By Travis Facette
70 min | Drama, Solo | PG
Howard Petrick’s show is more a piece of storytelling than anything else. With a drawling, simple style, Petrick takes the role of V.R. Dunne and recounts the man’s life and achievements as a union organizer and revolutionary. It’s a compelling and sometimes vivid story, though it seemed to need more time in rehearsal—Petrick frequently stumbled over his lines or hastily improvised new ones. These hiccups aren’t too intrusive in a humble, simple storytelling piece like this, though, and I found myself taken in for most of the show.
It’s easy to forget how brutal these early labour struggles were, or how crushing the conditions during the Great Depression really were. Petrick uses simple language to paint a vivid picture of that semi-mythic America, with its chain gangs and mosquito swamps and brave union folk. There are plenty of laughs as well, some scripted and some improvised. However, Petrick occasionally moves away from the easy storytelling style that he’s set up and hops into other roles, and this can be jarring. He doesn’t handle these characters nearly as well as he does the narration, and it’s here that he tends to drop his lines or do some unsteady improvisation. I couldn’t help but think these parts would work better if narrated as dialogue within the story, rather than acted out.
The show also went long, stretching to 70 minutes, and the final stretch seemed somewhat repetitive and unnecessarily detailed, before reaching a rather abrupt and awkward ending. V. R. Dunne is a timely show, and it tells an important story about class struggle and the roots of American organized labour, but it could benefit from some tinkering to improve its pacing and structure.
V. R. Dunne by Howard Petrick is playing at the ODD Box (2 Daly Avenue, 2nd floor) on Saturday, June 18 at 8:00 p.m.;Sunday, June 19 at 4:30 p.m.; Tuesday, June 21 at 9:30 p.m.; Thursday, June 23 at 6:00 p.m.; and Saturday, June 25 at 5:30 p.m.
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