WIDE AWAKE HEARTS by Brendan Gall, directed by Gina Wilkinson (Tarragon, 30 Bridgman). To December 12. $10-$44. 416-531-1827. See Continuing. Rating: NNNN
As one character puts it in Brendan Gall’s Wide Awake Hearts, “Nice people make dull drama.” Happily, niceness never intrudes in this witty, sexy new work by the multi-talented Gall.
The characters, who are making a movie, form their own little psycho-sexual network of despair and one-upmanship. There’s A (Gord Rand), the loathsome, loathing producer who, if he can’t prove that his wife, B (Lesley Faulkner), and best friend, C (Raoul Bhaneja), are sleeping together, will make damn sure it happens. A then draws C’s lover (the delicious Maev Beaty) into his insecure, egotistical web. Rand nails his tripping lines with a graceful sort of mania, kneading and prying at his face as if it’s something he’d like to take off.
Under Gina Wilkinson’s often thrilling direction, the four actors emerge and disappear from all angles, evoking the strange and very real sense that they’re arriving from somewhere else.
Combined with Lorenzo Savoini’s cockeyed, sheer-curtained set and Bonnie Beecher’s brandy-toned lighting, Wide Awake Hearts is as striking to the eye as it is to the ear. Which is wonderful. Until you realize that you’re watching the characters without really feeling anything for or with them. But, then, that’s par for the course in their world.
