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These recent Playwrights Canada publications all deserve attention, and have been successfully produced in the theatre. Critically speaking, they demonstrate that stylistically conventional plays run the risk of being rather uninspiring, while those which are theatrically innovative tend to be more imaginative, creative, and hence compelling. Fortunately, more and more play - wrights are choosing the innovative route.
Don Hannah's In the Lobster Capital of the World falls into the conventional category. A realistic domestic play, it is dramatically unremarkable though rich in characterization. Set in a small New Brunswick town, the plot revolves around a small - scale family reunion. Ed, a gay Torontonian in the art business, returns home to visit his recently widowed mother, Emma, and younger misfit brother Michael. They are joined by Patsy (once briefly wed to Michael though secretly pining for Ed) and David, Ed's young artist lover from Toronto. Together, or rather in constantly shifting pairs, they attempt to sort through their feelings about a number of fairly predictable modern issues (fear of commitment, desire for security, anxiety about AIDS and old age and death, longing for lost youth, longing for escape, inability to deal with parents, siblings, women, men, homo - sexuality, past, future, etc.) Their struggles are heartfelt but Hannah throws no new light on the issues, and structurally the play is quite cumbersome. The pace is slow, and whole sections of dialogue simply get one character off the stage so that two others can have a te@te - a - te@te. On the positive side, Hannnah's characters are fully rounded, distinctive personalities, quirky, endearing and often comic. The characters also all reach some form of reconciliation (with themselves and each other) by the end of the play, and there are a few genuinely touching and funny moments along the way. Lobster Capital is heartwarming, but it lacks the economy, precision, and theatricality needed to make it in any way memorable.
Opening Night, by Norm Foster, is a much lighter, quicker - paced play, but it has less substance than Hannah's piece. It is pure summer stock fare - a comedy with no pretensions to be anything more than a fluffy bit of entertainment ("fluffy" being very much the operative word.)
The play deals with...