Review: Same Time Next Week at Blue Room Theatre

Same Time Next Week at Blue Room Theatre
Thursday, August 15, 2024

The audience is ushered into an anteroom, standing squeezed together and craning over each other as a woman tries to purchase the game Dungeons and Dragons from an eccentric game store owner. She is new to this type of game, but stubborn and sardonic. He is comically weird. Elements of clever DIY stagecraft and live music elevate the scene. This prologue charmingly invites the audience into the world of this dark musical comedy about death, friendship and vulnerability before they even enter the theatre.

Mark has been diagnosed with leukaemia, and all he wants is for his three best friends to come over every Sunday and play Dungeons and Dragons with him. (For those who don’t know, Dungeons and Dragons is a popular role-playing game where players take on a fantasy alter-ego and use dice to imagine their way through quests guided by a dungeon master who decides the scenario.) None of them have ever played before, so the audience gets to watch their learning curve as they become increasingly committed to the fantasy and vulnerable with each other.

The story the friends create through the game is acted out by puppets, using a wide variety of techniques and surprises with puppets designed and built by Bryan Woltjen and Jesse Wood. The puppets bring a high dose of humour as well as magic, but importantly for both audience and characters, they allow for emotional explorations and vulnerabilities that are less accessible in everyday interactions with even the closest of friends. This has long been one of the appeals of Dungeons and Dragons—it allows players the opportunity to explore and play from the relative safety of a fantasy role.

The music, composed by Jackson Griggs, cleverly guides the mood and heightens the emotions with a wide variety of styles and instrumentation, using a small number of live musicians hidden behind a partition. The performances by the cast are all stellar, with no one truly outshining the others, although Amberley Cull, who plays the Dungeon Master, does have her juicy diva moments playing the undead villain.

The playwright, Scott McArdle, is very generous with letting the audience in. No knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons is needed to understand the show because the characters themselves learn along the way and bring the audience with them. Their self-awareness also invites the audience to identify with them; they know they are being silly, and they know that they are using their epic quest against an evil force as a metaphor for fighting against cancer. If they can play along, you can too. Same Time Next Week was inspired by true events, and this emotional honesty even shows through the drinking songs, dancing goblin skeletons, graphic interspecies sex, and underwater singing eyeball.

Same Time Next Week works because it is so balanced. Not only by the ensemble cast, but by the alternating scenes of hilarious, playful fantasy with the difficult realities of the people who come together each week. The silliness and the pathos balance each other out so that neither becomes too much. Even the prologue is balanced out when the audience is led back to the anteroom for an epilogue.

This is a play about friendship and death, but it is also about homemade theatre itself, creative play and collaboration. To experience a burst of local talent exhibiting all this and more, see Same Time Next Week at The Blue Room until Saturday, August 31.

SAMANTHA ROSENFELD