JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
05 NOV 2013
R: 2.5/5
There's a lot of good red meat in George F. Walker's MOSS PARK, currently playing in a Green Thumb Theatre production on the Theatre Passe Muraille mainstage. But director Patrick McDonald serves it it up as a bland and watery vegetarian stew, offering precious little into which an audience can sink its teeth.
A stand-alone sequel to Walker's Tough!, which premiered in the '90s, MOSS PARK reintroduces us to Bobby and Tina, two young Toronto kids who seemed damned to a life below the poverty line when we left them at the end of that first play. In the real world, nearly two decades have passed, but it is only a few years on in the world of Walker's characters, and their situation still appears hopeless as they meet up for an evening in the neglected park of title.
Tina, played by Haley McGee, is struggling as a single mother, raising a two-year-old daughter, while Bobby, played by Graeme McComb, remains a child trapped in a man's body, sorting out commitment issues, not just with Tina, with whom he wants to share his life, but with potential employers, jobs, the truth and even his loser friends. But Tina is short of patience, perched as she is on the verge of eviction and trying to sort out whether to continue with the pregnancy she's just discovered or to terminate it.
In many ways, this is typical Walker fare, unrelenting and occasionally even brutal in its examination of the self-perpetuating nature of the poverty cycle, lacing it all with compassion and black comedy of the bleakest sort — and when he rubs our noses in the options open to young people like these, it is utterly devastating on so very many fronts. Or it would be, one suspects, had director McDonald attacked the script with the same honesty and passion with which it was written.
Instead, in what one assumes is an attempt to create characters with whom a broad range of young people can identify, he soft-pedals everything, serving up a Bobby and Tina who, despite the words they mouth, look and act like nothing so much as a pair of middle-class high school students, having a bad day.
Had McDonald had the courage or the vision to demand the same kind of grit from the performers as he received from set designer Martin Conboy — poverty, after all, leaves physical and emotional scars as well as mental ones — MOSS PARK could have been deeply moving — thought-provoking not just for young adults but for a broader audience as well. Though it's hard to tell, this is a play that could have been a worthy successor to the likes of The End of Civilization, which still ranks as one of the most powerful contemporary indictments of public policy to ever grace a Toronto stage.
If this were a grammatical progression, Tough! would be followed by Tougher!, but sadly that's not the way it seems to work in theatre. Pity.
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