The Whisenhunt Theatre at the Zach is theatre-in-the-round or strictly speaking octogon but despite two curtain calls at the end of the night the three actors ignored the east and west sections of the audience.
Fiction has three characters all of whom are writers. A husband and wife and the gal at the writer’s workshop with whom he has a dalliance. Given the theatre configuration the set consisted of an end table, a number of chairs, and several storage containers that held props. Perversely I called to memory a play staged by Larry Solway at the Oakville Centre in which he played a writer whose bookshelves on stage contained 74 dictionaries, I suppose the slowest moving items the local Whites Bookstore was willing to loan. At the time I found that more disgusting than the fact that he walked off stage at one point displaying his naked buttocks.
The husky-looking boy-next-door Robert Gomes does not look the part of a starving writer though at 5’ 11’ 180 pounds he may be too small to be a running back. In the course of the play we learn his penchant for beer in brown bottles not green, for keeping detailed journals--about 50 appear on stage, for brown or beige corduroy. A few of the movie scripts he has written are alluded to though he describes himself as a hack writer. If film writing has made him a rich man it does not appear so on stage. His wife we discover is dying of cancer though there is no appearance of illness onstage.
This is a play in which the action is inferred from the dialogue where the actors sit around sparring verbally with one another. The setting jumps from the present to the past and the future illustrating points made in discussion. Nothing takes place on stage and save for the putting off or on of a jacket or shawl there are no costume changes. Save for a few brief scenes in which the actors used facial expressions and hand gestures to react to one another the dramaturge was non-stop. If you were raised on Seinfeld and like David Mamet then this will be to your taste. It should be obvious it wasn’t too mine.
Fiction has three characters all of whom are writers. A husband and wife and the gal at the writer’s workshop with whom he has a dalliance. Given the theatre configuration the set consisted of an end table, a number of chairs, and several storage containers that held props. Perversely I called to memory a play staged by Larry Solway at the Oakville Centre in which he played a writer whose bookshelves on stage contained 74 dictionaries, I suppose the slowest moving items the local Whites Bookstore was willing to loan. At the time I found that more disgusting than the fact that he walked off stage at one point displaying his naked buttocks.
The husky-looking boy-next-door Robert Gomes does not look the part of a starving writer though at 5’ 11’ 180 pounds he may be too small to be a running back. In the course of the play we learn his penchant for beer in brown bottles not green, for keeping detailed journals--about 50 appear on stage, for brown or beige corduroy. A few of the movie scripts he has written are alluded to though he describes himself as a hack writer. If film writing has made him a rich man it does not appear so on stage. His wife we discover is dying of cancer though there is no appearance of illness onstage.
This is a play in which the action is inferred from the dialogue where the actors sit around sparring verbally with one another. The setting jumps from the present to the past and the future illustrating points made in discussion. Nothing takes place on stage and save for the putting off or on of a jacket or shawl there are no costume changes. Save for a few brief scenes in which the actors used facial expressions and hand gestures to react to one another the dramaturge was non-stop. If you were raised on Seinfeld and like David Mamet then this will be to your taste. It should be obvious it wasn’t too mine.
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