Theatre review: Rural sex and bare bums to warm the urban heart
Credit to Author: Jerry Wasserman| Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 01:00:24 +0000
The Birds & the Bees
When: To Oct. 26
Where: Granville Island Stage
Tickets & Info: From $29 at artsclub.com
As the days get shorter and darker and wetter and colder, what could be better therapy than an old-fashioned, knee-slapping, rip-roaring sex comedy? Mark Crawford’s The Birds & the Bees had the Arts Club audience screaming with laughter and applauding enthusiastically on opening night.
It does seem coyly old-fashioned to start. The script and production implicitly invite us to giggle like kids at even the possibility of sex. But like Crawford’s Bed & Breakfast, last season’s Arts Club hit currently on tour, The Birds & the Bees turns into something richer and smarter without losing its comic edge.
Director Lauren Taylor delivers an absolute crowd-pleaser, giving her talented cast ample opportunity to flash their comic chops and bare bums to optimum effect.
We’re out in the country somewhere (the play was written for rural Ontario’s Blyth Festival) where Gail (Susinn McFarlen) lives alone since her husband left twenty years earlier. A beekeeper, she rents farmland to earthy Earl (Tom McBeath), who first seems like a classic redneck, joking about “those environMENTAL cases in Ottawa.”
Old friends Gail and Earl squabble like an old couple. Unlike celibate Gail, Earl has had lots of partners. Gail scoffs: you’re a 60-year-old divorced farmer, not exactly a great catch. But Earl isn’t shy about tooting his own sexual horn: “If you want your toes to curl, spend the night with Earl.”
Gail’s middle-aged daughter Sarah (Dawn Petten), who artificially inseminates turkeys, has left her husband and come to stay with Gail. Those two squabble like … well, mother and daughter. Then Ben (Christopher Allen) shows up, a lanky, frazzled, attractive young grad student doing research on the demise of local bee populations.
Soon (spoiler alert!) both bedrooms on Ted Roberts’ woody farmhouse set are being used extensively. Neither sexual relationship is generationally conventional. Ben is 15 years younger than Sarah. Gail and Earl are seniors. We see a lot of semi-nude grappling, not all the flesh washboard firm. The actors, fully committed, revel in hilarious, uninhibited, joyous physical comedy.
As much as I laughed, I was more impressed by the ability of the script and performers to shift seamlessly into darker territory. The way Gail and Sarah can hurt each other. The way Earl angrily throws off Gail’s professions of love. The way Sarah and Ben have funny, complicated, adult conversations about an awkward but profound issue that arises between them. That issue brings the characters together at the end in unexpected ways.
The ecological theme — are Earl’s pesticides killing Gail’s bees? — fades as the sex gets hotter and the relationships deeper. It reappears near the end in a blatant thematic speech by Ben that beautifully encapsulates the play’s ethos. Nature is complicated and chaotic and things don’t go according to plan. But nature has a way of achieving equilibrium and so might we.
Delivering both the conventionally comic and the exceptionally rare, it’s an ending that deserves its cheers.