Sinners reveals some of the secrets that have made Fredericton’s Norm Foster the most produced playwright in Canada.
It is Foster’s first play, produced in 1983. With six characters—a few more than his usual 3 or 4—Sinners’ dense plotting, narrative turnarounds and everyday characters in unusual situations had the playwright bursting out of the gate on his first try.
He has since written more than fifty more plays, including at least one musical and a 15-minute two-hander that was especially concocted for the Fringe circuit. It takes place in a car.
This deft theatrical writing has gained Foster the moniker ‘Canada’s Neil Simon’ with more than 150 productions a year worldwide. He’s been produced in places like Poland and Turkey, as well as in the far reaches of the English-speaking world, from Australia to New Zealand to Bermuda to the UK, the US, and, of course, Canada.
Often the bread and butter of summer stock and Community Theatre—there is even a Foster Festival now in St. Catherines, Ontario—these plays are marvels of dramatic construction.
In the hands of director Ian MacDermid and the Dartmouth Players, Sinners delivers a solid comedic punch. Double- and even triple-plotted, the story concerns an adulterous couple who are caught in the act by the husband, a Protestant minister.
Further unexpected visitors complicate the narrative; the single imposingly dowdy set of the minister’s residence—put together by director MacDermid and Holly Irving along with the Dartmouth Players team—provides a fine comic backdrop: from ugly wallpaper to mismatched furniture, the set allows for several crucial plot points as the main male character is literally a furniture recoverer.
That character, initially played with jittery grace by Rory Young, morphs from discomfort to confidence to discomfort again. It’s a nice range of emotions to explore by Young, who gets most of the good lines.
Cathy Cameron keeps up with Young in the second half as an industrial-strength busybody married to the Police Chief; Randy Burt matches both as Cameron’s husband, the cop who is also running for mayor.
MacDermid’s direction keeps the play humming. The comic timing delivers Foster’s caustic humour briskly. And while it was written in the early 1980s, Joanna Marsh’s workaday costumes set the action in a more contemporary time. This is classic Norm Foster, immersing the audience in the quotidian lives and loves of the average Joes and Josephines, everyday people who somehow found themselves humorously caught up in adultery and murder.
The Dartmouth Players deliver a fine production of what now seems an indestructible play.
The production runs to June 27 at Stairs Memorial United Church, 44 Hester Street, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
DARTMOUTH PLAYERS present Sinners by Norm Foster
Director: Ian MacDermid
Stage Manager: Zach Melanson
Producer and Prop Co-Ordinator: Shaylyn Macaulay
Assistant Stage Manager: Natasha Thomas
Costume Designer: Joanna Marsh
Sound Design: John Beard
Lighting Design: Richard Bonner
