Flashing lights conceal lack of big payoff

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2010 (6019 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the set and lighting stand out as the best elements of a locally produced play, it’s usually not the best of signs.

That’s the case with North Main Gothic, Winnipeg writer Carolyn Gray’s fantastical black comedy about gambling, poverty and institutional callousness.

This ambitious production, from the 20-year-old community-based company Theatre Projects Manitoba, must have squeezed the piggy bank dry to pay for some of its clever visual effects.

As designed by local lighting and stage technician Hugh Conacher, the proceedings resemble an old Super Mario video game crossed with The Phantom of the Opera and Alice in Wonderland.

Four two-storey columns of sewer-pipe openings stand like sentries along both sides of the deep stage. The black-box venue, the University of Winnipeg’s new Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film, works well to suggest the rabbit-hole-like catacombs where most of the action takes places.

Conacher and director Ardith Boxall employ rear-projection movie effects, a Guess Who-heavy soundtrack, eye-popping lights and a few hilarious props.

Where did they get that giant talking parrot for the entrance to their "McRegent Street" Casino?

As for Gray’s script, it’s a scattershot farce with overlapping plot lines that converge into some semblance of order.

An impoverished gambling addict (Monique Marcker) tries to get her electricity turned back on by the unfeeling "Provincial Power Corporation." A Main Street hotel clerk (Graham Ashmore) battles civic red tape to put up a wreath in honour of his dead friend.

A power utility middle manager (Eric Blais) searches the mean streets around Main for his BlackBerry, stolen from him after a late-night car crash. In a sleazy hotel he meets a documentary-film researcher (Krista Jackson) impersonating a prostitute.

The manager’s mean-spirited assistant (Alicia Johnston) and a mysterious hooded monk (Rod Beilfuss) round out the cast. They all end up underneath the Strip, where the steam-heating system has been turned into a Dante’s Inferno of VLT machines.

The insanity of the setting, Gray appears to be saying, mirrors a society that steals from its poorest citizens and gives them almost nothing in return.

The acting is nothing if not energetic, though often annoyingly broad. None of the characters is likable, and their motivations, a fault of the script, often don’t make sense.

Why, for example, would the assistant decide to sleep with her boss after he promotes her on merit?

And in a drama that focuses on issues of social class, shouldn’t the suits sound different than the down-and-outers? They don’t here. Everyone speaks like they’ve been to university.

At two hours, with one intermission, the play clips along speedily, and it contains a couple of decent laughs. As well, Boxall and Conacher save the best for last, an abstract expressionist light show that makes our real casinos look drab. Let’s hope they get their talking parrot back.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca