After Jerusalem
At Performance Works until Dec. 11
Tickets: 604.629.8848
vancouvertix.com
Actors Deb Williams and Andrew McNee are so perfect as Carol and Vladimir in After Jerusalem, it's hard to imagine Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»playwright Aaron Bushkowsky writing the play without them in mind. Under Rachel Peake's excellent direction, Williams nails middle-aged, never-married, Regina schoolteacher Carol so precisely: shy, nervous, awkward, excited and funny when she's hustled by handsome, much younger Vladimir. And McNee's Vladimir (with a thick Russian accent and Slavic syntax) is passionate and charming when he turns those big, soulful eyes on Carol and, in one of many direct addresses to the audience, on us. What a pair of perfect liars they turn out to be.
They meet when he, a security guard in one of Jerusalem's holy sites, refuses entrance to holidaying Carol because he detects metal on her. Turns out she's wearing a locket with a picture of her Labradoodle in it. She's embarrassed but it's a beginning.
What could be a simple holiday romance is made theatrical by fantasy sequences in the style of old movies; Vladimir gets all macho and Carol turns all Marlene Dietrich or he becomes Vlad, The Impaler and she, a willing blood donor. These scenes are differentiated by lighting cues by set and light designer Itai Erdal.
It's so darned charming and funny and clever as Carol digs herself deeper and deeper into her falsehood.
But as Bushkowsky did in My Chernobyl a few years ago, he sets the After Jerusalem story against a seriously devastating backdrop: radioactivity and ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, respectively. And it's the battle zone that eventually determines whether Carol and Vlad are having a holiday romance (a "homance" as she calls it) or whether there's a future for them.
Presented by Solo Collective Theatre, the show is short (70 minutes, no intermission), very sweet and with snow falling-but only on Carol-at the end, it's so innocently, undeniably Canadian.
True West
At Little Mountain Studios until Dec. 10
Tickets: 604-992-2313.
Pay-what-you-can ($20 suggested)
No one can string humour, menace, violence and death of the American Dream along a high-tension wire like American playwright Sam Shepard can. From the very first lines, we get the picture: brothers Austin, a screenwriter of romantic Hollywood schlock, and Lee, a drifter with a penchant for B&E, square off in their mother's immaculate L.A. kitchen. She's off on a cruise to Alaska, trusting Austin, who lives with his wife and kids elsewhere, to look after her house and houseplants. Lee, in filthy clothes, turns up out of nowhere.
In the excellent introduction to the Bantam edition of Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, Richard Gilman points out one of Shepard's recurrent themes: the assertion of the untaught self. This is especially true in True West. Austin has gone to college, but Lee has learned his chops by living alone in the Mojave Desert.
But what Shepard most markedly mourns in this play is the perversion of the true west where men pitted themselves against the elements and each other.
Directed by Stephen Malloy for Main Street Theatre, this is a muscular, sinewy, sometimes scary production. Lee, energetically portrayed by Daryl King, is an IED waiting to be triggered. King, eventually bare-chested and sweaty, hurls himself physically into the play. In the tiny Little Mountain Studio space, it's so in your face you might get toast in your lap.
Ryan Beil is conservative Austin who now and then ineffectually challenges his brother. Austin has a finely tuned sense of the absurd and Beil is an expert at delivering those lines with a loopy, lop-sided grin.
Josh Drebit plays the leisure-suited movie producer and Barb Pollard portrays the unfortunate mother of Lee and Austin who, when the shit hits the fan, behave like a couple of three-year-olds caught finger-painting over an original Picasso.
Terrific play. Terrific production.
-JL
