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theatre review

A scene from The Circle.

Six teenagers, an out-of-control party in a Calgary garage – and a bong named Trudeau. It's hard not to like The Circle, a feisty new comic drama by 25-year-old playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown.

Ily (Joe Perry) is an 18-year-old high-school dropout who deals marijuana between his shifts at the Keg. He lives in a garage attached to the house where his overachieving girlfriend, Amanda (Elisa Benzer), lives with her often MIA mother.

This garage becomes the site of an accidental party after Ily receives a call from an old friend named Tyler (Brown himself) – who soon shows up semi-invited with a new name, Mutt, and a new girlfriend, a street punk named Kit (Leanne Govier). Amanda's friend Will (Daniel Fong) and his boyfriend Daniel (Brett Dahl) arrive soon after.

It's all fun and games – punctuated by awkward pauses – for the three couples until Trudeau gets hurt. The accidental shattering of the filtration device named after our new Prime Minister leads to bong water on the bed, glass on the floor – and a shocking denouement.

The Circle is largely atmospheric rather than plot-driven. It takes an exceptional ear for dialogue to really pull that off. Brown has one, combining circular, hesitant rhythm of teenage speech with highly local references to create a script that is very real, very now and unexpectedly poetic.

Mutt is a brilliant character creation – a young man stuck in a pattern of self-destruction, scary and sad at the same time. Brown acts as well as he writes, and his portrait of this loser is indelible. (Perry gives the second-best performance of the night, providing plenty of stoner comic relief.)

Ann-Marie Kerr's production is at its best in its busiest moments, when we get to watch teens goofing around, dancing, doing whippets and being a little too casual with Ily's sword collection. But she too often matches verbal silences with physical stillness – leading to many moments of unnecessary stiltedness.

Brown overdoes it a bit at the end, with a monologue that needlessly underlines the play's themes. But it's an exciting debut – and I foresee young directors staging site-specific productions in garages across the country in the near future.

The Circle continues to Nov. 7 (atplive.com).

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