News

Legoland

• By Jacob Richmond
• Directed by Jacob Richmond and Britt Small
• Starring Celine Stubel and Amitai Marmorstein
• At Theatre Passe Muraille In Toronto
• 

Legoland, Jacob Richmond's bright and quirky Fringe festival hit with Victoria's Atomic Vaudeville theatre company, is a satire that shuts its eyes and lashes out in all directions at once.

Its freewheeling Weltschmerz hits hippies and capitalists, boy bands and rappers, McDonald's and people who too quickly dismiss the simple pleasures of a Happy Meal.

In its scattershot and scatological approach to satire, and the way it uses children to highlight the absurdities of North American culture, Legoland is like a variety show version of South Park.

Penny Lamb (Celine Stubel) and her younger brother Ezra (Amitai Marmorstein) have grown up on a commune called Elysium Fields in northern Saskatchewan.

Home-schooled in hermetic harmony, they believe nudism and humanistic talent shows ("where everyone comes in first") are the norm.

But as they enter their teens, the innocent Lambs become curious about what transpires in what they call "Legoland" - the outside world.

The pair begin sneaking out to nearby Uranium City, where they fake epileptic fits in a Wal-Mart in order to encounter regular people.

After one too many ersatz seizures, however, the siblings are seized themselves by the police and escorted back to Elysium Fields, which happens to run one of the largest, undetected pot-growing operations in Canada.

The fuzz arrests the Lamb parents and their children are sent off to Catholic boarding school; their thirst for knowledge has destroyed their garden of Eden.

And that's just the prologue, really. Then, Richmond's play takes a turn for the strange.

Reviewed here in its final preview, Legoland is framed as a talk the precocious Penny, now 16 years old, has been forced to give as part of her community service sentence for some unspecified crime.

She tells the cautionary tale of her long descent into assault and drug-dealing, helped out by Ezra, a 13-year-old Nietzsche nut who wears a cape, speaks in an affected, accented monotone and stares blankly from behind his giant, thick-rimmed glasses. He acts out the other characters using puppets and Barbie dolls, while she occasionally pulls out a ukulele to drive home a point.

Though Legoland's aesthetic has roots in vaudevillian double-acts, it is more closely related to that indie film genre full of heightened dialogue that casts the extremely bright but socially inept outsider as hero. Ezra resembles Wes Anderson's Rushmore both physically and in his offbeat artistic pursuits, while there's at least a jigger of Juno in Penny.

Legoland pumps up the tomfoolery to a hyper-theatrical level, however, where it seems quite reasonable for Ezra to break into a rap about fornicating with forestry equipment or for the siblings to suddenly shotgun a couple of cans of Pepsi. (People in the front row: Beware the spray.)

The play's anarchic feel is, in fact, carefully choreographed by its director, the performances punchy and precise all the way through.

What dilutes the show's impact to a certain extent, however, is the unrelenting oddity of its offbeat world.

There's no straight man in sight, which can make it drift into insignificance. (Its sloppy and contradictory timeline is also a distraction.)

And yet, in the play's final moments, a few moments of genuine emotion creep into the mayhem thanks to Stubel's poignant portrayal of Penny, rooting the shenanigan in something real.

While some Fringe hits don't have a shelf life that last past the summer, Legoland is proving its worth outside of the lunacy of the festival circuit.