MONTREAL - A George F. Walker marathon is under way at Mainline Theatre. Two plays from his six-play Suburban Motel cycle, Problem Child and Adult Entertainment, presented by Tableau D'Hôte, have already opened. The second pair, Featuring Loretta and The End of Civilization run next week. And the third two, Criminal Genius and Risk Everything, are slated for the following week.

Walker is popular, prolific and widely produced internationally. Call him the Michel Tremblay of Toronto. Only Tremblay has a second career in novels, while Walker has crossed over into television (Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland).

Tableau D'Hôte, which specializes in Canadian plays, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with this ambitious project. Judging from the enthusiastic overflow crowd which attended Tuesday night's double opening, tickets are soon going to be scarce for Problem Child and Adult Entertainment, if not the whole cycle.

Problem Child is a tightly written, dark comedy about a down-and-out couple holed up in a motel room (all six plays take place in the same chintzy pink room), waiting for a social worker named Helen (Catherine Lemieux) to pay a call. The husband, R.J. (Mike Hughes) is nervous, neurotic, hooked on reality television.

His wife Denise (Joanne Sarazen), a former prostitute, is so fanatically focused on getting their child back from the welfare authorities that she hires the motel's psychotic handyman, Phillie (George Bekiaris), to kidnap the girl from her foster home.

Director Liz Valdez has tuned the entire cast into the maniacally comedic side of Walker so well that the production has the crowd-

connected spontaneity of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Hughes plays the childish pathos of his TV-addicted character to perfection, while Sarazen sticks to sexy, sassy and obsessed. Bekiaris manages to be certifiable and huggable at the same time. And Lemieux becomes progressively hilarious as Helen loses her grip under macabre circumstances.

In contrast to Problem Child, Adult Entertainment, directed by Rebecca Harper, is a darker, zig-zagging work that starts out steamy and moves into bloody murder. Meant to highlight corruption in the justice system, it begins by revealing deal-making, mixed-motive sex between an on-duty cop named Max (Eric Davis) and a legal-aid defence lawyer, Jayne (Valdez in actor mode).

Max's alcoholic partner, Donny (Patrick Charron), who is parked outside, keeps interrupting with his phone calls. Donny's estranged wife, Pam (Annie Lalonde) initially gets dragged into the story via Jayne's nightmare, then as a real person when Donny summons her to the hotel.

By then everything is reeling out of control. Max murders a suspect and everyone becomes implicated in the messy cover-up.

Valdez and Davis carry the weight of Walker's soapy drama here with convincing complicity, while Charron plays the standard, dull-witted drunk and Lalonde does what she can with the thinly written role of his long-suffering wife. There's a 45-minute intermission between the plays.

Suburban Motel, by George F. Walker, continues at Mainline Theatre 3997 St. Laurent Blvd. through Nov. 29. The six-play cycle began this week with Problem Child, at 7 p.m. nightly, through Sunday, plus matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m., and Adult Entertainment, at 9 p.m. nightly through Sunday, with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets $20, $15 reduced. Package deals: $30 for two per night, or Six-play Motel Pass, $80, or $70 reduced. Call 514-849-3378 or info at www.mainlinetheatre.ca

pdonnell@thegazette.canwest.com
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