Angry young long-winded man

>> Spit happens in three-hour marathon Littoral

by AMY BARRATT

There's this play I keep seeing over and over. The stage is bare. The lights are positioned on the sides and back of the black box and periodically shone directly into my eyes. The cast is young, energetic and, usually, very talented. Five or six guys and two girls. Always two girls. Everybody runs around and yells a lot.

A young man addressing the audience describes the best fuck of his life. Then he gets mad about something and spits on the front row.

As I sat watching Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral, I kept having déjà vus. I've never seen this play before, but I sure have seen its ilk. Playwright/director Mouawad is one of our better angry young men, so Littoral isn't as tedious as it might be, even at three-and-a-half hours.

When it played La Licorne in December '98, I was warned that the show was four hours long. This time a publicist reassured me that it was "more like three." In fact, as the program clearly states, it runs three hours and 35 minutes, including the two intermissions. Having seen the current production, I doubt that the cut in running time is due to cuts in the text. Rather, I suspect that Mouawad has simply directed his actors to speed everything up. It isn't just Steve Laplante as the lead character, Wilfrid, who literally spits out his words; it's everyone.

The first act has Wilfrid distracted from the aforementioned copulation by a telephone call informing him that his estranged father is dead. Some of the best and funniest moments in the production come when he assembles a grotesque company of aunts and uncles to ask that his father be buried in the family crypt next to his mother (who died a-birthing him). Their answer: no way, José.

Wilfrid then realizes that what he really should do is return the body to its unnamed homeland, the war-torn country into which Wilfrid was also born. Specifically, he hopes to bury the old man on a beach where his parents danced in their youth. Throughout the first act, Wilfrid periodically addresses the shadowy figure of the "judge" who will decide whether he may transport the body.

The second act finds Wilfrid and his father--who, although dead, walks, talks and looks pretty darn good in a panama hat--touching down in the homeland, a bleak place where everyone wears woolen blankets draped over their heads. Here he wanders about seeking a plot of land that isn't already occupied by death and haphazardly amassing a band of unmerry men (and a couple of women). To their sad tales of death and despair Wilfrid responds with bourgeois envy. Compared to them, he feels he has no story to tell. And yet, there he is, up there yapping neurotically for three-and-a-half hours like Woody Allen on speed. Our hero is, to say the least, a self-absorbed young man.

I shouldn't knock Mouawad because with this, as with many of his projects, he manages to make literate material accessible to the action film and video game set. And it has to be good news for theatre when the average audience member appears to be barely out of his/her teens. :

Littoral at La Licorne until June 3, 7pm, 523-2246. At L'Agora de la Danse, Tues-Sat, June 6 to 17, 7pm, 525-1500