THEATRE REVIEW: A BOY CALLED NEWFOUNDLAND
2 April'10

Maximum quirk, b'y

JOHN COULBOURN -QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

A BOY CALLED NEWFOUNDLAND could well do for quirky what a girl called Mary Tyler Moore did for spunky. To refresh your memory:

Long ago, in a three-channel universe far, far away, there was a spunky TV heroine named Mary Richards, (played by the aforementioned Moore.) How spunky, you ask? So relentlessly spunky was Ms Richards, in fact, that her curmudgeonly boss, played by Ed Asner, was famously forced to acknowledge that she had spunk — and then promptly told her he hated it.

By the end of A BOY CALLED NEWFOUNDLAND — a new play from Graeme Gillis that had its world premiere in the Tarragon Theatre’s Extra Space on Tuesday — one suspects more than a few people will be amazed by their newly discovered but nonetheless deeply profound loathing of quirk.

Produced by Theatre Smash and directed by Ashlie Corcoran, A BOY... starts promisingly enough. With the lovely face of Vivien Endicott-Douglas (cast in the role of Evelyn), seemingly suspended in mid-air, bidding adieu, it seems, to her young swain, a boy called Newfoundland, who apparently lives far from Evelyn’s Quebecois home.

Next up, of course, we meet Newfoundland himself, played by Patrick Kwok-Choon. The charm continues, as the awkward young man struggles to come to terms with being ditched by the young lady he fell in love with at a remedial French camp in the summer just past.

Quickly, we discover many strange and quirky things about this young man, named Newfoundland Willow, not the least of which is the fact that everyone in his quirky family calls him Flounder, and that he lives in a brightly coloured home at the top of a hill somewhere in the Maritimes. We also learn he has two older sisters, the feminine and amorous Arley-Rose (played by Lara Jean Chorostecki) and the butch and belligerent Brigid (Natasha Greenblatt) — and, as siblings do, they don’t get on terribly well.

Apparently their parents do, however — so much so that mother Marianne (Martha Burns) and father Bill (Layne Coleman) support their family by publishing The Romantic Times — a niche publication devoted to affairs of the heart, both theirs and others.

But in the midst of Arley-Rose’s plans to elope with her lover, Hadley (a sweat-soaked but horny theologian played by Martin Happer), Marianne arrives home to announce that old Bill Willow has abandoned his roots and left hearth, home and family.
While the eccentric mother languishes, her equally eccentric children do their level best to get on with life and heal the rift between their dippy parents — and things just get quirkier and quirkier as the play tackles everything from turkey shoots to incest with the same vacuous and light-hearted, quirky charm.

This is, it must be added, a hugely game cast. All, with the exception of Coleman — who could stop a runaway Toyota with his leaden performance — do their level best to convince us we aren’t, in fact, about to suffocate in silliness as we sink in a quagmire of quirkiness, but are having a whole boatload of fun instead.

It all plays out on a versatile, multi-leveled set, painted in quirky rainbow hues by designer Robin Fisher, quirkily lit by Jason Hand — a set that, like the play itself, starts out with its pedal to the metal in the charm department, but soon gets all caught up in sap generated by its own quirkiness.

A BOY CALLED NEWFOUNDLAND — unlike the movie JUNO, which is obviously some sort of conceptual relative — fails to go anywhere. It chooses instead to revel in its own quirkiness in the hope that it will somehow be enough, when in fact, it is simply too, too much.

By half.


A BOY CALLED NEWFOUNDLAND
At the Tarragon Extra Space
Directed by Ashlie Corcoran
Starring the ensemble