When a young man reunites with his long-lost, emotionally turbulent sister, it’s obvious to the average theatre-goer how the story will pan out. It will be tearful. It will be touching. It will be tender.
The Boy and the Girl and the Secrets They Shared, an Ottawa Fringe Festival play, was none of those things.
Instead, it wove one sinister and shocking plot point after another into a mesmerizingly dark story.
Written and directed by University of Ottawa student Alex Kirkpatrick, it was surprising, to say the least.
Though a little rough around the edges, the bizarre originality of the plot and the charisma of the two actors made it a highly watchable production. The siblings, separated for 10 years by the foster care system, meet on a park bench and discuss how their lives turned out.
Amelia, adopted by a picture-perfect family, is a high school dropout and leads an unhappy life.
Dillon, though raised in a series of foster homes, is a thoroughly respectable university student.
Though they seem very different, they share a tumultuous past thanks to their father, a convicted and psychotic serial killer.
The riveting progression of their story was captivatingly disturbing, as both Dillon and Amelia are more like their father than they let on.
Lewis Caunter and Jameelah Rahey played off each other very well, and kept up the energy throughout the entire one-hour scene.
Dillon and Amelia, initially difficult to understand, were naturally impossible to relate to or identify with by the finale. However, this is to be expected when writing for unrepentantly evil characters, and Kirkpatrick did an excellent job of creating protagonists that garnered attention and interest rather than sympathy.
While the dialogue was decidedly theatrical, as opposed to natural, it meshed well with the surreal and unsettling nature of the story.
What seemed to initially be a heartfelt drama became something else entirely, and then something else again.
The Boy and the Girl and the Secrets They Shared was an intense and layered story, challenging expectations on every level.
