Lunchbox offers a time warp to the '88 Winter Olympics

photo by Ben Laird

By LOUIS B. HOBSON

A trip to Lunchbox Theatre's Go For Gold Audrey Pham is a trip down memory lane. Your destination is the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, one of the most successful hostings in the history of the Olympics.

Right out of the gate, the excitement for these games was palpable with registration exceeding all predictions. This gives Calgary playwright Camille Pavlenko license to set her odd couple comedy, outside of the Olympic Village. With true Canadian spirit, Audrey chooses to give up her accommodations in the Village and all its perks. Audrey is competing in ski ballet, which was as much a curiosity as the Jamaican bobsled team or Eddie the Eagle, so it is fitting Audrey be billeted in a room above a curiosity shop in Kensington.

Audrey, as embodied by Ali DeRegt, oozes enthusiasm and positivity, so, for the sake of laughs, it is essential she be pared with someone her polar opposite. That's Birchwoman, the owner of the shop that bares her name. Kira Bradley makes her the kind of wonderfully pessimistic, nasty eccentric Shirley MacLaine loved playing. Birchwoman is an aging hippie who collected many of the things in her shop on her world travels. There's a rich history hiding somewhere in this character and it will be up to Audrey to pull some of it out for the audience.

The role of a set designer is to create a playground for the actors, and it is one spectacular sandbox Julia Kim provides for DeRegt and Bradley. When you enter the Vertigo Studio Theatre, it really is as if you're visiting a curio, or second hand shop, and it is filled with incredible nickknacks. It's actually as deceptive as it is realistic, because eventually it has to take the audience to the ski slopes.

Both Audrey and Birchwoman have created facades to hide the hurt they are carrying, and it is to the credit of Pavlenko, DeRegt and Bradley that the revelations emerge slowly and believably.

Back in Audrey's home, there is an awards cabinet, where her brother occupies several shelves. Their mother keeps Audrey's shelf dusted and shiny. Calgary is probably Audrey's last chance to put something on that shelf. Birchwoman's store does not just hold items from her past, it is now her whole, empty-nest life. These are two people who need someone to fill the void in their lives, but their antagonism for each other initially suggests they are not each other's solution.

Like most TV sit coms, Go For Gold Audrey Pham is episodic, and director Bronwyn Steinberg does her best to make it feel less jerky than it is. There is a great puppet sequence near the end of the play that Steinberg and Pavlenko foreshadow when DeRegt first enters. She picks up a doll and uses it as a puppet to make comments about this strange world she has just entered. It's that kind of theatricality that this cute, nostalgic play needs.

With this current season, Lunchbox is celebrating its 50th anniversary, a truly golden milestone. It means, when the Olympics were turning the eyes of the world on Calgary, Lunchbox had already been producing plays at Bow Valley Square for 13 years, and even had a special Olympic offering called Talent of the Host Country. Calgary can boast we have the longest-running lunchtime theatre in the world, and Go For Gold Audrey Pham is another little gem in its crown.

Go For Gold Audrey Pham runs in the Vertigo Studio Theatre at the base of the Calgary Tower until Feb. 16.