Heat, Don’t Fail Me Now | Tracy Penner and Garett Ross are artists trying to survive a cold snap in A Year of Winter.
DETAILS
A YEAR OF WINTER
Directed by John Hudson. Written by Scott Sharplin. Starring Tracy Penner and Garett Ross. Varscona Theatre (10329-83 Ave). To Mar 29. Tickets available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca) or the Shadow Theatre box office (434-5564).
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The latest piece from Edmonton playwright Scott Sharplin poses a considerable problem for theatre critics. For the sake of suspense, a review normally sticks to the play’s first half for any descriptions of plot, and the first half of A Year of Winter is pretty unappealing. It’s full of clunky dialogue, the stilted tone of a sitcom (complete with the worrisome premise that audiences are willing to laugh at untreated mental illness), and an infuriatingly shameless exploiter dressed up as a figure of sympathy.
But wait! The play is almost wholly redeemed by a phoenix-like and satisfying second act, which in fact consciously rewrites and darkly complicates a lot of the most unlikeable material from earlier on in a way that makes total sense. Problem is, I can’t really tell you about any of these later bits without spoiling the whole experience. So you’ll have to trust me — and if you happen to be reading this in the Varscona lobby at intermission, never fear: it’s about to get much, much better.
John Hudson’s production begins in a freezing Edmonton basement, where a reclusive, dangerously schizophrenic painter named Terry Winter (Garett Ross) is trying to capture the faces that haunt his dreams in rough charcoal sketches. This is much to the chagrin of Alice (Tracy Penner), a childhood friend of Terry’s who now finds herself his de facto caregiver, buying him food and supplies, and liaising with Terry’s agent on his behalf. She’d rather he focus on producing new work that can actually make the two of them some money.
But Alice is a would-be painter too, so between their semi-strained banter about paint colours and the temperature (an early clunker: “It’s colder than a husky’s bum in here”) is a larger argument about what happens to art when it enters the public sphere as a commodity. Terry is petrified at the thought of strangers getting such a naked look at his mental demons; Alice, on the other hand, could care less about her friend’s sanity unless it also happens to attract some more buyers.
The reason all of this leaves such a sour aftertaste is that for its first half, the play actually takes Alice’s side in the debate. More than once are we encouraged to chuckle with her at one of Terry’s obvious cries for help, as if he were just a quirky Friends guest star and not a man who is, for all intents and purposes, trapped in a basement. None of this is the actors’ fault: Tracy Penner makes Alice as warm as possible under the circumstances, and Garett Ross presents Terry as a man whose world really is slowly constricting around him like a python.
And these problems in the script fade right out in the second act, when we jump a year into the future only to find Alice a national superstar and Terry mysteriously AWOL. Here begins a gripping psychological detective story that draws
on many things we’ve already seen and heard — the pair’s childhood memories, the strange contract they both signed, the mysterious set of masks Terry made before disappearing — and casts it all into serious doubt. By the end, the canvases spread around C.M. Zuby’s creepy set design double up as a huge sheet of ice on the North Saskatchewan River, and the frantic sweat on Penner’s face is the product of more than just wearing a winter jacket under theatre lights.
You’ll come out of A Year of Winter with the rug pulled firmly and happily out from under you — it would just be nice if the rug itself were also fun to stand on.
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