Matchstick at the GCTC. A gripping, disquieting drama

Photo: Electric Umbrella Images

You may realize earlier or later than your seatmate what is really going on here, but exactly when the penny drops doesn’t matter. What does matter is the intake of breath, the muttered imprecation when you suddenly understand that Matchstick, an odd and intensely original folk musical that starts out in fairy tale-like fashion, is becoming bigger and darker than you ever anticipated. The fairy tale is morphing into real life, and it’s not life as you’d choose to have it.

Playwright Nathan Howe’s story begins in An Undesirable Country where a young, motherless girl named Matchstick (Lauren Holfeuer) is locked out of her home by a cruel father. In Grimm Brothers style, she journeys to a big, soulless city. There, she’s taken in by an aunt (seen only in a photograph that Holfeuer holds aloft while speaking the aunt’s lines) and her reluctant husband (Howe, in one of multiple roles).

Matchstick becomes a young woman and goes through four suitors, all depicted by a snare drum-playing Howe wearing on his head a box with four cut-out faces. That we almost immediately accept these four guys as real – and in fact hardly find a box-wearing actor unusual – is testament to the way this tale so completely wires itself into our imaginations to create its own idiosyncratic and wholly credible world.

An apparent good prince shows up in the form of Alik (Howe again), a persuasive fellow from The Land of Freedom And Opportunity. Matchstick, ever one to look for the light in the darkness, ignores the warning bells, marries the man, has a daughter and briefly basks in happiness. But just as abruptly as Alik swept into her life, he then carries his young family off to his own native land. As the sinister foreshadowings that peppered the first part of the play begin to bear strange fruit, Matchstick finds herself isolated, unable to speak the language, increasingly uncertain about who her husband really is.

Which is exactly where this plot summary stops. To say more would be to say too much.

What you can know is that the husband-and-wife team of Howe and Holfeuer, along with director Kristen Holfeuer, have fashioned a gripping and disquieting show out of an apparently random collection of oddball ingredients.

Their homemade music with its odd rhymes, unexpected metres and angular lyrics is accompanied by guitars, that snare drum, a kazoo, a small xylophone.

There’s a bit of well-wrought choreography and hand-clapping – moments of funny, joyful harmony before disharmony descends.

The set by David Granger includes stylized trees in keeping with the fairy tale theme and a lit, seemingly artless backdrop where coloured sketches and shadow play help carry the narrative and add more characters to the story.

And Matchstick and Alik themselves seem at once randomly mismatched and inevitably drawn together: she’s open, vulnerable, often feisty; he’s controlling and enigmatic.

All this keeps you just a little off balance, perpetually unsettled in the same way that Matchstick is ever-wary even as she sinks deeper and deeper into a story that is not of her own making. There are forces at work, the show is warning, that can turn a fairly tale bleak and frightening, break your life as though it were no stronger than a matchstick.

The show originated as a fringe production and was an award winner when it played the Ottawa Fringe Festival in 2013. Its expansion by 15 minutes or so may account for the fact that it overstays slightly its welcome. But that’s a trifling flaw in an unassuming, compelling show that deserves wider play.

Matchstick
Persephone Theatre (Saskatoon)
At the Great Canadian Theatre Company
Reviewed Thursday in the Ottawa Citizen.

Tickets: GCTC box office, 613-236-5196, gctc.ca