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Culture Theatre

Three plays by Sam Shepard

Three plays by Sam Shepard (4-H CLUB, KILLER’S HEAD, COWBOYS #2) (Candles Co-op). At KA Mansion (160 St. George). To May 31. $15. 416-535-5620. See listing. Rating: NNNN


These three lesser-known plays culled from Sam Shepard’s early years are all about wild young men at play, so what better venue for these short shows than the massive living room of a derelict frat house?

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4-H Club, inspired by Shepard’s first New York City apartment, finds three roommates (Chad Donella, Salvatore Antonio and Sebastian Pigott) surrounded by trash, acting impulsively like childish savages and obsessed with inane foodstuffs. Full of unpredictable outbursts of intensity and violence, the three actors help demonstrate what terrible places hyper-masculine environments are.

Playing off the absurdist dialogue, Donella in particular expertly constructs an atmosphere rife with potential hostility. The best moments have his character obsessively feeding off the others’ escalating paranoia.

Originally written as a short companion piece, Killer’s Head is the high-water mark of Shepard’s dalliance with Beckett-style absurdity. A condemned man (Rouzbeh Fard) attempts to distract himself in the moments directly before his execution by spouting advice on pickup trucks and racehorses. Fard delivers the heartrending monologue skilfully, but it’s when he takes a long, dramatic pause that the full horror of his situation becomes most palpable.

Cowboys #2 centres on two young men (Joe Dinicol, Evan Williams) who use their imaginations and various Southern dialects to pass the time. Williams scores the biggest laughs when his character first breaks out of a clichéd western vernacular, confirming that the bad accents are indeed intentional.

Despite a less-than-satisfying, script-in-hand moment at the end of Cowboys, Steven McCarthy’s direction is otherwise consistently strong, especially in the frantic opening moments of 4-H and his perfect timing of Fard’s agonizing dead-air pauses in Killer’s Head.

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