Kitchen sink comedy

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This article was published 17/03/2016 (3680 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’ve ever undergone a big renovation in your house, you already know the process is inherently dramatic.

Let’s face it. Something as simple as a bathroom reno might send the closest of couples into a state of viperish Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf dissension.

Winnipeg playwright Rick Chafe appreciates that fact and sets it down on paper in Marriage: A Demolition in Two Acts, a comedy that closes out Prairie Theatre Exchanges 2015-16 season with the sound of power drills, hammers and, hopefully, raucous laughter.

The play would appear to be an example of a playwright writing what he knows. Sure, Chafe is a much-produced playwright in Winnipeg, with works that bounce between personal dramas (The Secret Mask, Zac and Speth) and celebrated adaptations (Shakespeare’s Dog, The Odyssey).

Let’s just say the playwright, who lives in a rambling older house in Wolseley, knows his way around a circular saw.

“I think wherever I’ve lived, I would have been a self-home-renovating guy, just because I’m cheap,” Chafe says in a phone interview. “But definitely, in Wolseley, the renos never stop.”

Chafe says his enthusiasm for home improvement invariably hits a wall at some point.

“I do enjoy it, but it’s always more than I can handle,” he says. “I worked as a house painter lots of summers, so I know how to paint and I know how to use a caulking gun, and I know how to do plaster and I can drywall.

“But everything else is faking it.”

Chafe, 56, laughingly recalls how his early adventures in reno involved researching home repair.

“Do you remember those Time-Life books?” he says. “You’d run to the Time-Life book and try to figure out how to do wiring. I learn it off the Internet these days.”

That generational distinction figures in the play, which doubles down on the marital conflict between a couple in their 50s (Tom Anniko and Marina Stephenson Kerr) and a couple in their 20s (Erin McGrath and Justin Otto). The older couple is having their kitchen renovated. The younger couple are the contractor — on his first major job — and designer hired for the job.

“So you’ve got a young couple who are just threatening to get into marriage and an old couple who are threatening to end a marriage,” Chafe says. “All that’s taking place in the explosion of a kitchen renovation.”

Chafe summarizes: “It’s about being baffled over what we’ve become, fearing what we might yet become, and a kitchen reno gone terribly wrong.”

The comedy is the second Chafe play to have its world première at PTE after The Secret Mask in 2011. It is also a product of the PTE Playwrights Unit, a collective of 10 playwrights that, for Chafe, functions as a creative support group.

“It can be so depressing working on a play entirely by yourself that needs five or 10 voices in it,” he says. “You’re stuck with yourself. So you need a writers’ group, really.

“When any of our members are working on a play and need help, we get together, read our scenes together, read the entire play if it’s in draft form and give mutual feedback and support the whole way along,” Chafe says. “And that has been tremendously productive.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca@FreepKing