CRIMINAL
GENIUS
by George F. Walker
Rogue Theatre Equity Co-op
Havana Theatre
1212 Commercial Drive
April 6-23
$15/$17
604-257-0366
www.festivalboxoffice.com
Canadian playwright George F. Walker has a thing for life’s
losers. In his TV series This
Is Wonderland, the bizarre dregs
of Toronto society face an insanely overstressed legal system.
Characters even further down the social ladder take centre
stage in his Suburban Motel plays, an inter-linked series of
six hilariously bleak one-acts all set
in a single squalid motel room. This is the end of the end of the line, temporary
home to petty criminals and alcoholics, the inept and pathetic. People who
know that when the shit hits the fan, it’s going to blow right in their face.
Criminal Genius is the funniest of the Motel plays and this
Equity Co-op production directed by Mel Tuck in the shabby intimacy
of the Havana finds enough of Walker‘s
ferocious humour to make it the sharpest comedy in town.
Rolly and Stevie Moore (Nick Misura and Johann Helf) may be
the most incompetent father-son team in the history of petty
crime. Along with paralytically drunken
motel caretaker Phillie (John Shaw), they find themselves caught up in
a hopelessly failed arson and revenge scheme run by tough gal
Shirley (Jo Bates)
on behalf
of sociopathic Amanda (Denise Jones), daughter of the vicious local mob
boss.
Wide-eyed Helf as Stevie makes a wonderful foil to Misura’s sad-sack, pot-bellied
Rolly, with his thinning hair, missing teeth and holey undershirt. Like Abbott
and Costello directed by Quentin Tarantino, father and son get on these riffs
that build comically through repetition, then explode in a line that shouldn‘t
be humorous at all but is screamingly funny in some awful way. ”Give him
the watch,” says Rolly. “No,” Stevie says, “I‘m
not gonna give him my watch.” After five or six variations of this, Rolly
delivers his punch line: “If you don’t give him the watch I will
kick you to death!”
Part of what makes them such losers in the criminal world is
that they “can’t
do violence.” They’re really out of their depth when faced with blond
trouble in the form of Amanda or the dark, profanity-spewing Shirley. Amanda
likes killing so much it makes her want to have sex. When Shirley gets out of
the shower, the first piece of clothing she puts on is her black leather gloves.
Rolly can only gasp in astonishment at the details of her latest homicide: “You
put a knife in someone’s head?!”
In some of the other Motel plays I’ve seen, Phillie has been funnier than
Shaw makes him here, but he gets his share of big laughs. He also has the play’s
final monologue, spoken from offstage in an inspired scene that epitomizes Walker’s
absurdly grim social comedy.
Now when is some local theatrical entrepreneur going to present
all six Suburban Motel plays in repertory like Toronto’s Factory Theatre has so successfully
done?
Jerry Wasserman |