by AMY BARRATT

His background, Darcy Bruce says, is in competitive basketball, English lit and psychology. There are certainly more direct paths one can take to a career in theatre, but an unconventional one can produce unique artistic fruit. Caketown, Bruce's one-man show currently playing the Wildside Festival, is strange and wonderful fruit indeed. The English lit is there in the fact that he wrote it himself, a love of psychology comes through in the twisted natures of his characters, and basketball in the effortless way the ball gets passed from one character to the next.

The lanky 28-year-old has not been cooling his jets since relocating to Montreal just two years ago. He performed Caketown at the 2004 Montreal Fringe, where Centaur artistic director Gordon McCall saw it and was impressed enough to offer a coveted space at the Wildside. Since then, Bruce has performed another original piece, The Fruit Fly Show, at the GLBT Theatre Festival. It featured some of the same characters as Caketown but all different monologues. There is also a third show, The Policy Writer, which he plans to take to the whopping Fringe festival in his native Edmonton this summer.

"It's interesting to see how audiences in different cities respond to the characters," says Bruce. In Caketown, these include a brittle suburbanite Bruce calls The Matriarch, who has barricaded herself into her house out of fear of a deadly airborne virus. This character, for some reason, killed in Montreal. He's curious to see how she will go over when he plays the Toronto Fringe.

Another character, a man who builds the world's highest fence because Buddhists have moved in next door is based on someone Bruce actually knew, though he takes the character to extremes. He is, after all, writing satire, and that means, as he puts it, "making you laugh at things you maybe wouldn't normally laugh at." You know, hatred, fear, paranoia... "Clueless and creepy" is how Bruce describes his characters, who are differentiated by minimal prop and costume pieces that all fit into a suitcase.

Bruce has a day job bottling Crown Royal in the Seagram's factory. "It's a perfect job for me right now," he says, "because it's so mind-numbing. I can work on ideas as I work, and try out stuff on the people I work with."

Among the five shows at the Wildside, three are remounts of Fringe 2004 shows. Alongside Caketown, there is Kabarett: a Cheerical (see profile of Glenda Braganza in last week's Mirror) and an adults-only version of Pinocchio by British duo Screwed and Clued. The two remaining shows are Filler Up!, a one-woman import from New Zealand, and the festival's only straight dramatic offering, Solus, by our own Soulfishing Theatre. Check out the Wildside schedule online at centaurtheatre.com.

Get out your agendas, the next show in the Centaur season is Edward Albee's The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?, opening Feb. 3. The Rape of Lucrece is Gravy Bath Productions' latest offering. It's a one-man adaptation of Shakespeare's narrative poem starring Gareth Potter; January 19–29 at the Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E.), 540-0774 for tickets

The Wildside Festival continues to Jan. 22 at the Centaur (453 St-François-Xavier), $15 for one show, $7 for a second show on the same night, or a superpass to all five shows is just $30, 288-3161

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