A fine crime caper

>> Great acting and dialogue offset the confusion in Trick or Treat

by AMY BARRATT

Trick or Treat, which opened last week at Centaur, is both tricky and a treat. It's worth seeing for the first-class dialogue and strong performances, but the countless things left unexplained in the script could leave you feeling frustrated.

You've got to hand it to Centaur theatre for putting Trick or Treat in their lineup at all. We don't often see cokeheads and illegal firearms dealers on the boards of the venerable old anglo house. The play, by Jean-Marc Dalpé, was first produced by Théâtre de la Manufacture at La Licorne under the same title. The Centaur production uses a translation by Robert Dickson. The Tarantino-esque story involving guns, drugs and shady dealings also has a poetic side, represented by projected words, dream imagery and references to the Old Testament.

I was curious to see the Centaur version because I had been puzzled by a number of things in the French production. Had I missed pivotal information in the French text or was there really a lot left unexplained? Well, having now seen it in English, a language of which I have a pretty fair command, I'm still confused.

To some extent I think it's the playwright's intention to keep us guessing. As spectators, we're dropped into a world where we don't understand the rules but, like the characters, we sense danger and it makes us edgy.

The play features a string of realistic scenes tied together only by the fact that they take place on holidays: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Canada Day. These first three are relatively short, but number four, Halloween, is like a one-act in its own right. When it ends we're briefly back to projections and voiceovers, then one final scene labelled Good Friday.

The audience emerges from the theatre, as from a dream, asking, "What was that supposed to mean?" Disagreement with your fellow theatregoers about the meaning of a piece is fine, but if there's not even any consensus about what happened in the play--who was killed and how, for instance--that points to a problem in the writing and/or the direction.

Dalpé, who is also a poet, has a fantastic ear for dialogue. Each individual scene is gripping. The problem is that you can still see the cracks where the various pieces have been cut and pasted together to make a semblance of a whole. Sometimes I could make a connection between the Biblical stories and the action, but most of the time it felt like a stretch. The impressionistic bits didn't seem like an organic part of the text but rather a self-conscious attempt to add another level of meaning so as to avoid being called things like "Tarantino-esque."

The director, Fernand Rainville, and the design team have been brought in wholesale from the Théâtre de la Manufacture production. Even the blocking, from what I can recall, is almost identical. The cast, however, is completely new. A couple of old Centaur war horses, Harry Standjofski and Michel Perron, are excellent. Patrice Bélanger so effortlessly portrays the teenage kid getting in way over his head that you forget he's acting. Andreas Apergis is good in his single scene, but must feel as if he's in a different play from everyone else.

Diego Thornton, as the drug-addled Cracked, seemed caricatured to me. In the French script, his dialogue was loaded with anglicisms. The English version attempts to recreate this by using hispanicisms like "no problemo"--to not very great effect.

Trick or Treat, through June 3 at Centaur, $20-36, box office 288-3161