THEATRE REVIEW: RECONCILIATION
16 Apr'10

Play has trouble written all over it

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

“What would happen,” the publicity bumpf for a new play titled RECONCILIATION posits, “If Sky Gilbert wrote THE DRAWER BOY?”

Well, having caught the play in question in its final preview at Buddies In Bad Times, where it opened Wednesday night in a presentation by Gilbert’s Cabaret Company, one is likely to answer: “Mehh, not much.”

Now, to be clear, Gilbert’s RECONCILIATION is not simply a re-write-on-gay-themes of Michael Healey’s very popular and widely produced farm epic. Rather, it is Gilbert’s attempt to explore if not a kinder, gentler way of making theatre, then certainly a more populist, even sentimental, approach to the art form — as he clings resolutely to his particular vision of ‘queer’ culture.

So where Healey set his tale in an old farm house inhabited by two old friends, Gilbert stocks his farm home with two brothers — Blake (played by Jason Cadieux), who lives in the house in question, and Jared (played by Wes Berger) who is visiting from Toronto for the weekend. Playwright/director Gilbert quickly establishes, however, that it is not an excess of fraternal affection that has brought the two together on this occasion. Indeed, his protagonists waste little time in establishing their mutual loathing across the chasms that separate them.

Blake, it seems, is a slob, while Jared exhibits a fastidiousness that borders on the anal.

Blake is a sweatsuit sort, while Jared is quite comfortable sleeping in a suit and tie with his brief case close at hand.

Blake subsists on beer and breakfast cereal, while Jared is clearly accustomed to dining on finer stuff, such as hard liquor and sushi.

Blake keeps company with their deceased father’s ghost (played by Bruce Beaton), while Jared takes comfort in the fact that there seems to be only a ghost of a chance that his relationship will survive.

Blake works in a gravel pit and raises emus, while Jared works as a professor and raises his eyebrows at everything Blake does.

About the only thing they have in common, finally, is the fact that they are both more than a little removed from the major bulge in a sexual bell curve — and we aren’t talking simple matters of gay and straight here. In fact, Gilbert seems to find it entertaining to turn the brothers’ respective sexual orientations into a bit of a guessing game in the early part of the show and, in view of the fact that it offers some small distraction in what quickly becomes scene after scene of endless bickering, we aren’t about to spill the beans.

Eventually, as it all shakes out over two long acts, it develops that even though they both have issues of sexual intimacy, each sees his own situation as superior to the other’s. Enter dear old dad — far more the Ghost of Christmas Past than anything glimpsed by Hamlet — who sorts things out with a drunken homily or two.

Designed and lit by Andy Moro, RECONCILIATION’s set certainly goes THE DRAWER BOY one better when it comes to rusticity, although Gilbert’s performers inhabit it as if there were a convenient bar around the corner and all of rural Ontario were blessedly mosquito free.

None of which would be all that problematic, of course, if Gilbert had managed to make the brothers and their profane bickering compelling, moving or even remotely entertaining. Instead, he merely created the kind of tedium that has inspired thousands of fathers over the years to yell: “If I have to pull this car over...”

If Michael Healey had written RECONCILIATION, it probably would have been a lot more entertaining — at the very least.