culture
Not a Walk in the Park
Optic Heart's Crush takes audiences into the barren landscape of an Ontario trailer park, with events you wouldn't believe—if they weren't based on real life.
Courtney Lyons (Sandra), Julian DeZotti (Martin), and Ryan Kelly (Ronny) turn the four walls of their trailers into one heck of a triangle.
Crush
Factory Studio Theatre (125 Bathurst Street)
December 1—11, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday matinee at 2:30 p.m.
$15-$20, PWYC Tuesday and Sunday
Daytime talk shows are the definition of the term “guilty pleasure.” Because when you’re knee-deep in Kleenxes and Tylenol bottles, unable to shed layers of ratty PJ’s and slippers and enter the public world, there’s nothing quite as redeeming as hearing the dramatic squabbles of paternity tests, adulterous trysts, and scandalous secrets revealed on national TV.
But after seeing Crush by Hume Baugh, a 2008 SummerWorks highlight in a remount at Factory Theatre that ends this weekend, any delight that such schadenfreude once brought us has pretty much disappeared.
The show takes the audience into the lives of three residents of a southern Ontario trailer park in the early 1990s—an overweight dreamer Sandra (Courtney Lyons), her gay best friend Ronny (Ryan Kelly), and the new stud on the block Martin (Julian DeZotti). Inside the microcosm that is their park, Ronny gets by through bartending at a local gay bar and faceless sexual encounters, Sandra with a receptionist job and hopes for worldwide fame. But the arrival of Martin—and his fluffy brown hair, tucked-in shirt, and leather loafers—throws their routines into turmoil. The trio of neighbours bond over beers and flasks of vodka, but tension escalates as both Ronny and Sandra vie for Martin’s affections, who himself is torn with his own personal confusion and unease after a fresh breakup. In such tight quarters, there is no such thing as privacy, and their friendship eventually spills over into anger, hurt, and violence.
With such dark issues, the characters of Sandra, Ronny, and Martin are defined by the place they live. From the perspective of those who don’t and never have lived in a trailer park, it’s difficult to distinguish between whether these are realistic portrayals of that lifestyle, or if they’re caricatures of what we imagine life in a trailer park to be. But in fact this script was loosely-based on a murder that took place after a “Secret Admirer” episode of Jenny Jones in the ’90s, when a guest was killed by his friend in a fit of rage days after revealing his “crush” on him on the show; a dose of reality that adds an extra layer of gravity to the story. Kelly and DeZotti’s performances become sadder, more desperate, and more lost once we realize the truth behind the fiction. By contrast, Sandra’s character—the one not directly involved in the original event—seems more contrived, an effect which isn’t helped by Lyons’ often exaggerated portrayal.
Each character is tragic in their own way, trapped by their particular circumstances: Sandra most clearly wishes to escape the confines of the park, Ronny desires a bigger and more stable love than his fleeting affairs, and Martin is consumed with an unspeakable darkness inside him. The emotions build to a dire level, and a sense of claustrophobia is enhanced by the intimate studio theatre, in which the audience surrounds the wooden skeleton of a trailer that the action rarely leaves. While the concept of the set is effective, it acts as a cage, while the wooden frame is so insubstantial that Sandra’s claim that “there’s nothing here” takes on a literal meaning—the movable pieces and doors within it are distracting, the actors using them at seemingly random points.
It’s still not perfect, but this remount of Crush directed by Siminovitch Prize-winning Mark Cassidy shows that it’s on the right track to become a very harrowing, impactful play. And with a soundtrack that includes Oasis, The Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, and Bush, it’s also a walk down memory lane. But one thing’s for sure—this story surely isn’t a walk in the park.