Review: Marine Life (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Natasha Mytnowytch)

It Only Sounds Unpromising
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

Picture the following triangle: An idealistic environmental activist is in legal difficulties.   Her eager beaver, but sexually dysfunctional, lawyer can’t keep his hands off her – until, that is, he encounters her brother, an abysmally bad subway musician whose incestuous designs on his sister are not entirely unrequited.   Add in a murder plot and a good deal of technical information about hermaphroditic marine species . . . well, you wouldn’t necessarily think this to be promising theatrical material.  You’d be wrong.  

Marine Life, Rosa Laborde’s most recent play, continually surprises and delights with its weird plausibility even as it leaves us puzzled about its political implications.  Are protesters self-indulgent narcissists? Is bottled water emblematic of all that’s wrong with society? 

At times the play is a tad too taken with it’s own zany gimmicks.   An out-of-place love ballad between environmentalist, Sylvia, and lawyer, Rupert, adds nothing and achieves only cheap laughs when Rupert’s voice cracks pathetically.  Overall, however, the manic self-involvement of the two male characters plays well against the earnestness of Sylvia. 

While the first half has its longeurs, the play hits its stride in the second act with a slew of revelations and one-liners that had the audience almost falling out of their seats.  Actress Tommie-Amber Pirie captures Sylvia’s naïve zealotry very well.   Likewise, Scott McCord and Phillip Rico are equally effective in somewhat easier roles.  Director Natasha Mytnowych, adopts vertical staging that effectively compensates for a rather makeshift set.  Indeed, the pathos of protest has rarely been so disconcertingly and hilariously mocked. 

Marine Life is at SummerWorks