Oddness and
absurdity

>>Segal Centre readies The Odd Couple,
while Théâtre Ste-Catherine delivers
with the surreal 7 Stories

CLASSIC BROMANCE: John Evans and Rod Beattie

by NEIL BOYCE

It was an innocent enough remark about guys, broads, cigars and poker playing—and what to do with material like this in 2008.

Taking a break from rehearsing the cast of The Odd Couple, Diana Leblanc anticipates the question and says sternly, “You mean, what’s an aging feminist like me doing directing Neil Simon?” before she busts up laughing.

It began for the busy director when she saw in actors Rod Beattie and John Evans the crucial spark required for it to work.

“I suppose it’s a guy’s play, I like doing guy’s plays—my dream is to do Glengarry Glen Ross,” she says. “I saw Rod and John doing a play out in Victoria about a couple of middle-aged guys trying to get laid and their timing was wonderful. A year and a half later, (Segal artistic director) Bryna Wasserman gave me the opportunity to do The Odd Couple and I said, ‘I’ll do it if you get those two.’”

Simon’s work from play to film to TV show has become a part of our language. The story of Oscar and Felix, the slob and uptight neat-freak, sharing an apartment after Felix’s wife throws him out is a classic, buried deep in the pop culture vibe of the late ’60s.

“It’s a masterpiece of the genre,” Leblanc says. “There are days I just spend laughing. But in a very unsentimental way, it’s full of heart—it’s a love story.”

Mike Paterson, who plays one of Oscar’s poker buddies, puts the piece in context. “This play is the beginning of the sitcom,” he says. “The whole style that everybody’s doing now, the way we look at comedy these days on television, it all came from Neil Simon.”

Apartment hopping

Théâtre Ste-Catherine may be hosting the most ambitious spectacle so far for the young venue with Tableau d’Hôte’s season closer, 7 Stories.

It opens with a vertiginous set, the exterior of an apartment building that dwarfs the tiny stage. Then, looking suspiciously like a René Magritte figure in a bowler hat, a Man appears on the ledge, perhaps deciding about whether to jump. As he makes up his mind, he is constantly interrupted by 13 strange and self-obsessed characters who emerge from the windows like bizarre pop-ups.

The nearly 20-year-old piece from Canadian playwright Morris Panych feels fresh and contemporary under Olivier Perras’s direction, the mounting disorientation sets up the audience for funny moments of absurd and increasingly surreal humour.

Eric Davis is great as the nameless central figure, maintaining a heightened panic throughout, and in a performance that sets the whole piece in motion, Mike Payette is wonderful as a paranoid wild man—and possibly licensed psychologist—rife with accusations.

The story moves from absurd fantasy into something deeper as the characters pile up. The piece begins to look at the nature of a life, and how, exactly, one chooses to spend it.

A fine moment: recounting a trip to Paris and an encounter with an agitated man, Catherine Lemieux as the elderly Lillian employs the only French phrase she knows: “Le pamplemousse est sur la table.” Reflecting on how well it worked, she concludes, “It’s not a bad philosophy to live by.”

The Odd Couple to May 25 at Segal
centre (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine)
$25–$47, (514) 739-7944 or
www.segalcentre.org
7 Stories to May 11 at Théâtre Ste-Catherine
(264 Ste-Catherine E.)$23,
student/senior $15, (514) 848-9696
or tickets@tableaudhotetheatre.com