A Boy Called Newfoundland: Quirky play suffers in staging
Have you ever seen one of those poor dogs or cats that misguided owners insist on dressing up until they look like neurotic furry Barbies?
That’s kind of what’s happened to A Boy Called Newfoundland, now playing in a Theatre Smash production at the Tarragon Extra Space.
This is a gentle, quirky, highly original play by Graeme Gillis that tells of a family falling apart and trying to put itself back together again. When I tell you that the leading character is a 15-year-old-boy named Newfoundland Willow whose family prefer to call him “Flounder,” you’ll start to get an idea of the offbeat flavour of the play.
The family has been held together by mom and dad writing a newspaper called The Romantic Times, all about, well, romances in the world, but one day mom comes back from a supposed vacation to Newfoundland (the province, not her son) without dad in tow and the drama begins.
It’s all just slightly off centre and potentially very charming, with one daughter a belligerent tomboy, the other “bumping uglies” with an uptight divinity student, while our friend Flounder longs for a Quebecois girl he met at summer camp.
You’re totally prepared to go along with Gillis and his offbeat characters, but the production by Ashlie Corcoran makes that incredibly hard. She tries to out-stylize and out-invent the author with staging that works overtime in the busy department and has that air of arch cuteness that sometimes weighs down episodes of Glee.
Robin Fisher’s set is another problem, a series of steep platforms painted in vivid, coloured stripes. It must have looked neat on the model, but in a low-budget production with actors clunking up and down constantly, it quickly wears out its welcome.
The cast do a generally fine job, although you see them being tugged between the offbeat purity of the script and the artifice of the staging. Patrick Kwok-Choon manages to make the impossible Flounder quite charming, Natasha Greenblatt and Lara Jean Chorostecki do well as the sisters and Martin Happer is gravely endearing as the divinity student.
As the mother, Martha Burns holds firmly to her delusions, but the script lets her down here and there with inconsistent actions, while Layne Coleman is a wonderfully fond and foolish father. It’s just hard to figure out why Gillis didn’t give them the final scene together the play seems to be pointing towards.
On the basis of A Boy Called Newfoundland, I’d go see the next Graeme Gillis play in a minute, but I’d look closely at who was directing and designing it first.
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