The Beaver Club At Lighthouse Theatre
I feel compelled to warn my readers that The Beaver Club by Barb Scheffler, now playing at the Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, ON, contains humour that is raunchy, off-colour, smutty, and occasionally downright dirty.
I loved every minute of it!
Four women of a certain age who live in the same Toronto apartment building form a club as a sort of mutual support group. The original suggestion for a club name is the Busy Bee Club. A brief round of discussion changes it to the Busy Beaver Club, which is shortened to simply The Beaver Club.
“It’s the perfect name,” one of them opines.
“Because we’re Canadian?”
“Because we all have one.”
That joke sets the tone for two-hours of bawdy laughter that more than justify the Lighthouse Theatre’s slogan, “Home of the Canadian sense of humour.”
Scheffler has been shrewd in her choice of mismatched types in the nascent sisterhood that is The Beaver Club.
Helen Taylor (Halfway There) is Karen the super-sensible and rather straight-laced founder of the club, a single lawyer whose string of disastrous relationships prevents her from committing to Bob, who is obviously in love with her.
Melanie Janzen (the Angel of Death in The Death of Me) is Radiance, a never-married free spirit with a penchant for kombucha, incense, and coffee enemas. It seems that in what we can only assume was her wild youth she hung out with the likes of Andy Warhol, Steve Jobs, and Leonard Cohen.
Marlene Handrahan is Eunice, an occasionally foul-mouthed Newfoundland transplant and mother who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
Melodee Finlay (Lakefront) is Yvette, a recently widowed Quebequoise, with an intestinal tract that may be a major source of methane in the atmosphere.
At the inaugural meeting of The Beaver Club the ladies find out that Eunice will be returning to her home town of Dildo, Newfoundland (yes, it’s a real place) for a cousin’s wedding. It doesn’t take long for a road trip to be proposed, debated, and finalized.
And so the game is afoot! Scheffler has created a 3,000 kilometer journey crammed with incident, much of it hysterically funny. Along the way, secrets are revealed and home truths spoken.
I don’t want to give too much away, but in Yvette’s home town, Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! (yes, that too is a real place), we learn that she lost her virginity in a church confessional. The angels that she thought were singing as she climaxed were in fact the elderly women’s choir rehearsing in the church.
A spontaneous skinny dip inspired by Radiance in “the middle of nowhere” ends badly when a young cop appears and commands, “Come out of that pond with your hands in the air.”
The biggest reveal of all happens in Dildo and it is heart-warming.
Director Emily Oriold is the founder and Artistic Director of the Foster Festival. Needless to say she is a woman who knows her comedy and she has a deft touch with a gag. To her credit, she never settles for a quick laugh. Instead, she has helped her able cast create deeply individual and fully rounded characters. By play’s end, we feel we know these gals and the bonds they have forged are palpable.
Everyone in the company is terrific, with Janzen and Handrahan perhaps the most outstanding.
Eric Bunnell has contributed an abstract set dominated by large, hanging, illuminated circles upstage onto which are projected photos and maps that keep us informed of just how the Beaver Club odyssey is progressing. (Joe Recchia is the video designer.) The cast do an efficient job of quickly shifting the set around during brief semi-blackouts between scenes.
Costume designer Alex Amini has done a nice job of delineating and differentiating each character and the lighting by Steve Lucas is almost a fifth character.
Is this high art? Well, no, but The Beaver Club seems to be destined to be one of those Canadian comedies that, like the best of Norm Foster, gets revived summer after summer.
The Beaver Club continues at Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover through June 13, 2026. It then transfers to their sister theatre in Port Colborne from June 17 to 28, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Lighthouse Theatre website.
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