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TORONTO - It's not uncommon for comedic actors to be caught off stage, trying to be funny.
Once they hit the stage, however, they are either funny -- or they are not. Few things in theatre prove more trying than an actor trying to be funny.
Actors notwithstanding, more than two decades after it premiered -- and almost 19 since it first played in Toronto -- Morris Panych's 7 Stories is still a very funny play. Funny in that arch, whistling-past-the-graveyard, giggling-at-a-funeral kind of way that Panych's fans have come to expect in the years, and plays, that followed on the heels of 7 Stories' debut.
For proof, look no further than the 20th anniversary production that opened Thursday at the Bluma Appeal theatre, a co-production of the Canadian Stage Company and Theatre Calgary.
At first blush, one might even think the play has grown up on its way to this celebration, for while designer Ken MacDonald's vision for the show doesn't appear to have changed much in two decades, it has certainly expanded to fill this bigger stage.
Overlaid by fluffy white clouds, both architecture and nature fuse in a beautiful evocation of the seventh floor of a high rise apartment building. On the ledge surrounding it, a man is perched -- or in this case The Man, played by Peter Anderson, returning to a role he originated.
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Buttoned up and buttoned down, he is of the species immortalized by the surrealist painter Magritte -- faceless men in black suits and bowler hats who, clutching their umbrellas, all but disappear into the world around them. Or in the case of The Man, disappear from the world around them, for it is obvious that The Man intends to leave the ledge in the quickest and most lethally efficient way.
Before he can make the leap, however, life intervenes -- specifically the life going on in the building behind him and spilling out into the ether that surrounds him.
Through no effort on his part, The Man is soon embroiled in such things as -- in no particular order -- a strange sort of S&M affair, an endless renovation project, a groom's performance anxiety, a treatment program run by a paranoid psychiatrist, a party where the host can't wait for his guests to leave and an agnostic's campaign to play God.
Enrapt as each of these people are in their own little world and petty problems, they take scant notice of The Man as anything more than a potential audience -- rendering these incidents all very real and believable, if somewhat cynical, reflections of our increasingly self-involved society. Panych even seems to have anticipated Facebook with a young man who collects friends like trophies.
But under the direction of Dean Paul Gibson, the supporting cast charged with bringing this seventh-story zoo to life -- Damien Atkins, Christopher Hunt, Melody A. Johnson and Rebecca Northan -- seems to play only to the humour of their characters. They layer on such heavy dollops of funny business that they all but smother the natural black humour of the situation.
In the midst of all this frenetic mugging, Atkins finds moments of heart-touching honesty in his portrayal of a gay actor about to enter into the performance of a life-time, while Johnson all but steals the show in its penultimate scene, bringing life and wisdom to a shut-in senior with a touching world vision.
In these two performances, one catches glimpses of what 7 Stories has been and could be again.
Here, it appears everybody got so caught up in trying to be funny, no one noticed that the elevator stops a few stories short of its goal.