|
Centaur shoots up >> Audience feels no pain from High Life by AMY BARRATT
High Life, a comedy about morphine addicts that opened last week, is actually a Crow's Theatre Company (Toronto) production that Centaur has picked up to fill a slot in their subscription season. No shame in that: it's a highly acclaimed production and winner of a Dora award for best play. Though there may be grumbling in some circles about the Centaur bringing in a show lock, stock and hypodermic needle (instead of casting it locally), surely part of the theatre's mandate is to expose Montreal audiences to the best from across Canada. With a better-than-it-ought-to-be script, razor-sharp direction and uniformly delectable acting, High Life certainly qualifies. Playwright Lee MacDougall has never been a drug addict; he just shared a house with some once. Not being an addict or an ex-con myself--yes, I have a squeaky-clean past; I'm not proud of it--I can't be sure that everything in the show is 100 per cent accurate. What's perhaps more important, though, is that it feels accurate. Each of the four characters in the play may be a "type," but none are stereotypes. The four actors, even when playing the comedy broad enough to accommodate triple takes, are absolutely solid in their characterizations. I don't ever want to hear again that anglo Toronto actors don't know how to use their bodies. This is pretty traditional theatre--not dance or clown-based--and yet at least half of what gets said here is in body language. The play begins with two old buddies, Dick and Bug, reminiscing about old times, both in and out of prison. Ron White, a familiar face to Centaur patrons, plays Dick, the kind of dominant personality who, when he was in the joint, earned the nickname "the warden." Bug (Randy Hughson) is a bear of very little brain and even less sense of right and wrong: your average big, dumb psychopath. These two actors have been with the production since the beginning and it shows. They are as comfortable with each others' rhythms as an old vaudeville team. High Life premiered in Toronto in 1996, and the production has made numerous stops around the country since then. Brent Carver, who was in the original cast, is no longer with the show, but it's hard to believe he could have been any better in the part of Donnie than Steve Cumyn. Donnie is a small-time thief who looks like a walking corpse and sounds like your Aunt Marge from Mississauga. "Oh yeah, I always try to return the wallets if I can, 'coz it takes forever to replace all those cards, eh?" Completing the quartet of misfits, brought together by Dick to execute a master heist, is Billy (Jason Cadieux), a teen-idol cute, preppie kid whose lifestyle hasn't yet taken its toll on his looks. They are four characters who have nothing in common except morphine, but for them, morphine is everything. Through black humour, High Life humanizes these hard-living characters without making them all cute and fuzzy. Unlike Taking Sides, this play doesn't make you think overly much, but like that drama, it does get you to identify with some characters you never would have imagined caring about. High Life until April 26 at Centaur Theatre
|
I'm in a quandary. First with Taking Sides and now with High Life, I find myself praising two Centaur shows in a row. People will think I'm sucking up. God forbid I should become known as the nice critic... no danger of that, you say? Okay then.