Dog Sees God is provocative, relevant theatre

We’re all supposed to grow up. But do we? Those treacherous teenage years are an explosive minefield of emotions that often detonate with satisfying clarity or blinding regret, and sometimes you are no further ahead.

In Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, an unauthorized parody of the Peanuts gang, playwright Bert V. Royal tackles some of the more subversive elements of adolescent angst.

Gone is the safe, endearing world. It has been replaced by hormonal rampages and fluctuating identity crises often mired in profanity-laced descriptive phrases.

Royal has dropped the trademark Peanuts monikers, choosing instead aliases that he uses as launch pads into the pen-pal reflections of C.B. (short for Charlie Brown.)

So what happens to the comic strip characters? C.B. discovers he might be gay. Lucy is an unrepentant arsonist and has been institutionalized. Beethoven, now the school outcast, was molested by his father.

Van (Linus) has turned from intellectual philosopher to Buddhist pothead. C.B.’s once sweet sister is a chain-smoking, Wiccan thespian. Matt (Pigpen) has morphed into a paranoid germaphobe with violent tendencies. Marcy and Tricia (Peppermint Patty) are trash-talking, cutthroat sluts who spike their milk with booze and revel in drunken threesomes.

The play opens with the funeral of C.B.’s beagle. The pet was euthanized after he contracted rabies and was found trembling in his kennel covered with blood from the tiny yellow bird that was his friend for years.

Deeply disturbed by the death of his beagle, C.B. reaches out to timid Beethoven as he’s playing the piano at school during lunch hour. After Beethoven’s father sexually molested his son, the gang’s conformist pressure ostracized and bullied him. The only refuge keeping him sane was playing the piano.

The duo rekindle their friendship to the point that C.B. kisses Beethoven at Marcy’s party, completely horrifying the gang. It’s kind of fun to watch C.B. experiment with his sexuality, and St. Albert’s David Johnston certainly gives the ‘blockhead’ a combative edge.

But it’s Zachary Parsons-Lozinski’s portrayal of the sensitive Beethoven that lends a real poignancy to the proceedings. Parsons-Lozinski’s character is the doomed archetype, but his melancholia resonates deeply with us whether hunched over the piano or conflicted by C.B.’s displays of affection.

Director Jenna Greig has selected a fearless cast that delivers some raw, yet passionate performances. Evan Hall is hilarious as the joint-puffing Van; C.J. Rowein as Matt is unapologetically psychotic and St. Albert’s own Arielle Ballance has turned the likeable geeky Marcy into a vampy snob you love to hate.

The challenge of discovering an identity and finding the right niche is huge. We all go through it. And because Dog Sees God is so accurate, so disturbing, so funny, it provokes us to not only look deeper, but also look around.