Michael Blake and Robert Persichini in Superior Donuts.Shaun Benson
If you haven't yet visited the cozy Coal Mine on the Danforth, Superior Donuts is the perfect comedy to introduce you to this scrappy little theatre company located in what used to be a store.
For this production, the intimate 80-seater run by Diana Bentley and Ted Dykstra gets to play itself, and does so with great panache.
Superior Donuts, a minor play by American genre-jumper Tracy Letts written and set during the financial crisis of 2008, takes place in a run-down, independent coffee-and-doughnut shop of the same name in a gentrifying Chicago neighbourhood called Uptown that's not all that different from the Greenwood-Coxwell neighbourhood in Toronto where the Coal Mine can be found. Indeed, you'll find similar establishments still standing their ground against Starbucks on your walk to the theatre from the subway.
Arthur Przybyszewski (Robert Persichini) took over running Superior Donuts after the death of his Polish-immigrant parents. As the play begins, police officers (and regular customers) Randy (Darla Biccum) and James (Michael Blake) are on the scene because the shop has been vandalized with a five-letter word that can crudely mean coward painted across on the wall.
This graffiti reignites Arthur's great fear that he is, indeed, a coward. He evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, which led him to exile in Toronto for a time and estranged him from his father; other choices in his life have been less than courageous but didn't even have principle behind them, and nowadays, the ponytailed pothead can't even bring himself to ask the appropriately named Randy out on a date.
Luckily, along comes Franco Wicks (Nabil Rajo), a young risk-taker full of fire and ambition, to answer Arthur's help-wanted ad and help him to engage with life again. This African-American kid may have dropped out of college due to overwhelming debt, but in his spare time, he has written what he calls the Great American Novel on a stack of legal pads. The title comes from a line in a Langston Hughes poem: America Will Be. Compare and contrast with the slogan Make America Great Again.
Franco is a manic-pixie dream employee, more there to challenge and change Arthur than a believable character in his own right. (Rajo brings swagger to the role, but can't quite convince.) Then again, the whole play is populated by stock characters, from a malapropism-prone Russian immigrant (Alex Poch-Goldin) to a loan shark with an ulcer (Ryan Hollyman) to a wise alcoholic (Diana Leblanc).
You might even say Superior Donuts seems like the pilot for a sitcom – and, indeed, a TV comedy based on Letts's play just premiered on CBS this month. Compare and contrast with Ins Choi's Kim's Convenience, another comedy set in a business founded by immigrants, specific with its local references and jocular about race relations.
What makes Letts's play weaker than Choi's is that the characters closest to Arthur are all dead or absent; in the place of real relationships, we get a workplace comedy filled with acquaintances. Arthur is a loner who fills us in on his complicated backstory in the less-than-innovative form of monologues between scenes.
Nevertheless, it's a wonderful leading role for Persichini, a long-time Stratford Festival company member often relegated to character parts. He's soulful, sweet and funny in an understated way, the chief reason to see this show. I wanted to cheer for him even in the show's ludicrous, macho dénouement.
There are other similarly subtle performances from Michael Blake as a cop with a heart (and Star Trek uniform) of gold and Paul Dods as a Russian who turns out to be more than his muscles.
But there's also a lot of over-the-top acting that would seem big in an 800-seat theatre, never mind an 80-seat one. As a director of comedy, Ted Dykstra is definitely not of the less-is-more school of thought.
I cringed at some of it, but there was uproar around me. A colleague of mine who happened to be in the audience on opening night actually asked me at intermission why I wasn't laughing. Take that for what you will; I'll go work it out with my therapist.
Superior Donuts continues to Feb. 26. (coalminetheatre.com).