Hroses, An Affront to Reason: A hodge-podge of semi-defined concepts.

  Photo: Barb Gray
Some ideas should remain just that: ideas. Putting them on stage does no one any favour, least of all audiences. That’s the case with Jill Connell’s Hroses, a hodge-podge of semi-defined concepts and often vaguely poetic language that never figures out what it wants to be when it grows up.

Connell’s script – and it’s not without merit including some evocative passages – tells the tale of two lovers and a horse in some nebulous,  possibly post-apocalyptic world. Ellery (Nick Di Gaetano) works in  sugar mines where all the men have moustaches while Lily, who is sometimes called Susan and is played by Katie Swift, tends crops on  her grandmother’s paper farm.  Directed by Emily Pearlman, the two engage in slightly unhinged  conversations, occasionally talk dirty, argue about whether or not the  farm is threatened by the mining underneath it, and sometimes climb  aboard the wooden horse. The horse, spelled “hrose” by the subversive  Ellery, says nothing but does look like he might be worth getting to  know. 

Buried in all this is a story, I think, about death and rebirth. About nasty commercial enterprises. About ecological destruction. And about love, power, and the age-old battle between reason and passion. Unfortunately, the script lacks much passion, and there’s little sense of relationship between the two characters or between the characters and the ideas (including something about quantum physics) with which Connell works. 

All this is too bad because Di Gaetano and Swift are good actors. But  this is one of those shows where everyone from playwright to director > to actors apparently got caught up in their own enthusiasm and never  considered that people would have to watch it. 
A Coproduction of Evolution theatre and Mi Casa Theatre