LUTZ
- NBActs
Photographer: Steven Moss
“But in many ways the play belongs to Caleb
Marshall's Pike and Ben Ross's Christian, who carry
most of the action and veer capably and with
discipline through extremes of their relationship,
from brotherly camaraderie to physical and psychic
conflict.
Especially impressive is the moment when,
after an enraged physical battle, the younger and
slighter Christian, victorious, announces that that's
what you get for tangling with a figure skater: at
that moment, it was easy to believe that he was
suddenly actually stronger than his brother.
Their
relationship reminded me of Sam Shepherd's True West
translated to rural New Brunswick, and Marshall and
Ross created the kind of intensity I associate with
the best productions of that I've seen. In part this
is engineered by Griffith's script, which offers us
much we don't understand and counts on us to keep
waiting to figure it out; but much, too is created by
the way the actors focus on their characters'
immediate motives, follow them to their extremes, and
let the language and the situation speak for
themselves.
Both actors have the rhythm and music of
Griffith's backwoods New Brunswick language down cold.
In the penultimate scene, when Christian has
manipulated Pike into going out hunting for the bear
with him, the presence of the loaded guns is a
wonderfully theatrical reminder that both are capable
of violence and that the bear they're hunting may well
be within either of them.”
Russ Hunt's Reviews,
NB Acts Theatre Festival, Lutz Review, July 2006
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