Four Dogs and a Bone – Brief Candle Productions

Overview

The title of John Patrick Shanley’s Four Dogs and a Bone (directed by Kate Gaul for Brief Candle Productions) should say it all. A short, savage affair which the losers will be lucky to walk away from. But instead of a bloody one-act scrap, what’s offered up is a series of lacklustre scenes largely devoid of the play’s titular animalism.

The play is a satire of the American film industry and concerns itself with the machinations of four people — a producer, Bradley (Sonny Vrebac); Victor, a writer (Paul Gerrard) and two female leads, Collette (Amanda Collins) and Brenda (Melinda Dransfield) — attempting to negotiate the brutal labyrinth of commercial filmmaking.

With the budget ceiling of his latest movie fast approaching, Bradley is looking to cut material and open to ideas about how this might be accomplished. The two actresses know the writing is on the wall, but not for whom. With the director nowhere in sight, all three descend on the writer (whose mother has just passed away, incidentally), angling to further their own cause with little care for the way it affects their colleagues or the quality of the film itself.

Though adorned liberally with witticisms, Shanley’s plot is pretty basic and best served, I think, at a brisk clip. No time for reflection. Time is money and never more so than in Hollywood. This is the play’s first problem. It feels strange to say this about a 70-minute production, but it could have easily lost 15 or 20 minutes.

Most of this dead space seems comprised of the time it takes the actors just to say the lines. Affecting an American accent was clearly a task for everyone in the cast, and much of the humour in the play’s one-liners and back-and-forth suffers from painstaking enunciation.

Another factor which deadens the play considerably is its comedic execution. The actors appear to have wrung relatively little humanity from Shanley’s characters and, possibly as the result of some odd direction, there was a definite tendency towards playing the laugh rather than the scene. Instead of trying to spark off each other, the cast deliver their lines almost as interrupted monologues, confiding their schemes and dreams to the distant horizon of the fourth wall, but very rarely to the person sitting opposite them.

For a script with no shortage of meat, Four Dogs and a Bone fails to satisfy.