Happiness is warm fun

>> A dark screwball play

by AMY BARRATT

Yet another darkly hilarious offering got up and running last Friday night at Concordia's D.B. Clarke Theatre. George F. Walker's Escape From Happiness began the Department of Theatre's fall semester, which is devoted to Canadian plays. Part of Walker's "East End" series, the play is set in a tough neighbourhood of an unspecified Canadian city. Director Ralph Allison describes it as a play about "family"--and not just the biological kind, either.

"All the characters have to deal with protecting their own--whether it's the cops, the robbers or the actual family in the story," says Allison. What Allison neglects to mention is that this is a very funny play. Think You Can't Take It With You for the '90s. The atmosphere is grittier than that of the 1930s classic--there's alcoholism, drugs, pornography and raunchy language--but Escape From Happiness is essentially a screwball comedy.

The action takes place in the kitchen of a family home which is, for each family member, a kind of fortress against the outside world. Tom (Dick Dousett), who mistreated his family before abandoning them, has returned to his wife and three grown daughters after 10 years. Nora, the mother (Verona S), continues to insist that her husband is dead and that this man, who suffers from an Alzheimer-like condition, just looks very much like him. Nevertheless, Tom has managed to move back in. The only family members who will have anything to do with him are the youngest daughter, Gail (Graidhne Lelieveld-Amiro) and her husband, Junior (Gage Pierre). The two older daughters, the tightly wound Elizabeth (Elisa Schwarz) and the flaky Mary Ann (Lesley Faulkner), are drawn back into the fold when the outside world threatens to encroach.

Obviously, this being a university production, some of the actors are much too young for the parts they're playing. In the case of Kelly and Verona S in particular, neither makeup nor body language convinced me that they were middle-aged. Generally, though, director Allison has put together a strong production, with each characterization as exaggerated as the next--and as strangely true. :

Escape From Happiness, at D. B. Clarke Theatre, until Oct. 26.