Someone for Everyone: too much pathos as playwright G.A.D. Caplan carries us through the intiation of a nice young man trying to find a nice girl.
This play comes to the conclusion that maybe there isn’t “Someone for Everyone”, something we discover after a series of sketches that carry us though the “case” of Steven Greenberg. This nice Jewish boy from Montreal is desperately trying to find a nice girl who is willing to have sex with him because she finds him physically attractive, and not because she wants to be “nice’ to him. But, girls only want to be his friend, and he is fed up, frustrated and even quite desperate. Narrated by his alter ego, who speaks to audience members as though we were the omniscient house shrink, in pure Woody Allan style, the story of Steven has moments of clever humour, (like the meeting in the confressional with Steven caught between a Priest and a Rabbi. or that encounter in the Jewish Dating service, or some of the scenes in first year university where Steven meets Girls! ). Some of the scenes do becomes repetitive, some even drag out the pathos a bit too much .
However, this has no reflexion on Patrick Gauthier’s tight staging which keeps it all flowing and flipping from one scene to the nextin the most imaginative way. Also excellent was the character acting and all those marvellous creatures who appear and dissappear into the shadows. There is even a certain German psychiatrist who appears to be playing both sides against the middle in a most unprofessional way. The comic creations are hillarious. Watch out for Catriona Leger in particular.There is Second City material here!
You can see that Caplan is immersed in film scenarios, TV scripts, and his adoration of Woody Allan’s neurosis oriented dialogue as well the comedian’s Purple Rose of Cairo pirandellian techniques that have the characters moving in and out of the show as though they really existed in the outside world. However, Caplan’s troubled young man is still insearch of himelf (and an author) because the show needs more work. It slows down after a while, some of the gags run thin, appear repetitive and dont survive the hour and 20 minute run, in spite of Kris Joseph’s film montage that establishes the atmosphere perfectly. If all the less interesting skteches were removed, and it were cut to about 50 minutes, it would make an excellent fringe show.
Reviewed by Alvina Ruprecht , Ottawa, September 20, 2010