The only thing unappealing about The Drawer Boy is the name of it.
What is the audience to expect – a show about a disillusioned carpenter, or perhaps a man traumatized by being placed in a drawer to sleep as an infant? As the audience discovers, a play cannot be judged by its title as its characters cannot be judged by their cover.
Drayton Entertainments’ The Drawer Boy has found an ideal home at the Festival Theatre. The farming community is full of characters such as Angus and Morgan, and peppered with Miles’s. All of them have a story.
On opening night, the audience members focussed on this story in particular and all were enthralled, amused, and enlightened in its spectacle and worldly significance. When rural and urban collide and uproot memories and truths, the audience discovers yet again that one can never, ever judge a person until they know what winds of circumstance have landed them in a particular place.
In this multi-award winning Canadian play by Michael Healey, two older farmers, living together and lifelong friends, have their lives disrupted when idealistic student actor Miles upsets the applecart by staying with them to "learn about being a farmer so he can write a play." It is actually derived from a 1970s project in which actors with Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille lived and laboured with farm families in Clinton, Ontario and collected stories to develop a production called the The Farm Show for the Blyth Festival.
Absolutely incredible in his performance as Farmer Angus is Robert King. He is recognizable, but not as an actor who has performed often in television, radio, and film as well as theatre, though he is new to Drayton Entertainment. While not an old man, his tender portrayal of Angus as a lost soul, damaged in the war, and unable to retain a memory is so effectual that the audience yearns for his lost potential.
One of those was his artistic ability, for he was the draw-er boy.
His friend and keeper is Morgan, who has endured it all with his him, sacrificing much in his own life. Played as a reticent but maybe not-so-simple farmer, Rob McClure lends much to his multi-dimensional role. He endures the gamut of emotions that Miles’ presence has scared up, at first amusing himself with making the city slicker do crazy jobs like ‘rotating the crops’ and then feeling protective, guilty, angry and devastated as recovered memories work their wiles.
Zachary Stevenson as Miles, the whipper-snapper from Toronto, plays it just so, with the appeal he formerly exuded as "Buddy Holly" still lingering, and now fresh, whether he is polishing gravel or psychoanalyzing the cows.
Director Adam Furfaro, in his sixth season at Drayton Entertainment, is certainly to be commended for his insightful work with the trio.
The set design by Tamara Marie Kucheran is remarkable, managing to convey in one swoop the key features of a working farm kitchen, a barn, the outside complete with amber glowing window shining forth and the hills beyond. The assembling audience is greeted by recorded cricket sounds that in this case could have been piped in from outside but are nonetheless invoking.
One is only left to wonder what happened to all those sandwiches they made. We hope they didn’t go to waste. Angus and Morgan wouldn’t like that.
The Drawer Boy plays eight shows a week through June 28. Tickets can be ordered by calling the Drayton Festival Theatre Box office at 519-638-5555 or 1-888-449-4463. Visit www.draytonfestivaltheatre.com.
