THEATRE PREVIEW

FEBRUARY 2025 | Volume 248

 

The Arts Club’s Canadian premiere of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for Theatre is a surprisingly modest affair. There’s not a whole lot to this 80-minute-long, gentle,feel-good story of a gentle man who once was lost but finds his way with the help of his friends. The gentleness and relative simplicity of the story may be the point. In fact, Ashlie Corcoran’s production only loses its way where it overrides the simplicity with unnecessary theatricality.

Kenneth (Andrew Broderick) tells us his tale. Growing up an orphan, bounced from one foster home to another, he emerged into adulthood with the help of his only friend, Bert (Broadus Mattison). He has settled into a quiet, routine life in a small town in upstate New York, working at a bookstore.Kenneth spends his evenings drinking Mai Tai’s and talking with Bert at the local bar, Wally’s.

When the play opens, the kindly bookstore owner, Sam (Andrew Wheeler), tells Kenneth he’s selling the store and it will close, cutting him adrift. Kenneth seems a lost soul, even with Bert’s help and advice, until, on the recommendation of a waitress at Wally’s, Corrina (Celia Aloma), he applies for a job at the title bank and is hired by the animated, somewhat eccentric manager, Clay (Wheeler again).

Kenneth has to break out of his dependency on Bert and learn to trust himself and his new friends, as Corrina and Clay must trust him. The twist in the play, which I won’t reveal, involves the nature of Kenneth’s friendship with Bert. Suffice to say that in this age of American cynicism, where empathy (think Trump and Musk) has become a joke if not a crime, an American play that embraces such values deserves a prize.

The primary characters are all very likable. Broderick plays Kenneth as an innocent, sweet-natured and vulnerable, while Mattison’s Bert conveys quiet strength as he becomes, unknowingly, Kenneth’s crutch. Aloma gives Corrina the qualities that would make anyone want her for a best friend. And Wheeler, one of Vancouver’s consistently best actors, finds charming ways to give admirable life to crusty old Sam and slightly weird but ultimately loveable Clay.

Here’s where things go wrong for me: in a strange, frequent, annoying sound effect that accompanies little shifts in reality that don’t need a bell to ring or even to be marked at all. In Aloma’sheavily exaggerated portrayals of two or three other servers at Wally’s that obscure most of whatever it is they say. And in the piano and guitar accompaniment of a musician (the excellent Anton Lipovetsky) that often plays over dialogue I’d rather hear unadulterated. Whether these are scripted or directorial additions, they do little for a play in which less is almost always more.

 

 

 

 

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