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| Ardon Bess as Joe Louis (Photo courtesy of Infinitheatre) |
When one fight should have been enoughby Gaëtan L. Charlebois
Infinitheatre's production of David Sherman's new play, Joe Louis: An American Romance, which opened tonight, is a perfect symbol of Montreal English-language theatre. It is at once quite thrilling and profoundly dismaying.
The central problem of the evening was that, simply, this was not a play ready to be produced—but produced it was in a pretty but, very often, awkward presentation directed by Guy Sprung. Again, simply, Sprung and his large cast did not know what to do with this play in this space. Elements of the evening—for instance, the beautifully staged interplay of actor and archival film—simply underlined what had gone missing in the rest of the evening: pace. There were very long moments of talking which had to be filled as well and everyone seemed to be at their wits' end as to how to do this because that talking was...well...unscintillating.
