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The Ol’ Switcheroo | Cardinal and Lauzon switch roles every night.

ThunderStick
Directed by Bradley Moss and Del Surjik.
Written by Kenneth T. Williams.
Starring Lorne Cardinal and Craig Lauzon.
 The Roxy (10708-124th St.)  To Jan. 31.
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The advance hullabaloo surrounding the production of Thunderstick had nothing to do with Kenneth T. Williams’s script, and everything to do with a daring bit of casting. Stars Lorne Cardinal (of Corner Gas) and Craig Lauzon (of Royal Canadian Air Farce) both loved the play’s buffoon hero Jacob so much that they agreed to share the role.

So depending on which night you see it, there’ll be a different version of the guy who wakes up drunk on his living room floor, vowing once again to give up alcohol for good and smashing his face on the toilet bowl.

Inspired by the actors’ hydra-headed approach, Bradley Moss and Del Surjik decided to co-direct it, too, and the whole thing ended up as a joint production between Theatre Network and Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre.

Thunderstick is in many ways a play about multiplicity. The reason Jacob is roused from his drunken stupor is because his cousin Isaac, back in Canada after 15 years shooting photos in tumultuous South Africa and newly employed at the Ottawa Citizen, comes to him with an assignment. Apparently Isaac’s editor mistook Jacob, himself a Citizen reporter whose career is permanently on the brink of collapsing, for his brother. The look on Isaac’s face as he surveys the disheveled apartment implies he was quick in setting the editor straight.

Set amidst the Canadian political scene in the mid-1990s, the assignment starts as a routine press conference with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and quickly expands to include disappearing cabinet ministers and a lesbian conspiracy that Jacob is really, really confident he isn’t just making up. (His credibility may also be affected by the fact that he just vomited a pink Pepto-Bismol spume all over Chretién and most of the press corps.)

For the most part, the story is pleasingly goofy. Cardinal and Lauzon — who played Jacob and Isaac, respectively, on opening night — have an easy chemistry together that meshes well with Williams’s dialogue.

Often the comedy is too broad to hit any real targets, but considering the crushing weight bearing down on the cousins’ shoulders (residential schools and abusive families, to name but a few examples), the fact that it’s able to retain such buoyancy is commendable.

Of course, I couldn’t tell you if Thunderstick works as well when the actors switch roles. It seems to me they were ideally suited to the characters I saw them play, but who knows? With energetic co-directors like Moss and Surjik at the wheel, the ingredients for success remain at their fingertips.