Canadian Stage’s current marquee production, The Shape of Things, seems to have everything going for it on paper—it’s the hot new play by a hit playwright, fronted by a buzz-worthy actress. And sure enough, the show is selling out nightly at the Berkley Street Theatre, the crowds eager to see Robert Redford offspring Amy Redford in theatre bad-boy Neil LaBute’s latest offering. Unfortunately, this production is all style over substance, mirroring the main message of the play itself.
The Shape of Things pairs brash art grad student Evelyn (Redford) with geeky English lit undergrad Adam (Allan Hawco). They meet when he tries to stop her from vandalizing a sculpture at the museum where he works as a guard. He’s not too persuasive, but before she bombs the art, she spraypaints her number onto his jacket. Soon things take a twist on the old Pygmalion tale as she methodically begins to mould him into the perfect specimen, while his friends, odd-couple Philip (Jacob Barker) and Jenny (Amy Price-Francis), look on.
LaBute turns this fairly basic conceit on its head with his usual knack for advancing ideas rather than simply the plot. What could easily fall into sitcom smarminess is elevated by the larger themes at work here, such as the subjectivity of art and our inability to look beyond the superficial.
Seems like someone forgot to tell director Jim Guedo. Instead of letting LaBute’s clever script anchor the production, he overplays everything as if he’s afraid that the audience won’t get it. Particularly galling are the huge Cosmo-style magazine covers projected on a massive screen above the stage. LaBute’s writing leaves it wide open for directors to do as they like—perhaps a little too much so.
All four actors are perhaps a bit long in the tooth to be believable college students, but Hawco gives it a good shot, all youthful physicality and stammering. LaBute has a brilliant way with dialogue, and of the cast, Hawco is most at ease with the rapid-fire entendres and witty comebacks (“At least I’m educated, so I comprehend that I’m fucked”). Redford, on the other hand, isn’t at all able to carry the play in the crucial role of Evelyn. We dislike her not because of her scheming, but because Redford’s whiny portrayal makes her come across as annoying. Barker is passable in his loudmouth role, while Price-Francis starts off weakly but improves during the course of the play as his mousy girlfriend.
Without giving away the twist ending, it’s safe to say that the final few scenes are too long by half, with the key segment of Evelyn’s thesis presentation serving as endless exposition—15 solid minutes of Redford delivering a meandering monologue. Instead of feeling horror at what Evelyn has done, by that point we’re just bored.
At the end of the play, Evelyn says of Adam, “He is a living, breathing example of the surface of things, the shape.” Ironically enough, two of the corporate sponsors for CanStage’s production of The Shape of Things just happen to be Botox and GoodLife gyms. Hmm. Seems LaBute’s point was lost in more ways than one.
