THEATRE REVIEW: WINNERS AND LOSERS

Pictured: James Long, Marcus Youssef









JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
20 NOV 2013
R: 3.5/5

TORONTO - Judged purely on dramatic merit, WINNERS AND LOSERS (the Theatre Replacement/Neworld Theatre/Crow’s Theatre production currently being presented by Crow’s and Canadian Stage at the Berkeley Street Theatre) would come up a winner on pretty much every front.

Conflict? You bet! In fact, it’s surprising just how much conflict can be generated by merely staging an essentially pointless game, wherein two contestants — in this case, Neworld’s Marcus Youssef and Theatre Replacement’s James Long, each playing himself and sharing a writing credit in the process — suggest topics, and summarily (and with an apparent spontaneousness that is the hallmark of satisfying performances) assign to them the status of winner or loser, defending their verdicts where appropriate.

Dramatic build and character development? It’s got those in spades too, as the game these two play grows ever more personal, moving from judging and justifying the win/lose status of obvious targets like Pamela Anderson, microwaves and Mayor Ford to riffs on the relative merits of their personal masturbating styles, their respective fathers, their own parenting skills and finally, each other.

Under Chris Abraham’s taut direction, things move at a satisfying clip toward inexorable trainwreck status with the two performers employing everything including beer drinking and Greek wrestling to avoid being reduced to the status of mere talking heads by the process. Taken at face value, this is theatre as entertaining and as disturbing as it is unorthodox, stripped as it is of conventional plot and staging, dwelling instead in a seemingly real world, the soil of its Vancouver genesis still clinging to its roots and littered with deeply personal improvised explosive devices that prove more than capable of not only wounding and scarring but taking off a metaphorical limb, should the occasion demand.

It’s Ultimate Fighting for the intellectual set. But — and yes, there is a big but here — finally, WINNERS AND LOSERS falls apart under the weight of its own pretension, asking that we extrapolate what we have seen on stage into the broader world — see it as a damning commentary on the capitalist system. Problem is, the boyish dynamic behind their game — a game, I suspect, that would be dismissed by most females of my acquaintance as utterly childish after about 10 minutes — would be exactly the same, were this game played with the same kind of earnestness by two men raised in a country where communism, socialism, informed dictatorship or even theocracy held sway.

Finally, it’s too easy to write it off as just a guy thing, and frankly, WINNERS AND LOSERS emerges more as condemnation of the mind-numbing effects of testosterone than of capitalism. One wonders if it ever crossed any of the three male minds involved in creating this work that perhaps God gave you wives specifically to save you from playing hurtful games like these.