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Walker on the wild side >> Toronto playwright right at home in joual by AMY BARRATT
I think if George F. Walker heard his plays in joual, as they are currently being performed at Théâtre Quat'Sous, he'd wish he could have written them in joual. The Toronto playwright's wisecracking characters seem more real in Maryse Warda's French translations of Walker's Suburban Motel series than they ever did in English. Why that is is hard to say. Could be that while Walker has to create a slangy dialect for his characters in English (because Toronto doesn't have one), here in Quebec, there's a ready-made dialect for them to use? Or it could be that the larger-than-life Québécois acting style is ideally suited to his outrageously black comedies? At any rate, it's a good thing for Quat'Sous, as they have devoted most of this season to Walker. Having presented L'Enfant problème (Problem Child) last fall, they are following it up with Pour adultes seulement (Adult Entertainment) and Le Genie du crime (Criminal Genius) in rapid succession. All three come from a series of six plays set in the same motel room. The characters in the recently opened Pour adultes seulement possess, at best, a lowest-common-denominator sense of morality. They're despicable, but they're smart enough to know they are--funny in their despicableness, even. Walker's short plays (this one runs 80 minutes with no intermission) are like sitcoms gone haywire: the farcical structure is there, but the content includes everything that is taboo for TV: swearing, violence and sex. The two male characters in the play, Max and Donny, are--God help us--police detectives whose main assignment seems to be covering their own asses. Donny is a drunk with a thing for whores, whose wife Pam--surprise, surprise--has left him. Max is in only slightly better shape. He still has his family at home, but that doesn't stop him from dallying in a motel room with Jayne, a defence attorney. Louise Bombardier steals the show as tough-as-nails Jayne, who goes to the motel to make it with old flame Max and ends up haranguing him, in black lingerie, about how pathetic his life is. Marcel Leboeuf makes good-ol'-boy Max lovable despite his chauvinism, and Gilles Renaud is appropriately dissolute as Donny. Monique Spaziani as Pam plays the only character with any innocence left, though she's doomed to lose it in short order. In a classic Walker gambit, we are so caught up in the cynical world of the other three that we find ourselves feeling contemptuous of Pam's essentially kind heart. Since there's nothing in these Motel de Passage plays that specifically sets them in Toronto rather than Montreal, I wish Warda had gone all the way in her translation and given the characters more French-sounding names. >>> This season's second Romeo and Juliet--this one in English--gets underway tonight (April 15) at the D.B. Clarke Theatre. Presented by the Concordia Theatre Department, it's an intimate studio production which will have the audience seated on stage. Info: 848-4742. Pour adultes seulement continues at Théâtre Quat'Sous until April 17, then Le Genie du crime runs April 19 to May 1. As of May 4, the two plays will be presented in repertory until May 22. Tickets $26; 845-7277
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There's a scene in Sophie's Choice where Sophie begins reading aloud from Look Homeward, Angel--in Polish. And Nathan says, "If that poor bastard Wolfe had heard you reading that, he'd have written it in Polish."