Sean Power - Reviews & Interviews

Stuck
20 Apr 1997 - The Toronto Star:
"Simply staged, profanely poetic purgative rant" (by Vit Wagner)

Simply staged, profanely poetic purgative rant

Stuck
By David Rubinoff.
Directed by Chad Dembski.
To May 4 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave.
****

BY VIT WAGNER
THEATRE CRITIC

Jack and Neal - and now Allen - are dead, but the Beat goes on all the same.

For a fine example of how the bohemian stream-of-consciousness esthetic of the '50s can slice with a contemporary edge, check out Stuck, a vertiginous hour-long monologue written by David Rubinoff and performed by Sean Power.

The show, which is being remounted at Theatre Passe Muraille after a successful launch at last year's Fringe, is a raw, purgative rant about sex, drugs and powerlessness. Beneath the surface of the writing - a guttural stew of streetwise profanity - thrums a poetic pulse, expressed not only in the careful selection of the words but in the rhythm of their pacing.

Rubinoff's protagonist, forcefully personified by Power, is Jack (the use of Kerouac's first name is not incidental), an angry, young, gay slacker on the road to nowhere fast. He slides through the underbelly of Toronto delivering a tortured soliloquy that blends sharply observed commentaries on urban life, drugged-out nightmares and fantasies in which he actually takes control of events.

Jack is no moralizing prophet. Or even the proverbial rebel without a cause. He is a man too constantly in need of a fix - dope, booze, cash, Eatmore bars - to take very much of anything seriously. The few times he appears to take charge are moments that exist only in his fertile - and fertilized imagination.

"I was gonna be a chef when I was a kid, but then I got hooked on fast food," he says with a sardonic shrug, in a typical reminiscence of his childhood in small-town Ontario.

When he talks about having taken on odd jobs, the implied meaning of "odd" is peculiar or even queer, not irregular.

At one point, he describes being in an hallucinatory haze on the shores of Lake Ontario when a newspaper floats out of nowhere and lands at his feet. "It's the want ads ... (timed pause)... which I don't."

The text is coaxed along by an attention to rhyme and metre that never becomes clunky or cloying. "I ask Bruno if he'll spot me a buck, but ... (timed pause)... no luck."

The insertion of the pause after "but" rather than "buck" and the measuring of each line in beats rather than syllables makes music of what might have been a uninspired couplet.

The combination of intensity and slovenly nihilism that Power brings to the role of Jack is a perfect complement to Rubinoff's prose. It also invites sympathy for a character who resists being liked.

Power adeptly adopts the guises of various supporting characters - from a drug dealer concerned with the performance of his mutual funds to a lunatic IRA supporter who forces Jack to drive him to the hospital. But it is to the actor's credit that these shifts never seem like mere flexing of prowess. Jack's one aspiration, however half-hearted, is to be a performer, so the intermittent impersonations work on a couple of levels.

Director Chad Dembski is the invisible hand in this barebones production. The staging is simple enough. But the symbiotic relationship between the author and the performer - so apparent in every angry moment of Stuck - testifies to Dembski's judicious involvement.