This is a Play
Playing at:	Lunchbox Theatre
Plays until:	May 17, 2007
Reviewed by:	Louis B.
	FULL REVIEW
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Nova Scotia-born playwright, actor and director Daniel McIvor is one of Canada’s most innovative and exciting artists.

Even in his most inconsequential moments he dwarfs most playwrights.

Such is the case with This is a Play, a brilliantly naughty backstage farce that’s enjoying a brilliantly naughty production at Lunchbox.

McIvor gives us a play-within-a-play.

His three actors are starring in a bleak Canadian melodrama, one of those gawd-awful things regional playwrights churned out in the 1960s and ’70s.

Instead of getting the actual dialogue, the audience is treated to the interior thoughts of the actors.

All those back-stabbing, self-congratulatory, selfish, mean-spirited, scene-stealing, manipulative thoughts and actions that are legendary among theatre folk.

This is a Play is a farce so the actors are allowed to exaggerate and mug shamelessly which they do with great abandon.

Karen Johnson-Diamond is The Older Female Actress trapped in horrible dialogue and an even more horrible wig.

She is the aunt with a terrible secret that’s as obivous to the audience as her dreadful locks.

Jennie Esdale is The Younger Female Actress, one of those frail, tragic heroines that were a staple with Tennesse Williams, William Inge and Arthur Miller.

She’s waiting to be loved or at least deflowered.

Evan Rothery is The Male Actor, the stranger who will eventually steal the young woman’s heart only to have his broken when he forces the older woman to reveal her scandalous secret.

It’s silly, silly stuff made all the sillier by Simon Mallett’s knowing direction.

There is much that is funny in McIvor’s script to be certain but Mallett mines it for even deeper laughs.

Mallett currently has two plays running in Calgary which illustrate just how versitile a director he is.

There’s this light-weight slapstick nonsense at Lunchbox and then there’s his powerful staging of Sharon Pollock’s new drama Man out of Joint at Vertigo.

As companion pieces This is a Play and Man Out of Joint show that, for Mallett, it’s all about the material.

Happily we see that, as a director, Mallett serves the play not himself.

This is a Play ends Thursday.

Man out of Joint ends Saturday.

Make time for at least one.

Better still, make time for both.

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