by Alison Lawrence
Directed by Ed Sahely
At the Tarragon Extra Space
November 19-December 6, 2009

   Avoiding the usual over-inflation of Fringe Festival hype, I can say that Alison Lawrence’s The Catering Queen is a worthy two-act satire that takes the catering backroom as its spyglass and microcosm. The play has moved from the Toronto Fringe to the Tarragon Extra Space, and though it has flaws, it shows its playwright’s craft to some advantage. Concentrating on six characters (equally divided by gender) in a single setting and continuous action, it has a unity where strands of plot link and loop, although some strands are inordinately lengthy and the final knot is a little too neat and rendered with too much soft sentimentality for my liking. In brief, the story concerns Melanie, an aspiring writer who has apparently lost her ambition and has become the Catering Queen, but food and drink are not the only things she caters. She offers her colleagues a sympathetic shoulder to lean or cry on when problems arise in their private lives. Like her, they also appear to have stalled dreams. Cynthia (Sharon Heldt) is a rather bitter actress who is at a turning point in her career. Timothy (Dmitry Chepovetsky) is a gay man who has split up with his lover but who is forever on the prowl for his next partner, even daring to pursue the upper class married host of the annual Christmas cocktail function for a Bay Street law firm. Eric (David McNiven) is a nice uber-caterer.

   Lawrence’s script has a nice wit. “Did I peak at 22? I am not happy in a bow-tie,” complains Cynthia ruefully. Timothy has the best bitch lines as a sort of fem queer. Melanie is a self-styled “monogamy girl” whose ex-lover, Nick (Brian Young), an underemployed freelance writer, coincidentally happens to be at the cocktail party as the date of Julia, a frosty, bitchy lawyer who can freeze a victim at twenty paces with her irony. Nick, alas, as Melanie points out, lacks a sense of irony, and he insists on airing his dirty laundry in the catering backroom—which puts a considerable strain on verisimilitude as far as situation comedy is concerned. The best lines are Julia’s and Melanie’s, but only one half of them get punched up adequately—and this is by Mary Francis Moore who plays Julia as an acid redhead. Alison Lawrence is a little too low-keyed as Melanie, many of her best cracks trailing off into muted humour. Her director could have coaxed a stronger performance out of her and, perhaps, have compelled her to re-think her ending.

   As it is, the rest of the cast act with correct timing, particularly Dmity Chepovetsky, but he is too much a comic stereotype as the gay man. However, the play’s innate problem is its insistence on following some formulaic patterns: the first-act pre-Christmas cocktail party is followed by the second-act funeral wake; the dramatic peaks of Act One are followed by the comic peaks of Act Two. And the comic tone settles for something middle ranged—a palpable loss and one that prevents the play from enlarging itself. Nevertheless, Alison Lawrence can be proud of what she has achieved with The Catering Queen as she moves to her next level of comedy.

photo: supplied

(L-R): David MacNiven (Eric), Alison Lawrence (Melanie), Mary Francis Moore (Julia),
         Brian Young (Nick), Sharon Heldt (Cynthia)




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