by George F. Walker
Directed by Ken Gass
At Factory Theatre
May 1-June 27, 2010

   Ken Gass’s erratic direction doesn’t help George F. Walker’s shrilly repetitive farce, but probably nothing short of a radical rewrite and a total re-imagining of the work from design to acting to directing would save this seventy-five minute play from Walker’s acclaimed Suburban Motel cycle. The first thing wrong is the script but that is noticed only after the audience feels it is looking at the wrong motel. Marian Wihak’s spacious, decently appointed motel room somewhere in Las Vegas is hardly the seedy, down-at-the-heels setting appropriate to the title character who is struggling not to surrender to forces beyond herself. Loretta is a waitress and pregnant by a man she had an affair with after her philandering husband was eaten by a bear, almost, it could be, as a concession to the stereotype of a wilderness Canadian. She is holed up in this desperate motel, waiting for a call from Michael, a guy who books topless dancers for strip clubs and who looks and acts very much like an oily pimp. She gets many telephone calls but mainly from people she has tried to escape from: her mother, sister, ex in-laws, and her unborn baby’s father who happens to be her dead husband’s best friend. She is supposed to go to dinner with Dave, a salesman of industrial screws—which may be the playwright’s idea of comic irony: screw or be screwed? Well, actually, the pimp would also like to screw her, as he confesses in a lubriciously comic roundabout way as he tries to solicit her service for porno movies. As if this situation were not ridiculous enough, Walker adds Sophie, a depressed Russian cleaning woman who is really a former physicist and whose browbeating father, an ex KGB agent, owns the motel. The comically incongruous cleaning woman is a proponent of The Right to Life and exhorts Loretta not to abort the baby. She also dispenses other assorted words of wisdom, all the while with a poker face and a body language that is sometimes the very silhouette of depression. At least, this is the way Monica Dottor plays her in an accent that sometimes sounds Italian.

   Walker’s play does not progress so much as it falls back on repetitions, its pace and volume growing in inverse proportion to a real forward motion. The men quarrel and then wrestle (with supposedly comic homoerotic overtones) as Loretta is on one of her innumerable calls. The cleaning lady goes on trying to be a clear-eyed witness with a moral centre. Loretta continues to worry about being free to exercise her own needs and choices with the possibility of earning real money. The cast tries hard—sometimes too hard—without reaping many benefits. Brandon McGibbon as the needy, love-struck but insecure Dave comes off best because he knows how to parlay neurotic eccentricity into genuine comedy; Lesley Faulkner as Loretta comes off worst because she plays in only one or two dimensions. Ken Gass’s production is false from the word ‘Go,’ but so is the script, and though Gass attempts surrealism late in the play, this only adds visual interest but no real dramatic point. Kimberly Purtell’s lighting grows hyper-real as Jeremy Mimnagh projects enlarged video images over the set and the two women, staring straight ahead, form a tableau to the background noise of the two men fighting offstage, as the lights dim. But this elaboration does nothing to illuminate what has preceded it—a story of almost zero credibility or sustained interest and relevance.

pic 1 (L-R): Kevin Hanchard (Michael), Brandon McGibbon (Dave) and Lesley Faulkner (Loretta) in "Featuring Loretta"

pic 2 (L-R): Monica Dottor (Sophie) and Lesley Faulkner (Loretta) in "Featuring Loretta"



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