IN THE BELLY OF THE CARP

Childhood poverty and abuse, adult addiction: this is my kind of holiday show. Seriously. At this time of year when so much entertainment is brainless and weightless, In the Belly of the Carp offers a more satisfying experience. And the staging of this production from the Butcher Shop Collective is gorgeously innovative.

Rodney DeCroo, Samantha Pawliuk, and David Bloom are listed as the core creators of this adventure. Based on DeCroo’s songs and poems, In the Belly of the Carp tells the story of a character named … Rodney DeCroo. With his band, Rodney is trying to complete a set at a small club, but his PTSD keeps knocking him off his pins. Sometimes, he’s reactive but still in the present — like when he imagines he hears an insult from his bass guitarist and tears a strip off him. And sometimes his reactivity tosses him all the way into a surreal version of his past, where he’s terrorized as a kid by a character named Rat Man, whom I understood to be Rodney’s father.

Rodney struggles with addictions as well as reactivity, and he can be a complete frickin’ prick, even with his best friend and business manager Samantha, who also runs tech at the club. Again and again, she tries to calm him down. One of those times, he wails, “But everybody leaves, Samantha!” These expressions of victimization can feel self-indulgent and, especially in Act 1, we spend a long time with Rodney as he runs through depressive cycles that don’t advance substantially — but, miraculously, are almost never boring.

That’s because there’s so much nuance in the material and so much beauty in its textures. (I recognized a lot of it from my own depressive and destructive cycles.) There’s a lovely device, for instance, in which Rodney shares the stage with his younger self (played by Camille Legg): fraternal tenderness. The text’s allusions to sexual defilement aren’t explicit, but they have impact: “From now on, nothing’s pure.” And there’s the complexity of Samantha’s relationship to Rodney: when Sam says, “It doesn’t matter what I want … I don’t want Rodney to kill himself”, we know this can’t be a good thing.

There are also considerable pleasures in DeCroo’s music and language. The songs echo with the textures of Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen — sometimes country, sometimes harder rock. Some lyrics I grabbed: “An angel with bad teeth and small hands”; “When I take you to the river, boy, you’ll hardly know your name”; “Grief will not change you./ It reveals who you’ve been”; “Some nights we go out walkin’/ Through the usual parts of town./ I say, ‘You’re so beautiful.’/ But that kind of beauty gets me down.”

The sounds produced by the band — Brian Barr (electric guitar), Ed Goodine (percussion), and Jon Wood (bass guitar) — come in invigorating, multilayered waves.

John Webber’s lighting design is often rock-concert dramatic. And the projections and shadows by Mind of Snail Puppet Co. (Cholé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel) are so satisfying Mind of a Snail’s work is very low-tech: they use a lot of overhead projectors. The deliberately handmade quality of their graphics feels intimate and human, and underscores the overall honesty of the work. Mind of a Snail’s contributions are sometimes playful: projecting a crude drawing of Rodney’s room, Legg, who’s operating the projector onstage, draws little wisps of smoke coming out the ashtray. And, often, the work is trippy. In one knockout sequence, young Rodney has shot up. We see a drawing of him nodding in a back alley; a huge white space above him fills with more and more vibrant colours, until they all run into one another and become murky.

The actors are as solid as can be: DeCroo doing an excellent job of simply being; creator Pawliuk, who appears as Samantha, tender and understated; Sebastian Kroon terrifying as Rat Man; Shekhar Paleja a relief as Raph; and Legg innocence itself as Boy, the young Rodney.

Let’s hear it for substance. Let’s hear it for beauty.

There’s only one performance left. It’s at the Shadbolt in Burnaby. If you’re in Vancouver and you think that’s too far to travel, you’re mistaken. In the Belly of the Carp is worth it.

IN THE BELLY OF THE CARP Created by Rodney DeCroo, Samantha Pawliuk, and David Bloom. Songs and poems by Rodney DeCroo. Projections and shadows by Mind of a Snail Puppet Co. A Butcher Shop Collective production directed by TJ Dawe and presented by the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Running at the Shadbolt Centre until November 30. Get tickets online or by calling 604-205-3000.

PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Rodney DeCroo, Samantha Pawliuk, and Sebastien Kroon by Blake Williams)