CRUSH by Hume Baugh, directed by Mark Cassidy, with Julian DeZotti, Ryan Kelly and Courtney Lyons (Optic Heart). At Factory Studio (125 Bathurst). Runs to December 11, Tuesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Sunday 2:30 pm. $20, $15 stu/sr, Tues and Sun pwyc. 416-504-9971. See listing. Rating: NNN
It’s not just teenagers who fall head over heels for the wrong person.
In Hume Baugh’s Crush, Sandra and Ronny, friends living in a small-town trailer park, are looking for the right partner, a man who satisfies their emotional and physical needs. Sandra, a straight woman, and Ronny, a gay man, both fixate on Martin, a confused newcomer who’s just broken with his girlfriend.
The strong emotional desires that develop aren’t good for any one of them, especially in a community where everyone gossips about everyone else’s supposed secrets.
Baugh’s script, inspired by a tragedy that began on the Jenny Jones Show in the 1990s, has grown since its 2008 SummerWorks run. The characters’ emptiness and confusion – they all have a negative self-image – are now better developed. We can see Sandra and Ronny’s obsessions more clearly, while the climax has lost none of its strength.
Courtney Lyons’ Sandra is the most sympathetic but also the most predictable of the trio, often lost in the dream of becoming a TV personality in a beer-inspired fantasy, she becomes her favourite talk show host, a woman who both encourages Sandra and puts her down. Martin, she thinks, offers her a path to a new life, away from a world “where no one wants to kiss the fat girl.”
As Ronny, Ryan Kelly is all bravado and cool talk. On the surface he wants to bed one hot man after another, but he’d actually like to settle down with a lover. Kelly gives Ronny a growing sweetness, a sense that the growing feelings he has for Martin blunt his waspish sting.
The troubled Martin, pulled in different directions by the other two, doesn’t reveal all that’s happening within, though Julian DeZotti suggests the darkness and violence that Martin can’t speak about. The lost Martin, never losing the feeling of being an outsider, knows there’s “something inside me that’ll never be right.”
Mark Cassidy’s direction nicely shows the change in the male characters, though at times his staging, with the audience sitting around the action, is unnecessarily fussy.
