Mules just closed, but Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies has 3 more performances at East Side Players. I'm not entirely sure how many shows are left in Little Menace (an evening of Pinter shorts at Soulpepper), but it was extended to March 17, so there is quite a bit of time left to see it.
Minor SPOILERS in the mini-reviews below...
Mules is a dark comedy about drug smuggling with one of the actors being the mule and the other her handler, who is trying to change the plan, in a probably futile effort to cut out the drug dealer above her in the chain. I suppose part of my "beef" with the play is the mis-marketing or at least mislabelling of the play. There are comic moments, but the ending is not at all funny nor does it put things right that were knocked askew (basically the classic definition of a comedy). There are cases with really depressing endings (if you think things through) but are funny in a bleak way, so that they still qualify as comedies. I'd put Dr. Stangelove and probably even How to Get Ahead in Advertising in this camp. This really was more of a dramedy or even Polonius's hybrid category: tragical-comical-historical-pastoral (though more urban than pastoral). While the mis-marketing didn't bother me all that much for Stratford's Napoli Milionaria!, it actually did bug me here for some reason. Now interestingly, I basically could buy the explanation they gave to cover a couple of plot holes that bothered the Mooney's reviewer, but there was a different issue that kept nagging at me and that is before she left, one woman would have definitely made sure that the other one had updated contact info in case anything happened to her daughter. That would have eliminated a fair bit of pointless "raising the stakes" that was just distracting. But my single biggest issue with the play was the introduction of a third character (a male janitor in training who basically will not leave the "mule" in peace to pass out all the drugs in her intestinal tract). On top of it not being really believable that he would insist on coming in, the writers made him a fairly racist,* homophobic jerk, so that the audience wouldn't feel bad when bad things happen to him. Overall, I did like the chemistry of the two leads, but the plot needs a serious overhaul to make this play work.
I had high hopes for Little Menace, which were largely met. However, in the end, I generally agreed with the Mooney reviewer that it was worth seeing, but it was not without flaws. The Basement was the longest piece. It just wasn't that interesting and was frankly a dud. Either they should have cut it and gotten the show down to 60 minutes (probably the better option) or replaced this with two other shorts, maybe A Kind of Alaska or even Night School (though that would have required some gender-flipping apparently). They might have considered transitioning from New World Order to One for the Road, but that one is really dark and might have just been too much for the overall tone of the evening. Another option might have been to pair Night with Landscape, though that might have been too much of a good thing. In any event, I definitely thought it was worth seeing, though I wish they had reconsidered including The Basement.
I wasn't really sure about Time Stands Still at East Side Players. It was the middle show of the subscription and I was more interested in the ones on either side, but I decided to go ahead and get the subscription. I thought it would be a fairly typical melodrama, but it ended up being surprisingly good. The main plot is that two journalists (or rather one journalist and one photo-journalist) are back from a very difficult tour of Iraq and are recovering. They interact with their editor and his new, young girlfriend and slowly piece their lives back together. I was pleasantly surprised that no one came across as a complete jerk, though they certainly did have conflicts over different issues. The ending was a bit downbeat but fairly realistic as the couple began to diverge (one being a true adrenaline junky and wanting to go back while the other had finally had enough of war). I haven't read it but apparently James Salter's Light Years is along a similar theme (without the war correspondent angle). Perhaps the only slightly off note is that one of the two makes a big point about how their careers have been built off the suffering of others, but this is also the same one that ends up going back to the front. I suppose foolish consistency and all that... Anyway, a surprisingly strong play, and I would recommend seeing it at East Side Players in the 3 dates that are left.
* I can definitely buy racists living in Metro Vancouver, but I can't believe anyone his age (and from Vancouver) confusing someone of Indian background with a Mexican. It just doesn't compute.
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