No clowning around

Rabbit, Rabbit is a dark, profane and poetic
debut from Amy Lee Lavoie

CHILD’S PLAY: Rabbit, Rabbit

by NEIL BOYCE

It all happens in an empty swimming pool. Remember where you are in the venue with Amy Lee Lavoie’s play, Rabbit, Rabbit: the deep end.

Infinitheatre opens its season by premiering the first professional production of Lavoie’s work. And what a start to a career.

The company’s often awkward space in the former Bain St-Michel was never used to greater effect. Stark lighting on torn wallpaper and rows of cheap mirror tile dazzle the eye as we face a narrow stage at drain level. The actors are already in place, waiting.

The set is a combination bedroom/dressing room. On one side, a young girl in a tutu lounges lazily on the bed. On the other, in front of a make-up mirror, a greasy-looking clown adjusts the hula-hoop waist of his pants and affixes a red clown nose. He isn’t smiling. Scenes from the movie Galaxy Quest babble crazily from a little TV. We already know this won’t end well.

Under Guy Sprung’s bold direction and Lavoie’s stunning text, the atmosphere of creepy dread ramps up, mercilessly, from the opening moments.

Teen prostitute Britney (Ashley Dunn) and “Cosmo the clown” Larry (Howard Rosenstein) are negotiating how they’ll spend the hour ahead—and Cosmo is quite particular with the psycho-sexual scene he’s envisioning.

Britney’s a blabby and bubbly 16-year-old, an endless stream of enthusiasm coupled with a hypertrophied attention span. Impossibly happy, seemingly unaffected by the work, Britney loves trying out new words, inserting them into her speech wherever possible (she’s a self-described “noteworthy” giver of blowjobs, although, she “laments,” the work can be pretty disgusting).

Cosmo is a distracted, fidgety and vacant pedophile. Eaten alive by his addictions, he’s fixated on Isolde, a six-year-old he met at a children’s party. “I really need to get straight this week,” says Larry, but his regular client, 12-year old Sabrina, is booked for the night with a “fat-ass turkey fuck” toilet fetishist in the adjoining motel room.

Rosenstein’s Cosmo is a fascinating construct—he wears the clown outfit nonchalantly, as a businessman would a power suit: to impress and deceive. His voice goes from flat to Mickey Mouse to a frightful croak, depending on his needs.

As the story gathers speed and we dismantle the artifices of this deeply unhappy pair, the thought is, “Don’t let this be more tame Canadian theatre. Fucking don’t hold back.” They did not.

Dunn, also making her professional theatre debut, shows no fear in the role, willing to take Britney from her happy veneer to a point where she snaps, convulsing, her brain on overload as she shrieks out variations on “monkey cum motherfucker brain cum fucker!”

It’s difficult to do justice to Lavoie’s script without a stream of superlatives. She’s found the beauty and poetry in the profane. She’s created a fantastically grotesque and sordid world that remains, somehow, believable and human: a corrosive blast to nice, safe, small theatre.

Great work stirs up associations. Since Rabbit, Rabbit, scenes from Blue Velvet—with its fucked-up characters fixated on a Roy Orbison song—have returned with a special resonance:

A candy coloured clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
“Go to sleep, everything is alright.”

RABBIT RABBIT TO NOV. 29 AT
BAIN ST-MICHEL (5300 ST-DOMINIQUE)
INFO: (514) 987-1774,
BOX-OFFICE@INFINITHEATRE.COM