Bruce Ryan Costella, who wrote and is performing Muttnik, is a gifted writer and actor: those things are givens. In Muttnik, he tells a story inspired by Laika, the stray dog who, for the sake of research, was rocketed into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 with just one meal and a seven-day supply of oxygen. It’s a horrifying equation but, for what it’s worth, Laika was the first living creature from Earth to journey into outer space. Through his character, who is a male pooch, Costella creates a world of fantasy, humour, and loneliness. His writing is eccentrically sensual. Referring to his much-missed mother, Costella’s mutt says, “I remember her kisses tasted like pastry dough and her milk tasted like porridge.” Remembering the elderly woman who cared for him until she died, the dog says she smelled of “equal parts expired perfume and damp cabbage.” Softening the blow of Laika’s fate, Costella allows his pooch an awareness of the dogs in Jules Verne’s stories, and he creates a dreamworld in which the dog’s mother becomes the moon. Although I admire all this from the viewpoint of craft, I resisted Costella’s thorough anthropomorphizing of his canine character — but I wouldn’t take my resistance too seriously as an artistic criticism; I simply anthropomorphize my beloved dogs differently. I just want to acknowledge that Muttnik didn’t completely engage me for a long time. But, as its thematic heart came into focus, it won me over. In two statements, Costella’s dog sets up a thematic tension: he refers to all dogs’ “biological impulse to make people happy”; speaking with the wisdom of having lived on the street, he also says, “Maybe if we are small and wish to survive in this world, it is best to believe in nothing.” Later, strapped into his capsule, he adds, in his Russian accent, “I do this to be good dog.” This is about a fear we all share, the dark suspicion that love may be futile, that we will be betrayed. In the show’s final moments, addressing the audience as stars, Costella’s dog says, “I think I’m going to take a nap now. You will be there when I wake up, da?” Many audience members gently murmured, “Da.”
At the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Remaining performances at Ballet BC: September 10, 7:00 pm; September 11, 10:30 pm; September 13, 8:45 pm; September 14, 7:00 pm; September 15, 5:15 pm. Tickets
(Photo by Greg Thonen)
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