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Underdogs have their day >> Anglo angst at Just for Laughs by AMY BARRATT
We'll probably never know which explanation was true, or whether they both were. But we are finally getting a chance to see the play--based on Weintraub's novel of the same name--thanks to Andy Nulman and the troops at Just for Laughs. Interestingly, the script has undergone extensive cuts and changes since Centaur passed on it. This time around, it was lucky enough to find a director willing to work closely with the playwright and get the play ready for the boards. The main reason to be interested in this production is that the director is Joel Greenberg, who gave us possibly this past winter's most thought-provoking evening of theatre in Taking Sides, also at Centaur. Taking Sides is about the de-Nazification tribunals following WWII, specifically the case of an orchestra conductor who may have been a sympathizer and the American officer who is determined to get him. I asked Greenberg if he saw any parallells between the two plays. "I think there are. For an audience, I think they're quite similar," he said. "In both plays, the audience is not allowed to sit back. They have to take a position; they have to listen to the side they don't want to listen to. "In a sense,Taking Sides is much safer. Underdogs is a tougher because it's closer to home. It's now. It's not nostalgic on any level. It's not a philosophical thing." Is he suggesting that there are different sides presented in The Underdogs? That it isn't just a one-sided rant? "If (a play) is simply propaganda, the writing doesn't allow you to deal with characters as people. If someone just represents a side--this is good and this is bad--then sometimes you don't do the writing a service by trying to humanize it. But Taking Sides wasn't that and I don't think, frankly, The Underdogs is either." Greenberg is very clear that he is approaching The Underdogs as true satire, the aim of which is "to educate, to stir debate, to provoke." He calls The Underdogs political theatre, but denies that it's agitprop. Nor is it, despite the Just for Laughs banner, sketch comedy or farce. He likens it to the work of Dario Fo in that "you're pushing the limits of credibility and you're making your point by talking about a world that doesn't exist. But there's enough truth in what's being said that the audience can find plenty of reference points." Clearly, the project has found a champion in this director. This is only the second year that Just for Laughs has tried producing legitimate theatre. And this year they seem to be working very hard to get everything right--probably because last year's Silly Cow, starring Luba Goy, was such a critical flop. Greenberg says that both Nulman and programming director Bruce Hills have been available to him without ever breathing down his neck. The production has a wonderfully skewed set by William Chesney (who also designed Taking Sides), that looks like a cross between 1984 and Alice in Wonderland. The talented, mostly local cast includes Pierre Lenoir, Anik Matern and Kathleen McAuliffe. It would be a shame if only anglophones--and only those in the Bill Johnson/Bill Weintraub age range--went to see The Underdogs. I'm not promising another Taking Sides, but there's enough talent involved here to at least make for an interesting failure. The Underdogs opens Thursday, July 16 at 7:30pm at the Gesù. It runs Tuesdays through Sundays until August 2. Tickets $25 and $35
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For a new play, The Underdogs sure has been around a while. William Weintraub's satire about life in Quebec 20 years after separation was slated for production at Centaur in the late '80s, then pulled. Centaur's artistic director at the time, Maurice Podbrey, said the play simply wasn't good enough, or at least needed work. The playwright in turn suggested that Podbrey and the Centaur were chickening out, shying away from the inflammatory material.