Old school meets po-mo
Hard Sell has it both ways
Gilbert A. Bouchard – SEE March 15-21

With their exciting new production of Craig Baxter’s Hard Sell, Northern Light Theatre gets to hold their artistic cake and eat it too, deconstructing and reveling in the ever-popular genre of police procedurals.

First off the “cake holding” portion of the show. On the surface, all is quite straightforward and seemingly on the up-and-up in this mystery-besotted show.
We have a play that unfolds crisply, quickly (only 70 minutes), and in real-time as two old school cliché English cops (Dave Clarke’s menacing Sergeant Filth of the shaved head, thick brow and foul mouth counterpointed by Mark Stubbings’ younger, shakier and only slightly more sympathetic Constable Pig) interrogating a wealthy young woman after the suspicious death of her husband.

In an energetic and believable search for the truth in the matter, these two increasingly worked-up and superbly rendered detectives indulge in a goodly dose of good cop/bad cop tactics as well as a great deal of psychological and forensic reconstruction as they poke and prod at the facts of an irritatingly murky crime.
Where the show really gets interesting is in the “cake eating” phase, where the show hunkers down and rips into the genre, starting with the fact that the “woman” the two cops are questioning (and hopefully will get the confession that most procedurals need for a clean wrap-up) is an inherently silent and confessional-less mannequin.

More so, as the interrogation/re-enactments move forward with increasing energy and speed, it becomes harder and harder to figure out if the cops are still talking about the crime they’re investigating, or have started to interrogate themselves.
This show is directed by the ever-cerebral Trevor Schmidt, who also decided to set this edgy and interpersonal and society-arching battle of a play in a cage-like box walled by a fine black mesh, animated by batteries of bright and luridly coloured lights.

The effect is to both distance the audience from the increasingly uncomfortable proceedings as well as to toss you uncomfortably into the midst of he action, creating a wildly effective claustrophobic scenario.

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