THE RIVER LADY by David Widdicombe, directed by Matthew Gorman (Lonesome Crowded West). At Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace (16 Ryerson). To May 14. Pwyc-$15. 416-504-7529. See listing. Rating: NNN
If you’re in the mood for a play about love – unrequited and quietly desperate – David Widdicombe’s The River Lady hits the target.
Drifter Laurel (Arlin Dixon) and Tyler (Daniel Chapman-Smith) meet in the diner where he works as a dishwasher. Each has a past filled with emptiness and disappointments.
Laurel drifts not only from place to place but from man to man she’d like a baby but fears bringing a new life into a troubled world. Tyler plans his own religion, one based on The Planet Of The Apes, to return people to life’s basics.
Widdicombe, a fine Canadian writer who’s worked in film in recent years, knows how to create rich characters. Quirky humour adds to their depth and lets them spark off each other in striking ways.
There’s a tentative quality to Dixon and Chapman-Smith’s initial interaction under Matthew Gorman’s direction, but that works well for characters who have trouble making eye contact. We have a stronger sense of Tyler and Laurel earlier in the show, when they deliver monologues that suggest their fears and desires.
As the diner conversation turns to death and suicide – the title figure is an unidentified suicide whose body won’t decay – we learn the degree of Tyler and Laurel’s anger, most of which they turn inward with corrosive effect.
The actors don’t always capture the pair’s desperation, but in the production’s best scene, Chapman-Smith and Dixon slowly dance a physical and emotional pas de deux around each other, their characters slipping from fantasy to reality, trying on the love they hope to share but ultimately finding another way to connect.
