‘Tread lightly, my star, there are monsters in the trees.’
Wyrmwood Theatre takes a surreal journey into the depths of memory with the help of some mysterious masked creatures…
Sawyer, recently graduated from university, returns to their rural Canadian hometown and reunites with childhood best friend Casey but something isn’t right as they head for gas station hotdogs. There are strange masked beings haunting both of them, seemingly overseen by an ethereal moon predicting that someone won’t return from the trip. It sets the audience up nicely for an unsettling hour of horror with a dash of humour!
It’s told in a non-linear style, with flashbacks to happy moments from the friends’ childhoods interspersed with terrifying encounters with the three-faced Mr Blue and a jerky red sunlike figure. These ‘demons’ accuse the friends of rotting, of hiding a horrible secret, but can Sawyer and Casey remember what it is? And why is there a goldfish in a smart suit waiting by the gas station?
In a way it doesn’t matter; the abstract nature of the play means everyone’s interpretation will be different. For me it was a struggle with inner demons made flesh, and fragmented memories pieced haphazardly together. As the goldfish tells us, there are many small ends in this world, but we all deserve goodness before we shuffle off this mortal coil and it’s a hopeful message to take out into the Fringe sunshine.
With The Gas Station… Trinity Tacknyk has created a thought-provoking portrait of the unreliability of memory and the transient nature of grief.
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The Gas Station At The Edge Of The Universe is at Venue 13 on Aug 27/29 at 13:15