The Long Weekend At The Foster Festival
When the first line of a play is “This weekend is going to make a colonoscopy seem like a lighthearted treasure hunt,” you sense that it’s going to be a bumpy ride. So it is with the revival of Norm Foster’s 1994 hit, The Long Weekend, at the Foster Festival’s Mandeville Theatre in St. Catherines.
Wynn Trueman (Caitlyn Driscoll) has invited her best friend Abby Nash (Claire Jullien) and her husband Roger (Darren Keay) to the Trueman’s rather posh country house for the long weekend of the title. Max Trueman (Tyrone Savage) is none too pleased. Hence his opening salvo.
Foster is known for his hilarious explorations of the manners, mores, and morals of the Canadian middle class. In The Long Weekend he has great fun breaking through the genteel facade of Canada Nice to reveal the passive-aggressive North American Nasty that lies beneath.
Max is a wealthy lawyer “profiting from the misery of others.” Wynn is a psychologist whose first book has just been published.
Abby and Roger are a bit more downscale. She has a clothing store. He is a former math teacher who has quit to write a screenplay that is still only half written.
On the surface the couples are good friends, and resolutely cheerful. They socialize regularly and have been vacationing together for years. But this being a Norm Foster play we quickly learn about the rude opinions and hidden resentments that bubble just below the hail-fellow-well-met surface.
For starters, Max and Roger loathe each other. For Max, Roger is a shallow whiner. Roger can’t forgive Max for failing to pay him back $23 for a long-ago bar tab. Abby finds Wynn’s taste in decorating abominable, but can’t bring herself to say so. Wynn senses her friend’s negative feeling but can’t bring herself to address the issue.
If the supposedly close friendships in The Long Weekend are built on shoddy foundations, so are the marriages. The couples sail back and forth borne on waves of laughter. In the end, when everything seems to have come to some sort of conclusion, Foster serves up a final, very funny, twist to bring down the curtain,
To reveal much more of what happens in The Long Weekend would spoil a lot of the fun and I do hope you’ll get a chance to see it. Of course, the play has been published and it makes a fun read.
Director Liz Gilroy is working with a gifted cast. I wish she had used a gentler touch. The acoustics of the Mandeville Theatre are just fine, but the cast projects as if they are trying to fill a much larger space. I can’t complain too much, though, because she delivers where it counts – in the laughs.
The cast is uniformly excellent. Driscoll and Jullien do a lovely job of making it seem like BFF really stands for bitchy friends forever, while Keay’s gift for physical comedy garners him the lion’s share of the laughs. Savage is perhaps first among equals; he has a wonderful way with the casual ease that defines the term boulevard comedy.
I have come to expect wonderful Foster Festival sets and costumes from Beckie Morris and Alex Amini respectively and neither of them disappoint. The lighting by Alex Sykes is suitably unobtrusive.
The Long Weekend continues at the Foster Festival through July 26, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Foster Festival website.
[image: Foster Festival]
