At the Living Room, an effective Pontypool dials up the blood
If you’re looking for Broadway belting or Shakespearean saber-rattling, you can take your pick from a handful of local theaters. But if you want to watch someone bite into a battery and projectile vomit blood, you go to the Living Room.
The theater is enjoying a banner season of high-grade camp. In October, the gory Chainsaw: The Musical painted the stage murderous red. And the company’s latest, an adaptation of the 2008 horror film Pontypool (itself an adaptation of Tony Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything), boasts a similar budget for fake blood. Also, a far more sinister villain: the English language.
Kimmie Queen and director Cody Wyoming have retrofitted Burgess’s script to the stage, maintaining its violent thrust while restricting the action to a single interior: the offices of Radio Beacon in Pontypool, Ontario. The small set never feels stagnant, thanks in part to a windowed control booth upstage, through which we watch Beacon producer Sydney Briar (Katie Gilchrist) and her assistant, Laurel Ann Drummond (Regina Weller), take calls from listeners and pluck news stories off the wire.
The busy backdrop doesn’t distract from the main focus: Grant Mazzy (John Rensenhouse), a former shock jock cooling his heels as the station’s new morning-show host. Mazzy is comically ill-suited to the position, and as he alternates color commentary with nips from a bottle of desk-drawer whiskey, Briar grows increasingly exasperated.
Read the goddamn list of school closures, she orders. Throw to Ken Loney in the Sunshine Chopper.
A pissed-off listener is a wide-awake listener, he replies.
Before they can come to blows, Ken Loney (Mitch Brian, all hockey-fan dialect) calls in with a curious report. A violent mob has gathered outside the offices of a physician named John Mendez, and they’re jumping down one another’s throats. Literally.
The panicked doctor (Bradley Thomas, with a confusing but consistent accent) arrives at the station shortly to explain. A new virus, spread by speaking certain English words, has taken hold, and its sufferers are clawing into one another’s mouths to find relief.
From there, the play hurtles like a runaway train toward its inevitable conclusion. Drummond begins repeating the same word, eerie as a wind chime, and vomits a spray of blood on the control booth door (one of many cool effects credited to Tab Treml, Weller and Curtis Smith). A mysterious report breaks over the airwaves in garbled French. Someone meets their maker at the business end of Chekhov’s fire extinguisher.
The show clocks in at a little more than an hour, and some of the plague’s particulars get lost in the race. It’s never entirely clear how the contagion spreads — or how quickly it incapacitates its hosts. But Wyoming manages to keep his actors grounded, despite the breakneck pace. Rensenhouse’s airborne, contagious talent seems key. If a virus could spread through language, I’d happily contract it from him; his classical crispness translates perfectly to Burgess’s campier world. Frenetic lines emerge from his mouth like so many silk scarves.
Gilchrist also finds success with an uncharacteristically understated performance. Thomas supplies the right dose of B-movie as Mendez, overly fascinated by the disease’s novelty and progress. (“Oh, I’m sorry, this is awful,” he checks himself in one ecstatic moment.) And Weller is undeniably creepy as the infected PA, though she could do more physically, particularly as the virus takes hold, to define the role.
The claustrophobic set — credited to Wyoming and Tim Ahlenius — amps up the actors’ anxiety. Pontypool plays in polite thrust in what is typically a backstage space at the Living Room. Low ceilings dampen the acoustics and crank up the intimacy.
The small space also allows Wyoming and his production team to focus on a few key technical elements, most notably David Kiehl’s balanced sound design. For much of the play, Rensenhouse speaks directly into the station’s mic, adding an extra layer of spine-chilling resonance to his speeches. And as the plague sweeps through the town, stage hands stationed throughout the theater stomp on floorboards and pound fists against walls to create a textured soundscape.
Pontypool is a polished piece of theater with authentic scare power, but Rensenhouse’s final monologue is by itself worth the ticket price. As Mazzy prepares to meet a certain end at uncertain hands, he soothes himself on air, broadcasting into the void with a languid purr and a dry-as-toast laugh. The lights in the station flicker, then die. We file out to the sound of hair raising on a hundred strangers’ arms.
This is camp, but it ain’t cheese.
