Self Help dinner theatre fills bellies with laughs

In playwright Norm Foster’s script Self Help, now in production with the St. Albert Theatre Arts Guild (STAGE), it’s a tossup whether words or actions count the most.

What do you do when there’s a dead, naked body with a stiff erection laying in the study, a snoopy tabloid reporter nosing around for the latest dirt and a romantically challenged detective asking questions about a missing gardener?

Self-help gurus Cindy (Melanie Pattison) and Hal Savage (Corey Rogers) have built an empire out of dispensing phoney how-to-control-your-life advice. But when presented with a tense, dotty dilemma, they panic. Everything they’ve preached about for seven years flies out the window and their immaculately polished image crumbles.

It’s the perfect substance for a comedic parody on popular culture and co-directors Mark McGarrigle and Danielle Pearce push all the right buttons in this roller coaster ride of fast-paced witty asides and bawdy humour.

In supervising the creative aspects, this directorial tag-team have kept the two-hour caper strictly in pursuit of laughs for this dinner theatre production now playing at Cornerstone Hall at the Royal Canadian Legion on Feb. 4, 5, 11, 12.

We meet Cindy and Hal as naive second-class theatre thespians struggling to make ends meet. Cindy is fed up of the never-ending poverty and travel.

The couple swaps their principled stage acting to create a counterfeit self-help technique they endlessly flog at packed arenas. As their bank account fattens, love dwindles. In a moment of weakness, Cindy seduces the gardener. Hal interrupts them as they’re about to cross-pollinate, and the gardener dies of a heart attack.

There’s a body to dispose of and an image to preserve. Cindy suggests dumping the body at the morgue in cover of darkness. “What do you think they have? A drop-off morgue?” replies a sarcastic Hal.

As the two leads, Pattison and Rogers have their snake oil lingo down pat as slick evangelists of the highest order. And when Hal and Cindy’s life falls apart, the breezy humour picks up urgency and momentum.

Pattison has an uncanny knack for being both sophisticated and vulnerable while Rogers projects a personal charisma and is incredibly natural nailing all the right comic notes. It helps that he has some of the play’s funniest lines.

Shirley Williams, a statuesque beauty, plays Ruby, the couple’s wise-cracking pushy agent that arrives in the nick of time to help dispose of the body. A British trained actress, Williams delivers a boisterous presence. When she’s onstage, all eyes are on her.

The loveliest surprise is Kate Elliot’s hangdog Bernice, the stressed out maid whose stuttering nervousness slowly disappears throughout the chaotic romp as she discovers her true self.

The only downside is that not all the tables had completely clear sightlines on Cornerstone’s flat floor. By and large, not only were bellies full with a roast beef dinner, but theatregoers left with a belly full of laughs.