LONG WEEKEND BEST OF MUSKOKA WITH FOURSOME, COMEDY AND DALLIANCES
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
GRAVENHURST — A Norm Foster play and Muskoka getaway are like a Saturday and Sunday at the cottage — they make for a great Long Weekend.
A fun play with plenty of familiar familial wisecracks that resonated with this afternoon’s audience of mature couples who know where the early exits are when prolonged guests come to visit.
On till Aug. 2 at the Gravenhurst Opera House (with 2 p.m. matinees and 7:30 p.m. evening performances), the Weekend is a leisurely and amusing take on weekend guests.
While not the Muskoka summer retreat treatment — with nary a cannon ball into a lake — the same deep dive applies.
“It’s going to be a long weekend,” moans Max Trueman — a anal fuss pot-cum-Felix Unger lawyer — as he and wife Wynn await the arrival of her “best friend” Abby Nash with in tow her “neurotic” husband Roger at their new weekend getaway that “wreaks of the country.”
The men despise each other (something about Germans, an island couples retreat and an unforgotten and un-forgiven drinks tab); while their wives mostly get along aside from supplying as many polite, good-natured and funny digs as can be gotten away with between BFF.
Roger is a retired mathematician and aspiring screen writer who has writer’s block — he struggles over using “pacify” or “assuage.” His wife Abby is a clothier and eventual fashion designer whose idea of putting on the Ritz is chips and Nachos. She has no use for “the black thing” in the backyard where burgers are burnt.
There are many great witticisms delivered dryly by all four great characters.
Max laments his wife’s comparison of John Coletrane to Kenny G. That’s like comparing “beef stroganoff to beef jerky.”
Wynn, an psycholgist, has just published a book: Choosing the Right Person for Life, “due out on Monday.”
“You don’t think I wrote it about you, do you?” Wynn asks an astonished Abby.
Together the foursome are engaging and entertaining to watch — the delivery of their dialogue rapid fire — as they bend over backwards to kiss each other’s derrieres, while behind their backs (often in front) dishing out stabbing remarks most always in good humour — at least to the audience.
The same oft times snide, yet not so cryptic, utterances all couples get away with when sharing company with others and when referring to their spouse.
Long Weekend is one dimensional, with all the fun taking place in Roger and Wynn’s “safe place” living room as the twosomes must contend with some surprise dalliances.
Naturally, in the second act, their lives take delightful turns two years later when the “friends” rejoin under a different theatrical and marital state of affairs.
The plot remains as fresh today as 30 years ago when it was set.
Gaged by the laughter this afternoon in its first performance, the Long Weekend could have gone on longer with more suggestive twists.
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