Play: Little Crickets

Little Crickets (Foundry Theatre Company, Dir: Byron Laviolette)

SummerWorks Festival (Factory Theatre Studio). Wednesday, August 10, 2011.

"That was Number One," explains Christina to her sister, who had complained that they had already looked at a particular Mondrian while at an art gallery. "This is Number Two."

Such rankings, and an omnipresent sense of competing for dominance, are always lurking in the background of this play. Set in Paris, the characters are all émigrés, beginning with eighteen-year-old Christina and her younger sister Rodica — very recently arrived from a revolution-torn Romania, and quite possibly undocumented. They encounter the kindly Mr. Smith, who buys them a meal, and is rapidly offering to put them up in his luxurious apartment. Smith is so unctuously exact and polite, it seems inevitable that he is concealing something much darker — and what he has in mind beyond genially hosting some tourists is pretty obvious, even well before the riding crop makes an appearance.

The sisters (who are by turns cunningly manipulative and naive) aren't fooled by Smith's kindly exterior, but aren't in too much of a rush to extricate themselves, either. Clearly they need money and a place to stay, but how far are they willing to go to turn the tables on this man whose velvet glove of charity could turn into something far worse?

Maintaining its forward momentum, the play doesn't stop to consider the characters' motivations, letting the audience fill in a lot of blanks — as well as drawing their own conclusions on the morality of everyone involved. Thus the main tightrope for the production to navigate is in finding the right balance for all the elements in play — how exaggerated the situations should be, and how far to push the play's more salacious elements (S + M, jailbait, "sex dolls", designer watches) to keep things interesting but not too lurid. As things move along, the uncertainty of the situation is played up by introducing ambiguous scenes and elements that play out more like dreamy psychological tableaux.

Going hand-in-hand with that, there are several rather stylized elements to the production — the actors all in half-whiteface (suggesting that everyone's intentions are always masked) and there are extra-showy scene transitions that go out of their way to call attention to themselves, with the actors wheeling furniture in and out in a carefully-arranged choreography. The performances similarly are pitched in the realm of the slightly-fantastic, with the three leads all acquitting themselves well. Peter Nelson's Smith is smarm personified, and gives the impression that this could be someone like Alan Rickman's Die Hard character, relaxing between capers. Shaina Silver-Baird, as pouting teenager Rodica, has the most fun here, her eyes glittering with the potential rewards of her precarious position, while Nicole St. Martin has the toughest job, staying more realistically anchored to the danger of the situation.

An entertaining production. With enough of what happened left open for reflection, it lingered more than I thought it would in my mind.