A welcome dead end
Cul-de-sac is inventive, humourous
Regan Sarmatiuk, Staff
Photo by Guntar Kravis.
In Cul-de-sac, a da da kamera production playing until November 26 at the MTC Warehouse, master storyteller Daniel MacIvor weaves an artful tale about one fateful night on a dead-end street while exploring the idea of telling a story in general.
MacIvor, the writer of and lone actor in Cul-de-sac, elevates the idea of the one-man-show as he portrays several residents of an archetypal, quiet suburban cul-de-sac, including a middle-aged gay man named Leonard, and a sampling of his fellow suburbanites.
They each tell their version of the events on one sinister evening that culminated in Leonard letting out an eerie “long, kind of a low, kind of a strange kind of a moan kind of a sound” that “seemed to creep along the ground” and into his neighbour’s windows.
Leonard, on a stage with a chair, the play’s only prop aside from some minimalist but effective sound and lighting effects, opens by informing the audience that he will be telling his story, but warns that “there’s not really all that much to tell.” He then observes that all stories are really just variations on the “hero and the journey,” or, alternately, there are those who believe that “It’s not about the story, it’s about the purpose of the story.” He goes on to suggest that if the latter is true, then the purpose of the story would have “something to do with something about the potential for the desire to believe in the possibility of transformation.”
MacIvor himself makes several transformations, skillfully shifting gears from Leonard to other characters, capturing the quirks and playing up the differing perspectives of each on the events of that fateful night, carrying the rhythm of the play as the plot thickens. It is surprisingly easy, especially in light of the simplicity of the whole production, to imagine Leonard’s cul-de-sac and all of the characters that inhabit it.
There are Joy and Eddie, a blue-collar married couple, along with Madison, an appropriately angst-ridden 13-year-old daughter of divorced lawyer parents, and Virginia, a Gilbert and Sullivan-loving, somewhat snobbish, older married woman. Toss in a retired widower veterinarian and a male prostitute, and the range of characters MacIvor portrays becomes truly impressive.
Still, one can’t help but feel that each character, with the exception of Leonard, is a little over-simplified and unoriginal, even if deliberately so. Joy comes across as the classic sexually deprived mini-van mom, while her husband Eddie is a one-dimensional hockey-loving boor.
Dr. Bickerson, the retired veterinarian, is portrayed as a lonely widower who also loves hockey (and who can’t resist the urge to put Leonard’s cat to sleep), although he does manage to spout out some profound dialogue about “the story”: “We think we’re all so different, but then you get to the point where you realize it’s the same five things that happen to everybody: birth, death, love, weather and arthritis.”
Ken Turner, the uptight lawyer father of Madison, the 13-year-old girl, is there to remind the audience that corporate lawyers are jerks and, as Madison puts it: “Marriage does not work.”
Hmm . . . Sexually repressed hockey moms. Boorish, hockey-loving and somewhat lonely men. Shallow or failed marriages. These are all of the typically negative messages about the suburban existence that have been selling so well ever since American Beauty. Been there, done that.
But the over-simplification of these characters is largely overcome through humour — at times, especially earlier on when Leonard is talking, the play has a bit of a stand-up comedy act feel to it, and it works.
In the end, MacIvor seems to waver back and forth between wanting to make an overarching statement and mocking the practice of making such statements in general. At one point Leonard remarks: “Life is a dead-end street.” He then adds: “I don’t really believe that: it just sounds sophisticated.” However, before the play is over, he states profoundly that: “Life is just a wake-up kiss.” This flip-flopping between the serious and the self-mocking add to the overall charm of the play.
Ultimately, MacIvor’s immense talent, humour and imagination turn a trip to the Cul-de-sac into anything but a dead end.
