Nice and naughty

The Centaur’s Urban Tales speaks to
the darker side of holiday cheer

By NEIL BOYCE

The idea of a well-told story is what counts for Centaur’s second Christmas collection, Urban Tales—but the topics covered leave no doubt that we Montrealers are a twisted bunch regarding the holidays.

In this deconstructed Christmas, Harry Standjofski directs and provides music (in Saint Nick garb) between acts. Slumped like Bad Santa in a chair, Standjofski wails lame-o riffs on an ’80s-era axe with too many effects pedals while stories of murder, deformity and decrepitude drift by.

Standjofski and Danette MacKay co-wrote Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?, in which MacKay tells of strippers Chanel and Candy, setting a sleazy tone that would deepen as the night wore on.

It’s a raw story (while fighting, one girl holds a pistol on another, saying “...ouvre ta calice de bouche”) with a tender epilogue. She sees one of the girls years later at a mall, now “just another middle-aged woman who’d done something stupid in her youth.”

Greg MacArthur’s A Tail Tale Art has Patrick Costello playing a young tagger who gets caught by the cops downtown amid the nativity scenes, mid-graffiti. Hurled to the ground (“almost crushing the baby Jesus”), he’s given a fine he decides to pay by doing pharmaceutical guinea pig work.

His transformation at the hands of the drug company isn’t the best payoff for its set-up—a cheesy, corporate-science-gone-mad plot from a b-movie—but Costello sells the humour and horror. His twitchy energy is best as he rants about trendy Montreal fuckheads with Zac Efron haircuts and oversized sunglasses, “using Justin Timberlake, post-structural theory and capoeira all in the same sentence.”

For She Stood Stock Still, Marcel Jeannin takes us inside the head of an angry loner. Witnessing an altercation on the street, he replays the story in his head all day, increasingly worked up that he didn’t intervene—until he does, and finds out how much the outside world differs from his internal one.

After the break, it gets worse. In Yvan Bienvenue’s Bukowski-esque story Mr. Douglas, Chip Chuipka swigs from a flask as he speaks about orphanage abuse and gothic horror.

Amanda Kellock’s performance of Mare-Eve Perron’s Makeover was a high point with great delivery and a sharp text. Her high-strung character just wants the party she’s planning to go perfectly—then a reality TV show (Is This How You Want to Look?) crashes the event. A satisfying explosion of righteous fury follows.

Graham Cuthbertson dispenses with realism right off the bat in André Ducharme’s psycho-slasher, My Sister Eats Balls. You might want to check first when carolers come knocking from now on.

Standjofski’s poignant story Shame finishes the night with the strongest segment: a spooky setting about the misadventures of a home repo-man grippingly rendered by Donovan Reiter.

A line from Bienvenue’s story best captures the desperate feel of the evening. These words don’t always explain the world, he writes. Sometimes, “the stories we tell just archive its crumbling.” Urban Tales to Dec. 20 at Centaur Theatre (453 St-François-Xavier). Tickets: (514) 288-3161 or centaurtheatre.com

More Xmas joy for girl and boy

Hudson Village Theatre presents its eighth annual Traditional Xmas Pantomime with a re-telling of the classic fairytale Beauty and the Beast. As it is still performed in Britain, audience participation will be an important part of the show. Dec. 19–Jan. 10, 28 Wharf Road, villagetheatre.ca

The Dancing Cock Brothers continue their sketch comedy charm offensive with ‘Twas the Cock Before Christmas. Stories about Grandma sex and an evening “funnier than your drunk uncle dancing with the dog.” Dec. 18–20 at Theatre 314 (10 des Pins W., #314).