[REVIEW] Tasteless

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The season for Theatre and Film Honours Performance Series is upon us, and the School of Arts has a space reserved for you in the crowd. Last week’s bill featured Tasteless, described on posters as “a nice dark comedy.” The production ran seamlessly from start to finish, garnering many laughs from the audience. One criticism of comedy can be that it does not carry any sense of meaningful weight outside of entertainment. How Tasteless managed to pull off both is credit to the production team and cast who made the stage their own.

Making use of a humble set, the entire one-hour play was set among a bed and nightstand. Three doors in the background served to mark the coming and going of characters. A brief but entirely appropriate soundtrack featured a slowed-down rendition of Jimmy Buffet’s “If You Like Piña Coladas” and Three Dog Night’s “One (Is the Loneliest Number).”

The protagonist Mike Hunt (Taylor Yanke) is a naïve comedian trying to make a living out of wit, who decides that the small town of Sommersvale is exactly the kind of welcome change that he needs.

As far as small towns go, Sommersvale will probably beat out any other in terms of number of quirky habitants. Stan (Rowan Traynor) is a Mike Hunt fanboy to his core, and you will find him hiding in the shadows for the majority of the play. Lisa’s (Claire Shingleton-Smith) instant infatuation with Mike raises a number of red flags, but oblivious Hunt walks into every trap with a smile on his face. Zac Williams plays Larry/Terry/Jerry, switching from garbage man to cable guy to mailman with effortless ease. Dr. Annita Mann (Nicole Clarke) is not a conventional doctor, choosing to run a slaughterhouse in her spare time. At the pinnacle of it all is the mayor, played by one of the directors/writers Ian Wilush, whose orchestrating hand makes the town run like clockwork.

Mike wants desperately to break out of his comedian mould, but the town has other plans for him. In Sommersvale, fiction and reality are warped, dulling the lines between persona and person. Too trusting and eager to please, Mike plays right into the hands of those who are not what they appear.

Tasteless challenged the preconceived construct of what it means to be funny, poking at the cultural obsession with celebrities and our eager consumption of their personal lives.

Satirical, dark and poignant, the play builds to its shocking end while making you laugh along the way. Rude jokes garner a few blushes, but it is important to remember not to take the play too seriously.

Witty dialogue, refreshing humour and transcendent acting made the play a phenomenal performance. Not one actor stood out among the others, each embodying their character with enough zeal to give their personalities credibility. Their struggles, while at times a little far removed from my own life, were grounded in shared experience. Many people can relate to feeling the pressure to be someone that others expect you to be, a parallel between celebrity Mike Hunt and the audience that may not be initially perceived.

My only regret is not having gone to any of the shows prior. While the curtain closed on Tasteless for the last time a week ago, the School of the Arts is running their two final productions Last Call and State of Mind on Thursday, March 26 and Friday, March 27.

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