reviewvancouver: Priory

Dial time back nearly three years, and you’ve got part of the setting for Michael Wynne’s win-some-lose-some play, The Priory. The mood is tense at the start, with Joy Castro as a pensive Kate, the lead character, alone in the priory. With a dexterity surpassed only by austerity, Ms. Castro runs through her range of anxious emotions, effectively underplaying a somewhat feckless fear which hints at the incipient trappings of a horror thriller. Hold that thought. Soon the rest of the characters spill amicably onto the stage, often with a kind of haphazard unexpectedness, and the tone shifts from a mock chill-thrill to a socio-cultural drama with worldly-wise-guise banter. Kate is throwing a New Years Eve party for a select group of intimate friends when a few uninvited guests arrive to put the ‘funk’ into these dysfunctional relationships.

One of these relationships originates on the Internet, where Daniel met a young man named Adam who shows up at the Priory unannounced. Christopher Cook and James Elston, who embody this gay relationship, succeed in registering a clear note of authenticity as they invest their respective characters with just enough nuanced depth to undercut the stereotypical pretentions of homosexuality. Meanwhile, Genvieve Fleming as the vapid but voluptuous Laura manages to be both alluring and hilariously condescending towards homosexuals.

But this play is much more than a good-natured dalliance at the expense of dullards who patronize gays. It reaches farther afield, and with much greater success. With an unexpected transition towards some gender-bending excesses in the second act, The Priory edges as much in the direction of social drama as it does towards comedy. But it is hard to say which is more successful. The insecurity James Elston expertly tousles into his role as Daniel threatens to poison his relationship with Kate, whose own tawdry affairs relentlessly deconstruct leaving her with lowered expectations for success.

Nonetheless, it is Laura who surprises everyone with her quick-change boutique neurosis, fed and nourished by her boyfriend Ben’s abrupt curtailment of their PDA. Gordon Myren inhabits the role of Ben with the mature sophistication of an infatuated adolescent, and manages to infuse his overt hostility towards the object of his disaffection during the second act with almost the same unbridled energy he spends in lip lock during the first.
So if you’re looking for a horror thriller, this comedy of a social drama might do nicely.

There is a scene near the end of the play when all the actors are temporarily off-stage. There is a pregnant pause and Laura returns into the tension that fills the room. The horror that ensues brings together the two least likely to work together on anything. Kate joins forces with Rebecca, played admirably by Catlin Clugston, whose strong performance makes her perhaps the most memorable character you’d least like to know in this dysfunctional cast of characters. Their temporary alliance is a small victory. But no win comes without some loss. It is perhaps the stand articulated so trenchantly by the last woman standing in The Priory that is most telling and least expectant. That’s right, I said, ‘expectant’.