“People go east when invited, when opportunity knocks,” says a character known simply as The Sage at the start of Karen Hines’s new play. “People go west when all bets are off.”
Drama: Pilot Episode, a twisted and consistently quotable satire, taps into the playwright’s own anxieties about Canada’s westward migration.
Hines, known for her cult clown alter-ego Pochsy and her role on CBC’s The Newsroom, is herself a Torontonian-turned-Calgarian – just one of an increasing many according to the latest census data.
So is Drama’s main character, Dr. Penelope Douglas, a forensic psychologist from Hogtown who has relocated to Cowtown to minister to the living after a disturbing “episode” in the morgue where she had worked.
This fetching young corpse whisperer – played by a mournful Daniela Vlaskalic – doesn’t exactly buy the right real estate to escape her demons: She moves into a condo-hotel built in an old abattoir that was, itself, erected on sacred burial ground. The location’s past is omnipresent in Scott Reid’s design, where several bison skulls and a complete cow skeleton hang over the stage like shamanistic chandeliers.
As you may have surmised, Drama: Pilot Episode is heavily influenced by film noir – a cinema style Canadian playwrights from George F. Walker to Mieko Ouchi have toyed with, but which almost always comes across as heavily affected translated to the stage.
More fruitfully, Hines draws from the televisual territory of procedurals like CSI and Bones; indeed, her play is as concerned with “the twilight of television” as it is with the rise of the West.
Dr. Douglas’s arrival in this through-the-looking-glass Calgary coincides with the Banff Television Festival – and her very first live patient is a nervous “content provider” named Noah (Christian Goutsis) who carries a binder full of unlikely show ideas about oil wives, transgendered poodles and a parallel universe where JFK survived assassinations.
After Noah hangs himself in her restroom – using his festival lanyard to do the deed, no less – Dr. Douglas is left in possession of these pitches (and his spirit). Deedee (the delightfully off-kilter Lindsay Burns), a breast-feeding network executive, wants them, as does a neurotic actress named Lily (Alana Hawley, groping for her character).
Dr. Douglas’s only true ally is Columbia, a very pregnant “oil wife” played with acerbic wit by Mabelle Carvajal. (The ethics of bringing babies into a world on the verge of environmental disaster is a recurrent theme in Hines’s work.)
While Drama: Pilot Episode plays cleverly with television tropes, it’s a pity Hines didn’t take more inspiration from the sheer story-telling craft of the best small-screen series. Her fortes are mood and dense, destabilizing dialogue, but her characters are very superficial and the play’s structure is a ramble.
There are not one, but two narrators who wander on and off delivering mysterious monologues: A teen concierge named Fig is played with an otherworldly weirdness by Amy Sawka; and The Sage, played altogether too knowingly by a galumphing Allan Morgan.
Drama: Pilot Episode is entirely drenched in the apocalyptic Adbusters tone that Hines developed for her character of Pochsy. Indeed, a single voice dominates to the point that the entire play seems like a deconstruction of the playwright’s own mind. A Freud bust that is a prominent prop encourages this reading, even if the dream-like structure suggests a play more Jung at heart.
Though Drama has shortcomings as drama, what the characters say never ceases to surprise or shock. And director Blake Brooker keeps it all moving elegantly, shuffling couches around the stage like fast-moving feng shui.
Particularly ingenious are Noah’s show ideas, my favourite being his pitch for a show called Anybabies in which baby souls fly around the world looking for fetuses to inhabit – and a future mommy. Hines is nothing, if not an original.
Drama: Pilot Episode
