Fringe Web Report for July 8, 2003

By JON KAPLAN

You’ll never see another western like Billy Nothin’. It’s got the chaps, boots, spurs and cowboy hats, all right, but it’s set in a lyrical, imaginative wild west that’s bred in the fertile mind of playwright Sean Dixon and played out against the very un-John Wayne setting of the loading dock behind Honest Ed’s department store.

Drama, comedy, music and poetry against a backdrop of yellow bricks, fire escapes, a dumpster and recycled cardboard boxes? You bet.

At the play’s centre is Billy None (Matthew Payne), horse trainer at the Saddle Up Ranch, and his strange relationship to Ben Tilli, the ranch’s new owner (also Payne). Throw in William Tilli (Payne again), a figure invented by Ben to clear up a mysterious disappearance, and you have a psychic train wreck waiting to happen.

Not to mention the difficulty for the actor, who has to create three different but linked characters on the same stage, occasionally simultaneously. Payne’s expert at it, though, and it’s one of the joys of this Theatre SKAM production and Dixon’s script that we can distinguish and believe each turn of the multiple personalities that Payne presents. As Billy he’s hatted and deep-voiced; his Tilli brothers display a bare head, a rabbit overbite and a high-pitched, less secure tone and shy demeanour.

Dixon’s script looks at how love gone wrong, caught up with fantasies, can redirect a person’s life. It’s a piece of hypnotic storytelling, both in its frame and within the narrative itself. The piece is set in motion from a fire escape above the audience’s heads by poet Melody (the mesmerizing Camille Stubel), who starts spinning the yarn, which gathers momentum and more magic as the filigrees of story become more and more complex. What-if games propel it forward, and the sorcery of the production enables us to deal with leaps in and conflations of time and space with no effort at all. Where else would we believe that cell phones can double as six-guns?

As one of the characters says, "The thing is to make things real."

The production wouldn’t succeed as well without the talented SKAM ensemble, directed by Amiel Gladstone with the zest of a celebratory hoedown. And it’s not by chance that the show ends with a robust square dance.

While you’re on line waiting to get into a show, you might see two guys with Alice In Wonderland-style Mad Hatter tophats, busking to beat the band. They’re Paul Gibson and James Downing of That Boy, trying to entice audiences to their show. The winner of this year’s Fringe new-play contest – which got author Gibson a slot in the festival – the production is at the Robert Gill. The pair’s outdoor work – guitar duos and melodious songs – is pretty seductive.