoxious host of the game show "Your Mother or Your Wife," the co-ordinator of an embattled charity and a foul-mouthed homeless man, Guy Bancroft provides an excellent supplementary array of characters alongside Jennifer Roberts, whose psychiatrist role sees a variety of distinct and hilarious incarnations.
Although the film motif may not be one the company should pursue indefinitely, this production seems to combine the best elements of theatre’s immediacy and film’s melodramatic flair. The debate is not finished, but in Reckless, Mob Hit artistic director Lawrence Leong and his capable cast have certainly offered a compelling argument for putting film onstage. |
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