Riffs on Shakespeare: High Gravel Blind
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Stratford has its new Studio space, backing on to the proscenium Avon Theatre. Its stage is a full-size replica of the Festival Theatre platform -- steps, balcony and all -- but its black-box auditorium is much smaller, seating only 250. The theatre is intended for the unveiling of new plays and the investigation of unfamiliar old ones. This opening season is devoted entirely to new work, mainly short pieces presented in a series of three double bills .The first of these opened on Saturday.

"It is a wise father that knows his own child": that, reversing the usual proverb, was the conclusion of Launcelot Gobbo, the clown of The Merchant of Venice, after comically announcing his own death to the father who, "being more than sand-blind, high-gravel blind," had failed to recognize him. Paul Dunn, who was last season's Launcelot at Stratford, has written his own ingenious variation on this unlovable jest and called it High Gravel Blind.

His Launcelot, commonly known as Lance, is a Montreal ex- squeegee kid currently sharing an apartment, though not a bed, with Jessica, who makes something of a living as an artist -- more of one, anyway, than Lance, who is flunking bartender's school. Determined to better himself, Lance, to Jessica's unreconstructed Bohemian horror, puts on a three-piece suit and goes out in search of work. Or he would, if he didn't suddenly have visitors. At the door are Gord, the father who abandoned him as a child and has now come from Calgary to seek him out, and Margery, a born-again Christian and Gord's new wife.

Gord is the only character not to be named after a Shakespearean counterpart, probably because Shakespeare never told us Old Gobbo's first name. Jessica was of course the daughter of Launcelot Gobbo's employer Shylock, and Margery was the name of Old Gobbo's offstage wife. To complete the symmetry, Richard Monette, who directed Dunn in The Merchant, directs his play here, and does an excellent job. The play, though, is no pastiche. It goes off on its own track.

Chances are that Gord wouldn't recognize Lance even if he were in his usual gear, but the sober-suited young man he beholds is so unlike the pathetic figure he expected that he is completely thrown. Lance, having gone to unprecedented sartorial lengths to begin a new life, is less inclined than ever to confront his old one. He says that Lance is dead, and that he himself is another roommate called Rob. So the four characters sit down to discuss the departed.

The scenes that introduce the two couples are commonplace, but when the four get together the play combusts, an especially cheering progression for a young author whose previous play (for Theatre Direct) was a monologue. The situation is that of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- its last act, anyway -- turned inside out; instead of an imaginary child being treated as real, we have a real, visible one debated as if he no longer existed. In many ways this is a more interesting situation, and certainly a more poignant one.

Booze flows less freely than in Virginia Woolf, since Gord is a recovering alcoholic who has reached the apologizing stage. He has a lot to apologize for, and Stephen Ouimette's tight-reined performance turns out to be the play's motor. Cunning games are played with our sympathies. We are inclined to be on Gord's side since he is on alien on bewildering turf, and a cruel trick is being played on him. But we come to see that Lance may have reasons other than fear and selfishness not to acknowledge this particular parent, who explodes internally at the realization, never quite articulated, that his son is/was homosexual. Nor can we ever be quite sure how close Gord may be to proving the wise father and knowing his own child and how much he too may be playing a self- protective game. (There is a running metaphor about clothes making the man; Lance is the creature of his own new suit, and Jessica, professionally, makes masks.)

Part of us wants to see a reunion between father and son; another part dreads a resolution so potentially sentimental. How it actually turns out I must not say, but I can promise that the ending is honest. Most of the play's comedy resides in Chick Reid's bustling Marg; Lance and Jess are well handled by Damien Atkins and Kimwun Perehinec.