Jackson Card in Brother Rat, ReadyGo Theatre at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If there ever was a show that demanded the audience ‘listen to me!’ and won’t take no — not to mention maybe, or we’ll see and maybe get back to you later — for an answer, it’s the one currently running at the Backstage Theatre in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

The thing about Brother Rat that knocks you back in your seat — besides the volume — is that there’s really no frontier between the music and the characters who play it. None.

For one thing, of course, Erik Richards’s new punk rock play with music, adapted from the nine-minute song Brother Rat/ What Slayde Says by the Canadian punk band NoMeansNo, is set at a concert. And the sound, Whittyn Jason’s set and dramatic lighting, the grimy clutter of instruments and speakers and cords, and the general haze in the theatre, envelop you in that world.

But more than that, the numbers (by the playwright and Josh Meredith) and the hammering barrage of repetitions in Richards’s lyrics also, in a visceral way, become the dialogue (and the soliloquies) in the scenes between numbers.

Maybe the whole engine of punk is an expression of anger. The characters are more than pissed off. They’re struggling, and coming apart at the seams from fury And it’s the fury of extreme desperation, as it emerges from the wall of sound that has us putting in earplugs (provided) when the members of the band, Theresa Give Me That Knife, grab their instruments.

In the first scene Robby (Jackson Card), haunted by mental illness, is hearing a voice he knows — “Robby, where are you, man?” — from somewhere the clutter of his head. And he’s trying to resist. The first number we hear from him and his bandmates includes “I’m feeling sick of spinning circles.” He left home — ejected in effect by his father who called him “a schizo” — when he pitched a brick through the door.

Michelle Rob in Brother Rat, ReadyGo Theatre at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Presiding from the altar of a drum set, Michelle Robb as Dianne whales away wildly, arms whirling. A lingering image of Richards’ ReadyGo Theatre production is Dianne collapsing over a cymbal like a puppet unstrung. She’s been off booze and pills, she says, trying to search for her mother who’s lost in the streets. “I think my mother would have liked this show…. She won’t see me end up like her. I have to get better.” It’s a tenuous thread to the world, and a glimmer of what the helping professions like to call “wellness.” But rehab-type programs notwithstanding, she’s started up again.

“I hurt all the time. So do you…. What are we supposed to do?” Robby says to Dianne. Well, there’s a question, from people who somehow slipped through the cracks of the world.

The third character Slayde, the bassist, played with a kind of vicious energy by Spenser Kells, is the band whip, so to speak, and Robby’s toxic alter-ego. “We plays shows. We get fucked up. We stick together.” So what is the problem? “Nothing’s wrong with you,” he says to Robby and Dianne. It’s the kind of pep talk — hey, the show must go on! — that underpins the entertainment industry, true, but oils the wheels of substance abuse and mental illness.

In the NoMeansNo song, it’s Slayde who seems to be the voice of Robby’s self-destructive urge:  “We’re brothers, brothers in arms, until the end your end brother rat.” There’s a romance to this kind of toxicity, a possessiveness. In the play Slayde urges Robby to jettison Dianne, abandon her to her fate. “She doesn’t want to be happy,” he says. “It’s not right to drag people down like that.”

My ears aren’t really tuned to punk (I bet you guessed). And I strained mightily to hear the lyrics before I realized it’s better to just catch memorable phrases as they lift from the aural fabric of Brother Rat. But you get a sense of a story arc based on serial lapses — and a powerful sense of the struggle to throw off chains, and stop the terrifying spiral into a kind of murky oblivion.

Brother Rat, ReadyGo Theatre at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson. Set and lighting by Whittyn Jason

Richards, best known as a sound designer/ composer, has assembled a cast of actor-musicians to form a band. The characters we meet are convincing outsiders. And we’re not sure if they can ever take charge of lives in thrall to assorted abuses. In a way Brother Rat is too short for its own story. It’s exactly the right length for a group portrait, though.

Musicals tend to take their characters to high-stakes moments when only singing will fill the bill, and move the story forward. The stakes are high, and loud, in Brother Rat, to be sure. But it needs its music in a different way. The spirit of punk is the fabric of life for its characters. They stay angry and they keep going.

Here’s a 12thnight preview interview with playwright Erik Richards.

REVIEW

Brother Rat

Theatre: ReadyGo Theatre

Written by: Erik Richards, music by Erik Richards and Josh Meredith, lyrics by Erik Richards, adapted from the song Brother Rat by NoMeansNo

Directed by: Erik Richards

Starring: Jackson Card, Spenser Kells, Michelle Robb

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Dec. 7

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca