Claudia Dey’s “Trout Stanley” is a comedy about two twin sisters (who look nothing alike) on their thirtieth birthday. Since the death of their parents, whom they now call “the holy ones” they have become recluses in a small cabin in a small town in rural Canada. Grace works in a local garbage dump and sidelines as a sexy model for billboards advertising a local hunting and fishing shop. Her sister, Sugar, has been wearing her mother’s track suit for the past ten years, and has not left their little cabin. She’s kinda crazy, but in a way that causes no problems given that she exists entirely within her little log asylum and doesn’t interact with anyone other than her sister, her dead parents, and a small figurine of a “bird baby” that represents their deceased triplet sister. Until… a stranger breaks in to creep around the house, slurp up the drippings from the big roast Sugar has prepared, sniff her slippers and the rest of her essence as she naps on the couch. When he is discovered by the two sisters we learn that he is also a man adrift in the wilderness, named Trout Stanley (after the fish, he explains) and is heading north in search of the “death place” where his parents drowned. By the end of the first act, he is invited to stay for the birthday party and by the end of the second act he is in love with Sugar, bound and imprisoned by Grace and an involuntary agent of change in the lives of both sisters. 

I don’t usually include this much story in a review, but one of the strengths of this play is the intricacy and complexity of the tall tale being told about these most unlikely characters. The play is very entertaining and enjoyable, the characters genuinely quirky and ingratiating, and the performances are first-rate. Director David Gassner does a terrific job of sustaining the tension and controlling the absurdity, and also leads his actors through sustained individual monologues without them ever becoming tedious or self-indulgent. There is a whole lot of text in this play and the acting and directing mostly overcomes some serious problems in the writing. 

I think “Trout Stanley” is a perfect example of a play that is overwritten. There are two reasons. The first is that there is simply too much language, too much verbosity. It makes us more aware of the writing by the playwright than of the words being said by the characters. The second is because the dialogue too often feels imposed on the dramatic action rather than coming out of the dramatic action. There are also some instances of precisely repeated sections of dialogue that simply feel artificial and precious rather than organic to the characters. Make no mistake, I think Claudia Dey is a very good writer and I love the freedom and imaginative abundance that she’s put into this play, but for me it was ultimately a bit too self-conscious, too intellectually intentional. 

None of that applies to the three excellent actors playing these parts. Angela DiMarco was absolutely wonderful as the arrested adolescent Sugar, bringing sweetness and innocence to a character trying to be both reverent and relevant, searching for a place in the world that will not require her to go out into that world. When she falls in love with Stanley her transformation is brilliant and endearing and when she returns from her first foray outside the cabin she returns as an adult woman and without saying a word about it, everything about her relationship to the person she was before is gone forever. 

Sarah Budge played the older sister, Grace, with a smart blend of fantasy sexiness and an overpowering stench of reality brought home from days spent rummaging through everyone else’s garbage. I really admired the way she varied her dominance over Sugar and Trout with her own self-doubt, her competence and confidence in the “outside world” with her insecurity and dependence within her home. Ms. Budge also had excellent dramatic focus and just the right emotional connection with the others. 

In many ways, Trout Stanley was the easiest and the most difficult character to play. Easy because Trout is the most outrageous, most easily comedic of the characters. Hard because what Ryan Higgins had to do was to make this guy who “never lies” believable, and to keep his erratic and idiosyncratic behavior eccentric but not contrived. He did. Because his character is the catalytic force that changes and defines the two sisters, he had to engage each of them on a level that allowed us to believe that he was influential but not manipulative, and that his own destiny was dependent on the connections he made with each of them. Higgins was attractive and compelling, the real deal in the most unlikely character. His connection with Sugar was sweet and touching, and his relationship with Grace helped define her, and himself, in critical ways. The balance between these three made for a terrific ensemble, without a weak component. 

Despite my reservations, “Trout Stanley”  is a very enjoyable and imaginative play, a fiction designed to entertain and enchant us with exaggerations and inventions in the best tradition of communal storytelling. Balagan Theatre has mounted a solid, admirable production, attractively designed and with impressive performances and strong direction.

PICTURED ABOVE: Ryan Higgins, Angela DiMarco and Sarah Budge in "Trout Stanley"
PHOTO BY: Andrea Huysing