Contacts
A roaring start to the Orillia Opera House season
By Andrew Wagner-Chazalon
In his more serious moments, Norm Foster writes plays that use comedy to explore the depths of the human condition. He was apparently not in one of those moments when he wrote The Long Weekend, which opened this week at the Orillia Opera House.
The Long Weekend is Foster at his most uproarious, flexing his prodigious comic muscles to rip off hilarious lines one after another in a blistering stream that had the opening night audience roaring with delight.
The play tells the story of two couples who have socialized for years. Max and Wynn have just built a country home, and they invite Max and Abby to come for the weekend. Wynn and Abby have been friends since high school, with all the comingling of love and tension that implies. Roger and Max have all the tension with none of the love: the two men pretend to be friends purely for the sake of their wives.
This much is unveiled in the first ten minutes of the play. The rest follows with a few entertaining plot twists and turns. What matters, though, is not what happens but what is said – and how the lines are delivered. And that’s what makes this production into a winner.
Director Jesse Collins has assembled a firecracker cast. Opera House veteran Viviana Zarillo (Wynn) is joined by three newcomers to Orillia: Kristen Da Silva (Abby), Matthew Olver (Roger) and Stephen Sparks (Max). And the crackling energy the four of them bring to the stage is a delight to watch.
These are veteran actors with decades of stagecraft under their belts, and it shows: the pacing is relentless, line after line fired off with whipsaw-perfect timing. In the hands of these veterans, the simplest lines are hilarious. On opening night, Olver got an enormous laugh just by saying danke schoen. In the context of the play, the line was funny; Olver’s timing and inflection, though, made it hilarious.
All four cast members have similar moments, working as an ensemble to craft a marvelous, magical night of laughter.
Kudos, also, to set designer Ashley Whitten and costume designer Alex Amini, Opera House regulars who have done their usual superb job in crafting a visually stunning production. The Long Weekend was first produced in 1994, and Collins has chosen to set this production in that same time. This has allowed Whitten and Amini to indulge in the rich colour palette of the era, which they’ve done with delight.
The Long Weekend is a perfect way to kick off this three-show summer season. It’s not life-changing theatre, but it is life-affirming. And above all, it is enormously entertaining.
The Long Weekend runs until July 19. The Opera House season continues with Every Brilliant Thing (July 24 to August 9) and Those Movies (August 14 to 30).