NEVER SWIM ALONE
by Daniel MacIvor
WARRIORS
by Michel Garneau
Street Repertory Theatre Company with Meta.for Theatre Society
Pacific Theatre, 1420 W. 12th
June 23-July 9
$18/22
604-257-0366
www.streetrep.ca

In theory, a double-bill of Canadian plays about the dynamics and dangers of testosterone-fuelled competitiveness and aggression looks like a great idea. In practice it only half-succeeds. Two young companies, Street Repertory Theatre and Meta.for Theatre, have pooled their resources here with radically mixed results.

The first half of the evening, Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone, is a stunner. Toronto’s MacIvor is one of our indispensable playwrights, with a range of styles from the ensemble naturalism of You Are Here and Marion Bridge to disturbing psychodramatic monologues like House and Cul-de-sac. Never Swim Alone is something else again.

Refereed by a girl in a bathing suit, two men in business suits enact a heavily stylized, absurd machismo contest superimposed over the flashback story of a tragic summer swim. The girl drowned that summer years ago, and the men’s competition offers a theatrically scintillating, if intellectually baffling, commentary on the event.

In their twelve-round bout, adjudicated by the whistle-blowing referee, the men speak rapidly, sometimes in duet, comparing their families, their expensive clothes and homes, challenging each other’s claims, undercutting each other’s status.

When Bill raises questions about Frank’s marriage, Frank observes that Bill’s hair has gotten thinner. They argue about who’s tighter with the boss and insult each other’s parentage. Their musical theme is “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” their rivalry staged as a High Noon showdown.

There’s nothing especially subtle or original about MacIvor’s critique—the referee even pulls out a ruler and measures the men’s penises. What makes it exciting is its dynamic theatricality, especially when the story crosses over to the scenes at the beach where all three race “through the water to the point” in a frantic choral ballet that has the eerie power of Greek tragedy.

MacIvor’s ideas and imagery get full value from the vivid, precise performances of attractive young actors Ruth Brown, Daniel Martin and Thrasso Petras, and director Amanda Lockitch’s imaginative staging. Even the heavy-handed ending, moralizing about winners and losers, gains resonance from video clips of war projected on a screen above the stage.

Those same video scenes accompany the second show of the night, Warriors by Quebec’s Michel Garneau. Again two men go mano a mano. They’re ad execs who have won a contract to brainstorm a new recruiting slogan for the Canadian Forces to replace “There’s no life like it.” Locked in a room with a computer, booze, cocaine and some books on war, they have ten days to deliver the goods.

But this time Lockitch and her actors, Sean Cummings and Jeffrey Fischer, can’t save a clumsy, static script full of conventional ideas and theatrical clichés. Sometimes war is hell indeed.

Jerry Wasserman