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by Norm Foster, directed by Emily Oriold

Norm Foster Theatre Festival, Mandeville Theatre, St. Catharines

August 17-25, 2024

Lee: “Nothing can be the way it was before”

The Norm Foster Theatre Festival concludes its summer season with the 40th anniversary production of Foster’s now-classic comedy The Melville Boys. The play was only Forster’s second produced play, yet it is the play that put Foster on the map and has become one of the most produced of the more than 70 plays he has since written. In The Melville Boys we find the mixture of the comic and the serious that make his best work so distinctive. The present excellent production will delight people who are already Foster fans and is sure to makes fans of those new to Foster.

The play begins with a fairly basic premise. Two brothers, Lee and Owen, go to their aunt and uncle’s cabin for a relaxing weekend. There they meet two sisters, Mary and Loretta, who live in the area. One of each pair is earnest; the other is not. The two frivolous ones get ready to party, leaving the two serious ones to decide how to spend a meaningful evening.

A lesser playwright than Foster could have turned this scenario into two hours of simple jokes, pratfalls and one-liners. Foster, however, here so early in his career, has something else in mind. The play starts as a frothy, seemingly lightweight comedy where the conversation between Lee and Owen is filled with comic remarks about food, fishing and each other’s annoying habits. The arrival of the two sisters promises even more light comedy when Owen and Loretta start flirting and when Loretta gives an example of one of the television commercials she does that she thinks will lead to an acting career.

Suddenly, however, the tone takes a surprising turn that throws us and three characters in the play for a loop. When Lee is alone with Mary and tells her he is married and has two children, he also blurts out that he is dying. This is not a joke. Lee has metastatic melanoma. He is waiting for treatment but still may have only a year or less to live.

How does news like this fit into conventional comedy? The answer is that it doesn’t. Foster’s best plays aim for a different sort of comedy – the human comedy of people struggling to come to terms with uncomfortable truths. As we discover, Lee’s reason for wanting to have a weekend in a calm environment with Owen was to help the less-than-serious Owen comes to terms with the fact of Lee’s approaching death. Owen, on the other hand, seeks as much distraction from this fact as possible.

The fact that everyone knows Lee is dying does not turn the comedy off in the play. The superficial Loretta can’t seem to ask a sensible question, and the other three try to speak as they did before but are conscious of words and phrases taking on new, morbid connotations.

At its essence the play is not really, as it first appears, about two brothers having a good time with two sisters. It really is about whether the care-free Owen will in the course of the weekend stop fighting against the truth of Lee’s condition and accept it and the responsibilities it entails. The main question is whether the childish little brother we first meet has it in him to grow up.

Director Emily Oriold has assembled a fine cast and manages the pace of the action and its changing tones beautifully. Daniel Reale is a rambunctious Owen. Though in his late twenties, Owen still acts much like a teenager who cares more about his pleasure than anything else. He feels his impending wedding in three weeks gives him licence to be even more self-indulgent. Reale well conveys Owen’s fun-loving, self-centred nature, but he also conveys Owen’s dependence on Lee as a guide through life. When Owen can no longer avoid the fact that Lee may be gone soon, his world crumbles, and Reale fully captures the mixture of confusion, anger and sadness that overwhelms Owen. It’s a sign of Reale’s talent that he can so convincingly depict Owen’s 180º change of outlook and with it the pain of having to face life on his own.

Isaiah Kolundzic is wonderful as Lee, the character who grounds the entire play. Kolundzic shows us from Lee and Owen’s first entry that something is preying on Lee’s mind that prevents him from tolerating Owen’s foolishness. Kolundzic makes Lee a meditative man only in his thirties forced to confront a destiny he had never expected. While he finds Owen and Loretta irritating, Mary, who has her own set of worries, helps soothe Lee’s thoughts and brings out the sense of humour that Kolundzic suggests Lee had before he received his bad news.

Lee and Owen clash several times during the action, each time worse than the last, until their anger at each other brings them to an agonizing climax we could hardly have imagined at the start of the play. Oriold, Reale and Kolundzic fill this moment with such tension that it becomes frightening.

Owen’s female counterpart is Loretta, who, in front of a group, appears to be a self-aggrandizing fantasist. Just as Owen thinks that having a brother who is foreman at the factory where he works will be his path to becoming foreman himself, Loretta thinks that adding sleazy sex-appeal to commercials will be her ticket to acting stardom. Both Owen and Loretta are wrong and blissfully aware that they are wrong. Kelly J. Seo initially makes Loretta’s self-centredness so prominent that it is annoying. Later, however, Seo shows us another side to Loretta. When Owen tries to lend importance to spending the night with Loretta, she calmly explains to him that the event has no importance. Seo demonstrates that beneath the fun-girl façade Loretta creates for herself, there is actually a practical, sensible person.

Lee’s female counterpart is Mary, whom Emily Lukasik lends exactly the right warmth and inwardness. Whereas Loretta lives without a care, Mary is weighed down with care. Her backstory, like Lee’s, is not comic. Mary’s husband left her two years ago and she has been wasting her time waiting for him to return. Lee happens to be the best person Mary could speak with since he is someone who does not want to waste the time he has left. How a bond of friendship develops between Lee and Mary is one of the solid pleasures that offsets the raucousness of the Owen-Loretta relationship. Lukasik makes Mary a delight as the only one who reacts to Lee’s news seriously but also surreptitiously sees the need to lighten Lee’s mood which she fears is in danger of falling into depression.

Beckie Morris has designed a lovely set of a realistic kitchen and living room but with outlined walls so that we can see the scenery outside the cabin. A deck with Muskoka chairs behind the cabin and stylized conifers around the cabin are all that is needed to conjure up a cabin in cottage country. All this in enhanced by Alex Sykes’s naturalistic lighting, although Sykes also uses lighting to emphasize conflicts between characters, especially between Lee and Owen.

Most people would never expect what they take as “light” comedy to have such a serious core. But that is exactly what has made Norm Foster’s plays so different from the comedies of other prolific writers like Neil Simon or Alan Ayckbourn to whom he has been compared. Foster seems to be always conscious that one of the main characteristics of life is its finiteness. He also knows that one of the ways of coming to terms with life is laughter. This production of The Melville Boys will raise your spirits more deeply that you might expect.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Isaiah Kolundzic as Lee, Emily Lukasik as Mary, Daniel Reale as Owen and Kelly J. Seo as Loretta; Daniel Reale as Owen and Kelly J. Seo as Loretta; Isaiah Kolundzic as Lee and Emily Lukasik as Mary. © 2024 Sandy Middleton.

For tickets visit: fosterfestival.com.