Playing the festival card

>> Centaur's Gin Game and Hydro's chutzpah

by AMY BARRATT

If you've got a Centaur subscription this year, you'd better be a fan of Gordon McCall's directing. The company's artistic director is personally helming three--count 'em, three--shows in the company's season, and that's not even counting For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again which he directed in 1998 and which is returning to Centaur in March after a Canadian tour.

Opening this week, hot on the heels of The Crucible--directed by McCall and starring Douglas Campbell--is The Gin Game, directed by McCall and starring Douglas Campbell.

Although it won a Pulitzer Prize when it premiered in 1977, The Gin Game is really a pretty flimsy piece of writing. On the porch of a seniors' home, a couple of old folks meet, play endless games of cards and reveal tidbits of their pasts. Let's just say the card-game-as-metaphor-for-life bit isn't getting any less cheesy with the passage of time.

D. L. Coburn's script is less a play than a vehicle for a couple of seasoned old pros. The original production starred the incomparable Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, while a 1997 Broadway revival that toured to every whistle stop in the United States featured Julie Harris and Charles Durning.

McCall has brought together Acadian grande dame Viola Leger (who, having appeared in Grace & Glorie at the Saidye last fall, is having quite an anglo season) and Stratford vet Campbell for the Centaur version.

The Gin Game has the good fortune to have fallen under the aegis of the Montreal High Lights Festival/Festival Montreal en Lumiere, which got under way last Friday. Largely geared to attract tourists in this most untouristy season, and organized by some of the people behind the Jazz Fest, High Lights is billed as a "three-tiered celebration of what is quintessentially Montreal." The three "tiers" are "Table Arts" (i.e. fine dining); "Performing Arts and Museums"; and "Lighting Arts." The opening and closing events have been organized specifically for the festival, but in between, most of the cultural activities, like The Gin Game, are things that were going on anyway.

The "lighting arts" portion of the festival is the most difficult to grasp. Events include "multimedia shows" every evening in front of Place des Arts, as well as original lighting "installations" in several downtown squares. Finally, the festival has enlisted the participation of "downtown residents and business owners in linking the major partners of the Festival--concert halls, museums, hotels, theatres and restaurants--by way of lighted corridors." Any surprise that Hydro-Quebec is a major sponsor? At deadline, there had been no reports of large sections of the South Shore being blacked out to redirect power to the downtown core.

Other theatre events falling under the festival's umbrella include: the Montreal Young Company's productions of Measure for Measure and The Possibilities at the Saidye (to March 5); infinitheatre and Omnibus' bilingual production of Farce, by Michael Mackenzie, at Espace Libre (Feb. 27-March 4); Sous le regard des mouches, by Michel-Marc Bouchard at Duceppe (to March 25), My Children! My Africa! presented by Black Theatre Workshop at the MAI (to Feb. 26); and Q Art Theatre's production of Lotte, at the Geordie Space through Feb. 20. :

The Gin Game, tonight (Thursday, Feb. 17) to March 26 at Centaur, $20-35; 288-3161