First, a land acknowledgement:
The Edmonton Fringe takes place on white man's land. This has always been white man's land, before his arrival this was an empty continent filled with banished Mongolians who achieved nothing other than stealing the untouched land from the previous wave of untouching Mongolians. Everything great that has been built on this land came from the white man, and his glory over it we acknowledge here today.New music sucks, and it sucks too loud.
- Davis Quinton, Corner Gas
If you have an idea about senior citizens being out of place at a heavy metal concert, you need to produce it sooner rather than later.
In AWOL, two men escape a senior citizens home and go out on an adventure at a heavy metal music concert. While Neville (Rob Gee, also the playwright) is never given an age, it is mentioned "twice" that Cyrill (Jon Paterson) is 82 years old. Presuming our story takes place in present day, that means Cyrill was born in 1941, and would have been connected to the music scene from 1953 until about 1962. It would have been 1971, after Hendrix and The Doors and the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were both born in 1943!), when he reached that age of 30 where you, as Davis said at the beginning, start deciding that new music just isn't your scene anymore.
So as a best case scenario Cyrill is a fuddy duddy who thinks that Buddy Holly, Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis is what rock and roll is supposed to sound like and that February 3rd 1959 is the Day the Music Died; yet he's still at the age where he would have been in his 20s when the British invasion and Bob Dylan's folk revolution radically shifted music and possibly Cyrill along with it.
If you have a version of AWOL (they did promise AWOL 2, which I instantly realized was familiarly never going to happen) that you would like to produce in 2030 and is set in present day, your protagonist will have been born in 1948 and been a teenager in 1960 still taking in new music until as late as 1978. If we take the two leads as British (while they annoyingly tried to localize the story to Alberta for the cheap pop, their terminology even more than their accents make it clear this happened across the pond), 1978 is the year the punk revolution in London ended. It's hard to make a "fuddy duddies can't handle your heavy metal" when your senior citizen saw The Ramones at the Roundhouse. So as I said, this is a genre which is already showing the strains of age. Obviously you could still do a story where some 60-year old can't handle obnoxious tubs of lard autotuning their way to the top of the pops, but the hook of the play is "senior citizens attend a Metallica concert" and that loses some lustre when Metallica is getting dangerously close to being senior citizens themselves.
This is a long way to go for this particular ham sandwich of a review, and you might be wondering "sure by the time you post this the Fringe will be already over and even if it wasn't this sold out the last 3 showings, but it might come to my city and I'm left wondering is it any good?" The answer to that is its probably good enough. It opens in medias res with our two geezers on the run from security, jumping fences and climbing stage equipment to desperately keep free. They realize they have to make a dangerous leap to stay free, they do so...
And welcome to Act One. It's often difficult in two man shows to keep track of character changes (we just covered that with "Agent Thunder" at the start of the Fringe), and while both of these men are better actors than we saw in that show it's still difficult. Neville's vaguely "Emo Phillips meets Grimace" voice is at first part of his character's charm until you quickly realize that Rob Gee always talks like that, when playing any character. Anyways our story starts with Cyrill's granddaughter coming to visit (the relatives around them are all gone: presumably age on Cyrill's end of the register and drug tragedy on hers), and since they don't have a lot to bond with since their interactions seemed to end when she was in elementary school, Cyrill has Neville sit and act Alzheimer-y stupefied so that she'll talk to him about what she's actually feeling (thinking it's like some sort of therapy to unload on a human being who can't actually hear you), at which point he feeds the info back. Unfortunately this time he accidentally replies to her, freaking her out as she (without any additional knowledge) pieces together that Neville actually knows Cyrill and feeds him the information. Hint to readers: this never works out well.
So with that, Cyrill loses all access to his granddaughter, which bothers him. So he and Neville conspire (well, Cyrill conspires) to escape the long term care home and find her. She did mention she's playing at the local heavy metal concert, so fortunately as the story started Cyrill had blackmailed the pothead guard into helping them (awfully helpful) and a couple awkward arguments later they inelegantly have his keycard (it would have worked better with a more interesting escape plot).
In Act Two, it turns out that Neville was a badass motorcycle gang member in his younger days, and his own grandson has become a motorcycle gang leader in his own right.(awfully helpful) In deference to Neville's reputation, the gang agrees to work with their connections in the event security team to smuggle the two men inside the venue (awfully helpful). As you can guess, here's where the story starts to creak quite a bit. The scenario has all the makings of those madcap Carry On era comedies: of course, you might notice they don't make those anymore, and the audience is expected to follow along too many coincidental plot helping elements. The core of the story should be these two demented old geezers stumbling around the heavy metal world causing mayhem (ie. bumping into somebody because they aren't sure on their feet, and a mosh pit breaking out), or instead using their wily old man powers to evade security and/or the nursing home staff chasing them (oh, right, that's happening). Both gags work, and if you're really clever you can alternate between them.
This doesn't really happen here. There are no "hey we can communicate effortlessly here since the loud music doesn't bother us since we can never hear each other anyways" jokes, and even the sendup of the heavy metal culture from the geezer perspective never really comes through and falls flat. I don't know if its the woke audience scared to laugh at the "wrong" humour but the show twice tries to pull the old "I don't know if it was a man or a woman or both or neither" joke out, which might work if it was the 80s glam rockers or something, but this is a heavy metal show apparently, and "wait what sex am I looking at" is something you ask a lot more at, say, the Fringe beer gardens, than you would at a metal concert. Those men there tend to be pretty testosterone-fueled (in fact I believe Neville even explicitly says this). The "all of them need haircuts, especially the balding ones" joke works much better, as this does increasingly start to describe heavy metal fandom (I know one guy who wears his hair long and straggly and a ballcap to cover the fact that an inch above the brim he's see-your-reflection bald, and while he's not a metalhead he did come of musical age in the 1980-1985 range that metal did).
Mostly this holds together based on the strength of the performances: the "cantankerous old coot" and the "lovable old man" tropes are used to play off each other though not as much as you might expect, and while Paterson is a strong enough performer as Cyrill his other characters are a little lacklustre and as noted earlier Gee doesn't have a second gear at all. Most of the time is spent with our two leads, though a drug dealing side character played by Paterson is way too over the top and gets far too much screen time. You would think a more natural way to have a "our straight laced leads have a drug trip" gag would try to incorporate the fact that both young concertgoers and senile senior citizens both find themselves taking a lot of pills and a bottle mixup would cover the situation nicely.
Basically what I'm saying is that the scripting was what was holding this back from being a real barn burner of a play. The audience received a decent little hour of entertainment and a smattering of fourth wall breaking humour (as noted earlier, all of the ones that were Calgary slags or Edmonton rah rah were complete wet farts upon arrival), with two fairly well drawn characters whose adventures we were happily along for the ride on to the inevitable happy ending (which, ironically, we had watched in the first 30 seconds).
If they do make AWOL 2, they definitely need to plot out a better adventure to put them in. Maybe put on a music show of their own...
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