The honour of being a regular theatre critic can often be overwhelming and even embarrassing: how on earth did I miss Adam Pettle’s highly-praised tragi-comedy Zadie’s Shoes a decade ago at the important Factory Theatre, and shortly after at the Winter Garden Theatre? And how can I catch it (in its new and improved version) before it closes at this coming Sunday’s matinee?
Thankfully I did catch it, and both my wife Merle and I were quite impressed with the play, co-directed by both the author and his brother Jordan Pettle. It is hardly a classic of its kind, but it confronts one of the major issues of modern times: addiction. We usually think of drugs, food or sex when we see that powerful word, but in this case, it is gambling: the search for fast answers, for good luck, for prayer or for the easy money that would seem to solve all our problems but rarely does.
Pettle’s basic plot is about Benjamin, a young man in need of cash to pay for his girlfriend and himself to fly to Mexico for an alternative cancer treatment. (He gambles on horses at the racetrack; she on coffee enemas, but aren’t they both tossing the dice in their own way?) Like his grandfather, or "zadie," who migrated barefoot to Canada from Poland after losing his footwear in a poker game, Benjamin is a gambling man.
What makes Zadie’s Shoes work so well are the playwright’s well-drawn characters: the neurotic protagonist Benjamin (played with edgy tension by Joe Cobden), his possibly-dying lady friend Ruth (a solid Patricia Fagan), the latter’s hippie and sports-obsessed sisters Lily and Beth (Shannon Perreault and Lisa Ryder), and the most outrageously vulgar Bear, a one-time liquor/drugs/racetrack addict played with uproarious gusto by William MacDonald. We quickly grow to care about all these characters and their beautifully interwoven relationships, and the laughs come hot-and-heavy, often thanks to the not-so-divine interventions of the well-named Eli (as in Elijah the prophet, perhaps), an older man whom young Benjamin meets at a synagogue, who, of course, is quite a gambler himself.
Zadie’s Shoes is middlebrow, often more Neil Simon than David Mamet, but the ingenious comic touches of the former and the rat-a-tat filthy but occasionally powerful dialogue of the latter are in frequent display. I like this play a lot, because it sets its goals only moderately high and often hits them, as any good gambler should. Playwright Pettle has been writing primarily for television recently, which is fine; I’ve recently (and reluctantly) realized that some of the best dramatic writing today (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Mildred Pierce) can be found on the little screen. But I hope he never turns his back entirely on live theatre: sure, it’s a gamble, and an often poorly-paying one at that. But the Pettle brothers show real talent here, and there’s no doubt that audiences are the winners.
Zadie’s Shoes, May 5 – June 5, Factory Theatre
Allan Gould is Post City’s theatre critic