Like Wolves: Play crippled by self-centred characters and contrived script.

By Patrick Langston | June 6, 2013

From left, Alix Sideris as Nina, Kimwun Perehinec as Mia, John Koensgen as Yuri and Nancy Beatty as Vera in Like Wolves.

Photo by Chris Mikula, The Ottawa Citizen

Like Wolves, the world premiere at the GCTC by playwright Rosa Laborde, is a lot like a TV sitcom, with shallow characters that it’s hard to care much about. Sam just wants to watch television and crab about the sandwiches his wife Vera has made. Vera buys Sam a present that is really a gift for herself. The couple’s daughters Mia and Nina worship at the altar of self-involvement. Retirement home staffer Tom is a seducer and worse. Only Yuri, Nina’s vodka-swilling boyfriend from Chechnya, seems aware that there’s a life outside his own skin.

All these characters intersect in Like Wolves, the dark comedy by Ottawa native Rosa Laborde making its world premiere at GCTC.Too bad their intersection with each other and even with themselves is so lacking in credibility that we don’t much care what happens to them or mourn the missed opportunities that they’ve let slip by them.

The story focuses on Vera (Nancy Beatty), a mercurial elderly woman whose life has been reduced to a continual round of low-level sniping with her crotchety husband Sam (Peter Froehlich). To celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, Sam, unbeknownst to his wife, agrees to a free stay for the two at Journey’s End, a slick retirement home located by a cluster of high-tech companies (set designer Jessica Poirier-Chang’s modern retirement unit, all hard edges and as void of warmth as a model suite in a condo building, works well).

Sam has a heart attack, and the two daughters — Kimwun Perehinec plays needy and flaky Mia, Alix Sideris is the puffed-up Nina — appear and start causing trouble. The cynical, plain-spoken Yuri (a very funny John Koensgen) further stirs the family pot. Tom (Matthew Edison), an oily representative of the retirement home, slides in and out of the action wearing shoes white enough to blind you.

Vera, cast adrift in all this, starts to reflect on her circumstances and realizes that her life is an unfulfilled one, although she hasn’t a clue what she should have done to fulfil it.

“I see no fully formed people. I just see blobs of effort bouncing around,” she says at one point, her dispirited observation about others clearly being mostly about herself.

Vera’s dilemma is the crux of the play, although it’s hard, given the contrived nature of much of the script, the glib, sit-com elements that pepper it, and director Peter Pasyk’s failure to inject much tension or a recognizable rhythm into the story, to get very worked up about Vera and her life.

One problem is we don’t know enough about Vera’s life prior to when we meet her. That’s an issue for a play tackling issues of aging, memory and lives unfulfilled. Granted, the play’s point is that she is suddenly without moorings and must do something about it rather than, like her husband, just sinking into old age (“Old people are dying; that’s what old people do,” Sam says at one point).

But without knowing her history, it’s impossible for the viewer — yes, it is frequently like watching a television show — to get engaged with Vera.

That surface-deep quality cripples the other characters and their relationships with each other as well. Too often as the story unrolls, you’re more aware of the actor than of the character he or she is playing.

Not that the show is without merit. Laborde writes some very funny lines, there are sparks of warmth and trenchant dialogue (long-married couples will hear echoes of themselves in Sam and Vera’s squabbling), and the cast is good.

But, like Vera’s life, that’s not enough to make for a fulfilling experience.

Continues until June 23. 613-236-5196, gctc.ca.