The Shoplifters

At the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until March 9, 2019
Tickets from $29 at artsclub.com or 604-687-1644

Posted February 17, 2019

In the Arts Club’s press release, playwright Morris Panych says, regarding The Shoplifters, “I’m fascinated with what’s happening in the world right now, with people being left behind, and I wanted to write about that.”

Alma (portrayed by the incomparable Patti Allan) will not be left behind, you can bet a couple of rib-eye steaks on that. She’s a mouthy senior in sneakers who favours “the five-finger discount” over any senior’s special pricing. On this particular day, she’s been caught by overly zealous security-guard-in-training Dom (Raugi Yu) with booty including a small bag of sugar, a cake mix, half a dozen eggs and a couple of juicy, 2-inch thick steaks stashed under her clothing. Alma usually works alone but this day she has high-strung  birthday-girl Phyllis (Agnes Tong) with her. What Alma has shoplifted looks a lot like a birthday celebration in the making. While Bible-quoting, newly-converted Christian Dom seems bent on calling the cops, Otto (Dean Paul Gibson), the veteran security guard, wants to go easy on the women. Thievery, he says, is not a motive, “it’s a consequence.”

Panych presents a premise so off-beat and persuasive that you find yourselves rooting for the bad guys. Or in this case, the bad gals.

And, really, suggests The Shoplifters, stealing is all relative. Big business is stealing business away from the little guy and huge pharmaceutical companies are keeping prices so high, children in Africa are dying. Big pharma are not stealing cake mixes, they’re stealing lives. “Who stole the American dream?” Alma, full of rage, asks.

The Shoplifters is set in the vast stockroom of a super store, piled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes of everything from canned tomatoes and bleach to mini Oreos and chips. The cartons are stacked two or three deep, floor to ceiling, stage left to stage right. It’s a fantastic Ken MacDonald design that makes you wish you’d been there when it was being set up; equally good would be seeing it taken down at the end of the run. Half a dozen boxes scattered throughout are open to reveal a tightly packed case of bottles or cans; scene changes are marked by lighting designer Alan Brodie colourfully illuminating these boxes from inside. A long work table and a couple of chairs complete the set. The immensity of the design underscores the pettiness of the crime especially when Alma reveals what she actually does with the proceeds of her light-fingered activity.

Patti Allan and Dean Paul Gibson are a matched pair: they simply are Alma and Otto. Allan is by turns coy and flirty, conniving and loud-mouthed. She rants. She seduces. She does everything she needs to do to make us cheer for Alma, a life force to be reckoned with. Dean Paul Gibson, at the top of his game, begins full of bluster and in command of the situation especially when he is in the presence of by-the-book, dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks Dom whom Otto says is, “like a gun ready to go off”.  But Otto mellows and Gibson takes us there in a plot twist that is vintage Panych. You just have to love Panych’s mind: darkly funny, intelligent, little-guy sympathetic.

The two supporting characters do not fare as well and that seems to be mostly in the performance rather than the script. While Otto and Alma appear real, Dom and Phyllis are caricatures. Directed by the playwright, a lot less might prove to be a lot more. The situation itself is engaging and funny enough without working so hard to make us laugh. That being said, both Yu and Tong pull off some very fine physical comedy.

The award-winning partnership of Panych and MacDonald continues ridiing its off-beat, gritty, entertaining  edge. “Some chase and some run,” says Alma proudly. Panych is still chasing and leaves us with a grimly funny truism: “No matter how much you take, there comes a point in life when we have to give it all back.”  One way or the other.