The Late Yukon Gothic Theatre of Trout Stanley

Ryan Higgins, Angela DiMarco, and Sarah Budge in Balagan Theatre's production of Trout Stanley

Set in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Trout Stanley (Thurs-Sun at the Balagan Theatre through March 6; tickets: $12-$15) opens with Sugar DuCharme (Angela DiMarco) dancing to Heart's "Magic Man," which ought to please any Seattleite worth their bacon. She's in a knick-knack-filled shack (Maridee Slater has fully transformed the bare concrete of the Balagan basement) that she's stayed inside of for ten years, kept company only by her twin sister Grace (Sarah Budge), who works at the town dump, where the dead bodies of young women their age turn up annually.

At this point, you should have some sense as to why the New York Times said the play "could give wacky talkiness a good name." And if wacky talkiness appeals, by god, you can do no better currently for the price.

I had an idea that Trout Stanley the work of a young playwright (seems true) who had just discovered the joys of getting staggering word-drunk, but it turns out that Claudia Dey writes like this all the time. The Toronto playwright says she drew upon her experiences cooking in bush camps for Trout Stanley, and she has penned a far-North flood of monologue that, in this context, has just one subtext--gnawing loneliness.

All the characters are orphans, and besides the vacancy where parents should be, there's also, for the two sisters, a childlessness that appears in distorted form in Sugar's reading material (Smith's Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation) and in her aborted career as a figurine maker. She and tough-gal, Yukon-fashion-plate Grace are pushing an old couple's well-arranged apple cart that the arrival of the mysterious traveler Trout Stanley (Ryan Higgins) can only upset.

By Act II, the readiness of all three characters to launch into lengthy soliloquies wears on you, and the play embroiders on itself as your patience is wearing thinnest. But you have had such a good time in Act I, thanks largely to Angela DiMarco's outstanding turn as Sugar DuCharme--DiMarco portrays the closest thing to Alyson Hannigan's quirky-cute I've seen in person--that you tolerate Dey's predilection for everyone selling their stories to the back of the room.

Director David Gassner says "the more absurd and amibitious the better," but the production (on opening night) felt a little under-rehearsed--some scenes were on the money, while other limped along, with characters reciting Dey's words, rather than exploding or immolating with them. Because the play is decidedly not plot-driven for sections of time, I think it makes greater demands on a director to knit together a sense of arc and pacing.

Budge can find more to Grace than she has--it feels like she's holding back (though sometimes her droll take plays really well). I couldn't get a bead on the soul of Higgins' Trout--Higgins looks terrific for the role, and brings a fierce-eyed stare to love at first sight, but he also wavers between a word-weary traveler, a naif, and a con man. That may be Dey rolling everything up into a ball, but it doesn't bring this Trout to bold, defined life.