Barking up the wrong tree
PTE’s latest production just too stereotypical to be funny
Barb Stewart

Playwright James O’Shea may have grown up on the Prairies, but doing so didn’t give him much insight into its people.

Thus, his attempt to bring to comedic life the story of two isolated Saskatchewan brothers and their encounter with two city slickers falls as flat as... well, as flat the Prairie.

Starting with an overly long piece of slapstick involving fumbling, mullet-coiffed brother Roland and a collapsible workbench, Dogbarked beats every stereotype and bad joke to death with a sheer lack of finesse.

Roland and his beer-guzzling older brother, Baxter (Claude Dorge), are attempting to name their town — a town which consists of their dilapidated garage and family farm. A true town once existed around them until the highway was moved, leaving them in the middle of nowhere.

In an effort to hold onto their existence, Roland and Baxter have started selling parcels of ‘town land’ for $1 each on the Internet, proof that these simple folk can manage such modern wonders as computers and the World Wide Web.

Along come Leo and Gloria, an obnoxious commercial producer and his smart and wily production assistant. They’re the epitome of snotty city folk. They’ve lost Leo’s Jack Russell terrier (fateful, of course, because Roland and Baxter have just decided to name their town ‘Dogbarked’) and in their attempts to find him end up stuck on a back road. That’s when the culture clash begins.

To his credit, O’Shea’s heart is in the right place and he isn’t trying to make these characters caricatures — they just are. Of course, we find out that the hicks aren’t just hicks but have brains and poetic souls, just like city people. And, of course, the city people aren’t just uptight snobs but people with feelings too.

Even with all of these ‘insights,’ Dogbarked’s characters never come to life with anything approaching a reflection of reality.

The actors make admirable attempts to give the work some life — especially Allan Zinyk, who pulls off Roland with admirable aplomb — but they can only do so much with their stereotypical characters.

The salt-of-the-land farmers seem to have nothing to do other than drink beer and lament the fall of the family farm, even though they have a surprising lack of work to do in late summer. But they do have time to bail the uptight city folk out of trouble. What else are fine farm folk good for but to come to the rescue with practical wisdom?

Dogbarked is supposed to be good for a laugh but, with very few exceptions, such as Roland and Baxter’s list of sayings for Saskatchewan license plates, it just isn’t very funny. Serious plot points, such as why Roland seems to be so angry with his father, are left completely unexplained. Is this meant to show Roland’s complexity — or is it merely sloppiness by the playwright?

While the life of rural folks may be ‘simple,’ Dogbarked proves that trying to write a humorous play about it is not.