Raw, realistic drama tells truth about liars

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Leif Norman photo From left, Monique Marcker, Andraea Sartison and David Gillies.

Tell the average classroom of teens that it's time to watch a play about alcoholism, and you might expect eye-rolling and groans.

But right from its blunt title, Liars, the show that has public performances tonight and Saturday at Manitoba Theatre for Young People is far from a preachy, uncool stage lecture.

First mounted by MTYP about 15 years ago, but handily updated with funny references to the likes of Justin Bieber and the Twilight Saga, Liars is an outstanding work by young-people's playwright Dennis Foon (Rick: The Rick Hansen Story).

Based on interviews Foon conducted with teens, it deals frankly, in a contemporary voice, with what it's like to have a parent who is a drunk.

That might sound like a shocker. We don't like to think about 13- or 14-year-olds confronting the reality that adults' addictions can make them dishonest, manipulative, abusive and just "not there" for their families.

But MTYP notes that 20 per cent of youth are worried about parental alcohol use. A show of hands at a school performance Thursday indicated that a great many middle-schoolers know someone affected by it.

And director Leslee Silverman says the 50-minute, four-actor play inspired many teens to seek help from on-site counsellors as it toured all over the province, and to Winnipeg schools, in November and December.

Twenty-something actor Toby Hughes is absolutely believable as Jace, a twitchy, disruptive bad boy of about 16 who tries to escape his home life through music and drugs.

Jace is obviously a creative, witty kid underneath, and Hughes makes him highly sympathetic. When he starts flirting at school with Lenny (Andraea Sartison, also ideally cast), a high-achieving girl who seems to have a perfect life, he has no idea that her upper-middle-class mother (Monique Marcker), like his working-class dad (David Gillies), is a serious alcoholic.

Scenes of their growing bond alternate with raw family scenes that have the heartbreaking ring of behind-closed-doors truth. Lenny takes the responsible mother/wife role in her home, believing she has to try harder and harder to take care of both her resentment-loaded mother and addiction-enabling father (Gillies again, in the show's only caricatured performance).

Jace's situation is more openly abusive. His boozing dad is a pathetic promise-breaker. But Foon is such a skilled playwright that, in all three adult characters, we can glimpse the loving parent beneath the layers of guilt and self-delusion that accumulate in addicts like the dozens of empty glasses and bottles that form part of the set.

Foon's artistry includes the use of two life-size mannequins, dressed identically to the two alcoholics. These mute, passive doppelgängers have a powerful metaphorical presence, in part suggesting that the addicts have "checked out," leaving behind a kind of empty shell that must be borne as a burden by their children.

When Lenny cradles the slack, hollow dummy of her mom, it's a piercing moment that speaks louder than a hundred lectures. Liars communicates to teens that it's not their job to carry their messed-up parents, and they have the right to seek help for themselves.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

THEATRE REVIEW

Liars

Manitoba Theatre for Young People

Tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets $14.25 at 942-8898

4 1/2 out of five stars

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 7, 2011 D4