Dog a revealing probe into mental illness

There is nothing generic about Surreal SoReal Theatre’s new production, Dog: a 1950’s Homelife Nightmare that opened Thursday night at the Roxy Theatre.

Much like A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe’s acclaimed film about Noble prize-winning mathematician John Nash, Dog is a revealing look at mental illness and the fear of losing one’s mind.

But the two stories differ widely. While Beautiful Mind has a fairly realistic linear progression, Dog looks through a stylized lens using techniques of stop-motion and freeze frames to combine time shifts between the ‘50s and ‘70s.

In fact, the opening sequence is a series of stop-motion actions, snapshots that imply the whiteface characters are jerky stringless puppets controlled by an invisible puppeteer.

As director Bradley Moss’ multimedia production reveals, Dog packs technological gimmickry — voiceovers, fast-forwards and scene replays to heighten the surreal, melodramatic affair.

Playwright Jon Lachlan Stewart takes on the role of the bespectacled Edward Bright, an oddball genius working on very experimental drugs and secret projects. Terrified of succumbing to a hereditary insanity that destroyed his father, Edward tries to create a miracle drug that will cure the world’s ills.

After his happy-go-lucky wife Vally (Sarah Sharkey) miscarries, their splintering marriage falls further apart. Seeing his wife depressed and suicidal, Edward, albeit with cracked logic, tries to cure her. He experiments on Vally with LSD and electroconvulsive therapy. But she shouts, “All I needed was someone to take care of.”

The third character in this fatal triangle of family dysfunction is Lupus (Vincent Forcier), both a menacing pet dog and their equally dangerous son out to destroy them before he can be born.

The three actors are physically dextrous and each is deeply in tune with their character. Stewart displays a broad emotional range from romantic husband to despairing scientist. Sharkey puts on a powerful performance as woman who grows from a featherweight to a Joan of Arc who saves her husband. And Forcier, a man of many faces, is a delight to watch as he inhabits multiple characters.

Using very clever visual technology, Cory Sincennes’ light design and Paul Bezaire’s video design create a stunning hallucinatory world that wavers on the edge between sanity and madness.

What doesn’t work is the mashup of voiceovers — some signifying characters thoughts, some silently mouthed by actors and other voiceovers accompanied by actors. The combinations confuse and distract, taking away from the heart of the story.

But ultimately this eccentric play tests the power of the imagination and reflects the best of small theatre resourcefulness.