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theatre review

Libby Osler and Gabe Grey in After Wrestling.John Gundy

If you have a hankering to hear the late David Bowie's Let's Dance album, then After Wrestling is the show for you.

This production at Factory Theatre by fledgling indie company Blood Pact Theatre is propelled – not to say, overwhelmed – by a large helping of songs from that popular 1983 release, along with tracks by the likes of Elvis Presley, Talking Heads and even A-ha (remember them?). Often, you're not sure if it's supposed to be a play you're attending or a listening party for nostalgists.

Oh, there is a play underneath the tunes – if you're able to ignore those colourful Bowie lyrics blasting from the speakers and focus on the dialogue being spoken by the actors onstage. It's a pretty serious play, too – all about mental illness, suicide, grief and unresolved feelings. But its co-writer Bryce Hodgson, who also directed the show, seems to want to smother his own lines with the incessant soundtrack and otherwise distract us with a jagged, abrasive staging.

True, part of it is the pumped-up style we've come to expect of shows associated with the Storefront Theatre, which presented Blood Pact's previous offering, the amusingly titled Kill Your Parents in Viking, Alberta, and has supported this one. And true, the music has some dramatic justification: One of the play's characters is a DJ at an oldies radio station, while another is a cop with a fondness for karaoke. Still, this variation on in-yer-face theatre – call it "in yer ears" – does no favours to Hodgson and Charlie Kerr's semi-comic, semi-surreal script.

Like Kill Your Parents, the duo's new play revolves around dysfunctional siblings. Hogan (played by Kerr) has moved into the Vancouver apartment of his single, school-teacher sister, Leah (Libby Osler), after behaving irrationally and being picked up by the police. The ostensible trigger for Hogan's breakdown is his breakup with his long-time girlfriend, but we soon learn that he's also lost his best friend to suicide. Leah insists he seek therapy, which he does – with the ghost of said friend, Gibby (Anthony Shim).

In his spectral form, the glib Gibby is an advice-dispensing radio DJ named the Falcon, who sagely counsels Hogan even while still sporting the hole in his temple from the souped-up starting pistol he used to end his own life.

The depressed Leah, meanwhile, has found unexpected romance with Jaggy (Gabe Grey), the affable cop who arrested Hogan. Jaggy's two off-duty obsessions are karaoke and pro wrestling. During their first date in a karaoke bar (cue some of those Bowie songs), he drunkenly reveals his Owen Hart and Chris Benoit tattoos – grim choices, given both those Canadian wrestlers died tragically. Leah, in turn, confesses to a past life as a drug dealer.

At first, Leah's new love and her brother's beyond-the-grave therapy sessions seem to be making them both happy. But Leah is hiding a secret about Gibby that could shatter their fragile peace.

The play fundamentally concerns those unanswered questions left after someone has died by suicide. When Hodgson, as director, finally dials back the frenetic effects in the later scenes, the story grows poignant – especially in flashbacks involving the still-living Gibby, hospitalized and battling psychosis. There are times when it even recalls the quiet sadness of Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood – another music-drenched work with similar themes.

But most of the show is in a higher key, played with a raw vitality that is exciting at best and, at worst, sloppy and undisciplined.

There's an excellent comic performance from Grey as the zealous Jaggy, who is endearing in his wrestle mania and gets some of the funniest lines. Shim is entertaining as the phantom Gibby, the smooth, chain-smoking radio jock, and affecting as his catatonic corporeal counterpart.

Osler's Leah, her short hair dyed blue, looks every inch the funky Grade 5 teacher and has a nice chemistry with Grey. Kerr, however, is annoyingly mannered as the unsteady Hogan, all hunching shoulders and twitching arms.

Hodgson and producer Bri Proke have co-designed a detailed two-level set, filling Factory's Studio stage with Leah's cluttered apartment on the upper level and both the radio studio and karaoke bar on the lower. A "Miss Langley" is credited – or should that be blamed? – in the program with the sound design.

Blood Pact, originally from Vancouver, now transplanted to Toronto, is an ambitious collective and Hodgson and Kerr are clearly playwrights with something to say. But they shouldn't let their love of blunt-force theatricality drown out their own voices.

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