Play leaves audience cold!

>> Freeze feels like reliving ice storm tedium

by AMY BARRATT

They were calling it the first real storm of the season last Thursday night as I made my way to Centaur Theatre for the opening night of Freeze, a play about the 1998 ice storm. As I sat down to write the next morning, ice pellets were falling outside and there was a freezing rain warning.
Was it a publicist’s dream or a publicist’s nightmare? That all depends on whether Montrealers can be convinced they want to relive those dark days just over four years ago. If Centaur can get people in to the theatre, despite its many flaws, Freeze has the familiarity factor that scores big with local audiences.

Stephen Orlov’s play is, thankfully, a comedy. Even though it was scary when four out of five main power lines were down and we thought the water supply might fail, a straight drama about those events would have been painful. Or I should say, more painful. Because Freeze is not painless. There is some really terrible writing in there. I’m thinking particularly of a supposedly suggestive exchange between Nicole and Curtis in the first act that could easily win one of those “bad sex writing” awards.

Freeze is the kind of play I imagine Andy Nulman would have loved to get his hands on when he was running the Just for Laughs festival. It’s full of typical Montreal characters, in-jokes, and political clichés. All plays are, of course, contrived, but this one is like a bathrobe worn inside out: all the seams are showing.

Freeze is set on the fifth day of the ice storm, that Friday from hell when the entire city shut down. The first character we meet is Nicole (France Rolland), a feature writer for Le Devoir who lives in the Monkland Village (enh?). She is sashaying around her duplex in a fur coat thrown over a slinky little dress, as she awaits her jazzman boyfriend who is driving in—slowly—from Toronto.

The boyfriend, Curtis (Tyrone Benskin) does eventually arrive, but not before Nicole is visited by a firewood salesman from the Pointe (Mark Camacho) and a Hydro-Québec serviceman (Michel Perron) who’s been up for 35 hours straight and is in no mood to speculate as to when the lights might come back on. (I wonder if Hydro-Québec knew what they were getting into when they agreed to be a Centaur season sponsor). The little community huddled around Nicole’s trendy fireplace eventually includes her upstairs neighbour Claire (Mary Long), a randy grandma who hails from New Brunswick.

Somehow, Orlov thought that the storm of the century wasn’t excuse enough to keep these five characters together in a confined space, so he sets about fabricating other complications. He has made Curtis’s impulsive marriage proposal and whether Nicole will eventually accept it into a major theme. The trouble is, we don’t care about them as individuals or as a couple.

There are also a lot of little proppy things that detract from the play’s believability. Just one example is how everyone in the house goes to bed leaving a kettle on the fire. Director Harry Standjofski is famously anti-props, but since he has to work with them in this show, he really should pay attention.

Like the ice storm itself, Freeze starts out kind of charming (all that candlelight), but becomes tedious by going on too long. :

Freeze, to March 10 at Centaur Theatre, $20–36, 299-3161