REVIEW
What: Escape from Happiness
Where: Langham Court Theatre
When: To May 7
Rating: Four out of five)
There’s no question that George F. Walker’s absurdist farce Escape from Happiness is a bona fide workout.
For the cast, it’s a word-stuffed challenge of monumental proportions. It’s quite the trek for the audience, too. A just-opened Langham Court Theatre’s production clocks in at nearly three hours, including intermission.
An eccentric hybrid, Escape from Happiness is part crime thriller and part satire on dysfunctional families. It’s wickedly funny, yet Walker’s bite equals that of such domestic vivisections as Long Day’s Journey into Night and August: Osage County.
Sprawling, strange, overarchingly ambitious, Escape from Happiness is a difficult play to do well. Capturing the correct tone is especially tricky. To their credit, the Langham crew, under Wendy Merk’s able direction, do an impressive job — especially for a community theatre troupe.
Escape from Happiness is about a working-class mom struggling to hold her family together. Nora’s adult daughters are Elizabeth, a high-strung and volatile lawyer, the neurotically self-absorbed Mary Ann, and Gail, who’s pretty ordinary — but in this play emerges as a shining beacon of sanity.
The continual irritant is Tom, an ex-cop and Nora’s husband (although she pretends he’s not). Something bad obviously happened to Tom, who staggers around with a blanket over his head, demanding soup in a Rain Man-like voice.
The tone is set at the beginning. We’re greeted by the sight of Junior (Gail’s husband), who’s collapsed and covered in blood. Thugs have beaten him. Nora advises Junior to shake it off by getting up and dancing. Such a Monty Python-like bon mot typifies Walker’s black sense of humour, wiggling through the play like a playful serpent.
Escape from Happiness upshifts into a crime thriller when cops bust in to find drug-filled garbage bags in the wall of the family home. Nora is duly marched off to the police station. Did she do it? And if not, who did?
Walker’s wit and the pinball craziness of the script hold our attention. But it seems he could have done with an editor — like Nora, the playwright seems excessively voluble, pinwheeling like a never-ending firework.
Happily, Merk’s direction emphasizes clarity and vivacity. On Thursday, each actor had very fine moments — unfortunately, space limitation prevents giving each of the 10 performers their well-earned due.
Lorene Cammiade did a lovely job of capturing Nora, finding the right balance between wide-eyed innocence and quirkiness. The underlying anger that provides the play’s backbone was personified by Chilko Tivy, who as teeth-clenched Elizabeth raged through like a fistful of broken glass.
Natalie Shaw as Gail and Michelle Mitchell — who manages to make Mary Ann’s narcissism likable — also caught their characters’ essential elements. The hardworking cast includes Matt Mathiason, Wayne Yercha, Rosemary Jeffery, Andrew Pirie, Kevin Stinson and John Manson.
Of late, Langham Court Theatre has hosted a series of terrific sets. This trend continues with Don Keith’s excellent depiction of a dilapidated home interior. There’s a curious beauty in the chunks of exposed lath, peeling layers of wallpaper and cleverly patinated paint. If I had to live in a slum, this would be my first choice.