Boom box LOVE

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2023 (1035 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s 1993 and 16-year-old Bea Klassen (Ericka Leobrera) is just minding her own business, kicking back in her Doc Martens at an otherwise abandoned Saskatchewan farmhouse, reading a few pages of a novel and staring at the late afternoon sky.

Screech. Rattling down the road comes a beat-up Honda Civic with Ontario plates, a potential intruder waiting at the gates of her silo of solitude.

Perhaps some of us would greet the visitor from out east with a suspicious wave, but not Bea Klassen: she says hello to Romeo Alvarez Jr. (Anthony Perpuse) with a loaded crossbow pointed right between his fair Scarborough eyes.

This all happens in the first minute of Toronto playwright Marie Beath Badian’s The Waltz, on until Nov. 29 at Prairie Theatre Exchange. Set over the course of one summer evening, and told within a single turn of the hourglass, The Waltz has no time to waste, and neither do Badian’s characters, who make quick work of familiarizing themselves with each other and the audience under the direction of Nina Lee Aquino.

It’s a gentle, funny teen romance brimming with optimistic nostalgia — think Say Anything… with less soap, more grit and just enough boom box — built around two characters who grew up in the same country but in two different worlds.

Under such time constraints, costume designer Jackie Chau’s well-observed sartorial choices carry extra weight. Leobrera’s Bea is draped in Prairie grunge, wearing a Nirvana T-shirt with a flannel shirt wrapped around her waist. By contrast, Perpuse’s Romeo is in a long-sleeved rugby polo, Timberland boots, and baggy light-wash jeans with a bedazzled back pocket.

Romeo makes a memorable first appearance, lugging six small duffle bags, a cooler, and a boombox through the audience and toward the farmhouse, stubbornly unpacking his car in one trip instead of taking a more measured approach. He’s in a rush to get wherever he’s going.

Headed to the University of British Columbia for his first-year orientation, Romeo arrives on Bea’s doormat at the suggestion of his mother, who immigrated to Saskatchewan in the late 1960s from the Philippines to work as a nurse in the tiny community of Arborfield.

“I’ve heard of her,” Bea says. As it turns out, their moms used to be co-workers, a chapter explored in Badian’s Prairie Nurse, which ran at PTE in 2018.

But after their mothers’ paths crossed, they diverged, giving the next generation vastly different life directions. In white-as-snow Tisdale, Sask., Bea sticks out, while Romeo was the valedictorian at his mostly Filipino high school.

She despises how easily he fits in, but it’s clear, especially when she recalls a euphoric childhood trip to the Philippines, that Bea’s anger is grounded in her desire to blend in and be anonymous just like everyone else seems to do.

“It was crowded and loud and hot and humid and smelly and delicious and familiar and foreign all at the same time,” she says.

A two-hander is only as solid as the actors on stage, and Perpuse and Leobrera are both excellent, making the most of Badian’s writing, which layers insightful conversations about assimilation and living in the diaspora with sprinkles of wisely placed humour.

The show gets funnier as it goes along, especially after Romeo begins to sense a connection between himself and Bea. The characters begin an adorable courtship that is refreshingly not defined by the pursuit of sex or even romance; they harbour innocent crushes, trying to impress one another in the simplest of ways.

Romeo whips his hair and leans against a farmhouse beam like a wannabe teen idol; despite his efforts, Bea hardly bats an eye. Later, Bea shows Romeo how to shotgun a beer, tossing back cans of PBR like nobody’s business.

One of the best jokes of the night is a wordless one it wouldn’t be possible to make if the play were set in 2023. When Romeo wants to play a song by New Edition for Bea, he flips open his well-stocked CD binder. The batteries in his boombox are dead, so Bea runs an extension cord into the house. The Spotify generation laughs in disbelief, while gen X bristles with recognition.

Aside from its stars, the era-awareness of The Waltz is probably its greatest strength. Badian’s semi-autobiographical characters are part of the last generation to grow up without the internet. They live in an age of innocence and anonymity, giving Romeo and Bea’s fateful connection a sense of magical and romantic realism.

A gem of second-gen storytelling, The Waltz is certainly quaint and most definitely twee, but it accomplishes exactly what Badian was aiming for, hardly ever missing a step.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com