Snowman
At the Revue Stage until Nov. 19 Tickets: vancouvertix.com
Greg MacArthur's Snowman, directed by Craig Hall, had its world premiere back in 2003 at Performance Works. As part of Rumble Productions' The Young & The Restless series, it only ran for four days. "It's like a poem by Robert Service high on cocaine," was how I described it back then and I loved it. Hall, Yvan Morissette and Kevin MacDonald's expansive set with lots of clear plastic sheeting was so evocative of the Canadian North's vast ice fields that I felt cold. The play was funny in a quirky way, but overall it was a haunting tale of three drifters who have reached the edge of the edge.
Once again directed by Hall but on the Arts Club's Revue Stage, Snowman is very funny; it feels like a completely different play and it's intriguing to think about why this should be.
To begin with, the Revue stage is smaller and the set features a couple of dozen bare, birchlike tree trunks illuminated variously by John Webber with a lot of side-lighting ranging from warm gold to icy cold against a bright turquoise blue sky. Centre stage is a double bed with a shabby coverlet. While the room's occupants are warmly dressed-Denver (Derek Metz) in well-worn grey longjohns and Marjorie (Kathleen Duborg) in pyjama bottoms and woolen undershirt-it doesn't feel frigid. One imagines a woodstove pumping away in a corner somewhere. The vastness is gone and with it the terrible sense of having reached the end of the line. The scenes out on the ice take place on top of the bed-ostensibly out there somewhere on the glacier where the naked body of a boy is found encased in ice.
And in a play structured around direct address storytelling, the characters are so much closer to the audience than they were in Performance Works. Metz (who also starred in the show back in '03) is hilarious, and the intimacy of the space amplifies his portrayal of Denver as laid back and permanently stoned. Metz just has to grunt and the audience laughs. Given such proximity, the characters are completely in our face. Loopy, vacant Marjorie; sad, troubled Jude (Charlie Gallant); and disillusioned, horny archaeologist Kim (Anna Cummer). You can almost smell Denver's grubby grey longjohns and the ointment he smears on Kim's almost naked, woodtick-bitten body.
This production may be playing up the humour and the opening night audience lapped it up-but it works. When the play darkens, the contrast is intensified. Gallant's Jude is so lost, so desperate for someone to love. With his naked, slim, white, back to us as he's cradled by Denver after falling through the ice, Jude seems almost Christ-like.
Beautiful, elegant Duborg looks like someone has taken pruning shears to her hair and she maintains a distant, nobody-home look as Marjorie shifts nervously from left foot to right foot to left foot again. She lights up briefly as Marjorie tells of her weird fantasy of being "excavated," her entrails pulled out and displayed all red and shiny.
Cummer is all bouncy and curly haired as Kim, the government archaeologist sent to investigate the body. Cummer's portrayal is definitely as a city girl out for hot sex in the cold North.
Robert Perrault's live guitar playing adds appreciably to this production.
I liked the play in 2003. And I like this production, too. If the first production reminded me of Robert Service, this production, strangely, made me think of Waiting for Godot. After the dust-or the snowflakes-settles, Denver suggests they pick a direction and leave. They don't go.
Director Hall, unfortunately, will go as he takes up artistic direction of Calgary's Vertigo Theatre. He will leave a glacier-sized hole in the Vancouver theatre community. Damn those cowboys, but congratulations and good luck to Hall.
