THEATRE REVIEW: FEATURING LORETTA
14 May'10

'Featuring Loretta' has many flaws

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5

TORONTO - It was, after all, one of the funniest entries in George F. Walker’s acclaimed six-part SUBURBAN MOTEL series, so it would seem logical that the first thing one would look for in remounting FEATURING LORETTA would be a crackerjack Loretta to feature.

Instead, in bringing the fifth play in the SM series back to life, director Ken Gass goes all counter-intuitive on us, weighing his production down with a major casting faux-pas, right off the top.

FEATURING LORETTA opened last Thursday on the Factory Theatre mainstage, closing out a memorable 40th-anniversary season for the nation’s leading purveyors of quality Canadian stagecraft.

And certainly there’s no denying that in casting Lesley Faulkner in the title role — a beautiful young widow who has an instant and very physical effect on most every male who sees her — Gass has landed a Loretta that not only looks the part but wears the costumes‚ what there is of ’em, to maximum effect.

Unfortunately, when it comes to moving from looking the part to playing it, Faulkner simply can’t get deep enough into the character of the young widow determined to take control of her own life in such a way that we can root for her. On the surface, she’s fine, but when it comes to the character’s requisite toughness and vulnerability and anger and sorrow, Faulkner and Gass are fishing in what appears to be terribly shallow water.

Mind you, they get scant help from Marian Wihak’s sprawling, utterly unbelievable set — a creation that looks more like an under-furnished suite than a cramped room in a seedy downtown motel. The set completely ignores how much of the humour of this piece grows from the friction created by having too many people in a too-small space.

Sadly, Faulkner is not Gass’s only casting misstep either, for in recruiting Kevin Hanchard to play the role of Michael, the aspiring young talent agent for topless bars (or as another character succinctly describes him, “a pimp”), Gass may earn points for colour-blind casting, but loses them all and more when he wakes up in a fetid slough of racial cliches which, of course, he then tries to side-step, all to the detriment of the production.

Fortunately, in landing Brandon McGibbon in the role of the hapless Dave, a needy and impulsive nerd who has come a-wooing the shapely Loretta and her charms, Gass comes up aces. But even McGibbon’s strong performance, coupled with a fun turn from Monica Dottor as the harried daughter of the motel’s Russian owner, is not enough to save the day, particularly when Gass seems so determined to keep tripping himself up.

In terms of pacing, Gass transforms what is supposed to be a carnival ride into a leisurely cross-town trip on an aging trolley. And when things really start to crawl, rather than put a directorial foot to the floor, he inexplicably throws in a bit of ‘cutting-edge’ video embroidery and even a dash of meta-theatricality, which only serve to slow things down even more.

FEATURING LORETTA’s program suggests the show will run 75 minutes, but there was very little change from an hour-and-a-half on my watch by the time the last video rolled. And in a piece of comic theatre where even a split second counts, 15 minutes cannot only be a lifetime, it can also be the death of you.