Comedy play brings hearty laughs to unorthodox theatre setting
People House Theatre hosted a lovely night of comedy at the Making Box Pop-up Theatre, located at 40 Baker Street, on Friday, Oct 24. GIANTS! a play by fourth-year English student, and regular Ontarion contributor, Will Wellington, offered uproarious humour with a gently layered subtext about human nature and our endeavours to create things larger than ourselves.
Lars and Molly are two giants who eat children. The inseparable duo demolishes villages, picks people from houses as one would from a box of chocolates, and practices their stomping and roaring together, with cheekily self-aware witticisms. But their biggest challenge comes in the smallest of forms – nine-year-old Gertie, sharp as a tack and inventive far beyond her years (not to mention petulant as hell), makes it her goal to convince these giants to stop eating children, instead opting for a more vegetarian diet. As an artist, historian, writer, and critical theorist, Gertie shows the giants literature, visual art, and her dirty, daft little brother Mel, who she loves unconditionally, and whose future she has (begrudging) hopes for. She slowly convinces the giants to consider their position on their child-centric diet and, in the meantime, helps them reveal their true feelings for one another.
With deftly crafted humour that resists profanity, violence, or jaded bleakness, Wellington’s play came alive in the hands of director Danielle Fernandes, and the cast and crew of People House Theatre. Josh Anderson-Coats and Julia Haynes portray the goofy, romantically-awkward giants with remarkable chemistry. Lauren McGinty’s energy level was through the roof as the excitable, enterprising Gertie, Gordon Harper did a hilarious Monty Python-esque job of Gertie’s mom, and Nora Cigljarev’s Mel hit ignorant bliss with her Dopey the Dwarf-reminiscent character. Gabrielle Flood’s costumes were also on point – nothing too over the top, charmingly handmade, and suited each character perfectly.
After jokingly asking Wellington “How autobiographical is this?” he offered some surprising insight, “I mean, I’ve thought all of the things that the characters say. A lot of what the characters, especially the giants, have to say, are things I’ve thought at sort of my worst moments, you know? […] But I think that’s why I like writing drama because you can give voices to things you wouldn’t want to say out loud yourself, or you wouldn’t want to stand with that position yourself, […] so I’d say it’s actually pretty autobiographical – there’s even some of my struggle with vegetarianism in there [laughs].”
Danielle Fernandes, director, and Lauren McGinty, discussed the production process with me. “I started this project with Julia [Haynes], and the very first night we came up with the concept of a play. […] Later on we decided to put a call out for actors, and that’s when we came across the lovely Lauren McGinty.”
“I think our biggest struggle was trying to make the giants look giant,” McGinty interjected. On her role as Gertie, she said, “I’ve never played a child before. I played a teenage boy, so the lankiness can be brought over to a youthful person not knowing what’s going on. […] But the idea of doing a comedy for children for adults is an interesting twist, and I haven’t done anything like it before.”
Fernandes elaborated on the production saying, “Yeah, we went through so many different concepts and tried different things like splitting up the stage different ways, […] thinking ‘Do we need to put them in a different place?’ They pass objects back and forth – how can we get the big objects to look small? Or the small objects to look big in the humans hands?”
What made GIANTS! so successful was the way it blended childlike wonderment and gentle humour with real philosophical issues of the human condition, and the nature of art. A full house of audience members from all ages got a chance to share some laughs, but also to share an opportunity to feel like a kid again.