The following article was published on OrilliaMatters.com on Aug. 8 when Hurry Hard played at the Orillia Opera House earlier this month. It has been reprinted with permission from OrilliaMatters.com, and the original can be viewed here.
Hurray Hard runs at the Gravenhurst Opera House until Aug. 22. More information and tickets can be found here.
By Andrew Wagner-Chazalon
We’ve all known this guy. In high school, he was a great athlete, someone with potential. He may have even had a shot at the pros. But things didn’t line up, and now here he is, 20 years later, caring much too deeply about winning the local slo-pitch tournament, the beer league hockey trophy, the community bonspiel.
In songs and movies, he’s often portrayed as pathetic, a washed-up has-been or never-was who doesn’t see how time has moved on.
Kristen Da Silva knows him, too, but she is much too good of a playwright to lean into the tired trope. In Hurry Hard, which opened this week at the Orillia Opera House, she does something much more interesting: She gets the audience — and the other characters on stage — to care about this has-been and his not-quite-dead dream. And in the process, he and we begin to breathe life into the nearly moribund dreams of those around him.
This is celebratory theatre at its best, a feel-good play that explores life themes while providing a championship level of laughs along the way.
As the title implies, Hurry Hard is set in a curling rink — in this case, in Stayner. Brothers Terry (Tim Walker) and Bill (Darren Keay) are set to enter the regional bonspiel. Terry is desperate to win the title from hated rivals Meaford. Bill humours his brother, but he cares much more about his inability to speak to — or even look directly at — his ex-wife, Sandy (Erin MacKinnon).
Sandy has been teaching her friend, Darlene (Caitlin Driscoll), to curl, but Darlene is much more interested in flirting with Johnnie, played with easygoing charm and lighthearted arrogance by Jack Ettlinger.
The entire ensemble does stellar work, maintaining exactly the right tone in a comedy about some flawed people. Most of the characters have attributes that could make them unlikeable if played the wrong way — Johnnie is good looking and knows it; Terry is not only obsessive about curling but is also sexist; Darlene will cheerfully stand up one date in pursuit of a better one. But in the hands of this cast — and under the direction of opera house artistic director Jesse Collins — they are people the audience cheers for. Quite literally, in fact, as the play progresses.
The Studio Theatre in the opera house is a great place to see just about any play, a venue that invites audience engagement. The 100-seat theatre is intimate to the point where the front row of the audience is nearly sitting on the stage. That intimacy went even further before the lights went down on opening night, as audience members wandered onto the stage itself to examine details of Collins’s note-perfect curling club set. (Ushers were eventually stationed on the stage to discourage the practice.)
Hurry Hard is a superb choice for the theatre. It helps that Da Silva’s script is superb. It’s touching in all the right ways, and triumphant in the end, and it’s absolutely hilarious throughout.
You don’t need to have lived in a small town to appreciate the deep vein of humour Da Silva mines here — though the opening-night audience roared with insider appreciation at some of the lines.
This is a production that invites the audience to engage, much like curling itself. On the surface, curling seems like a series of individual challenges, with each player throwing a rock in turn, scoring points for their team. But in truth, it’s a team sport. The rock is thrown by one person, but where it ends up is determined in large part by the actions of their teammates, those who sweep to adjust its trajectory, those who “hurry hard.”
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