Pinkerton Comes To Prospect At Lighthouse Theatre
Pinkerton Comes To Prospect by Jamie Williams belongs to a genre (or perhaps sub-genre) of farce that plays fast and loose with the presumed conventions of the melodramas that flourished at the turn of the last century. These shows tend to feature frontier settings, outlandish plots, ludicrous coincidences, evil villains, absurdly overdrawn comic characters, and young love. They are decidedly and unapologetically low-brow.
Pinkerton Comes to Prospect, which is now receiving its world premiere at the Lighthouse Theatre in Dover, Ontario, has all that and then some. If your taste in comedy tends to Tom Stoppard, steer clear. But if you can check your artsy-fartsy pretensions at the door you can have a rollicking good time as did the sell-out audience with whom I saw the show.
It’s 1890, somewhere on the frontier, and the Prospect to which Pinkerton comes has seen better times. The town is hollowing out and as a result “Doc” Hennessey (Matthew Olver) who owns the ramshackle saloon in which the action takes place is not only the town’s mayor but also it’s doctor and dentist.
Doc runs the joint with the help (if it can be called that) of Amos (Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski), a dipsomaniacal idiot who is hard to describe. Imagine the love child of Gomer Pyle and Gunsmoke’s Chester with a lobotomy.
When Pinkerton Comes To Prospect opens, Doc has his hands full. For starters his life isn’t worth a plug nickel. A contretemps at a card game in another town some nine months ago has resulted in a threat from a gunslinger named Tallahassee Trigger, who is worth $300 dead or alive and is heading to Prospect to settle a score. In self-defense Doc has hired the legendary Pinkerton Agency to protect him.
Enter Herschel Penkerton (Ryan Bommarito) – that’s Penkerton with an “e” – a mild-mannered surveyor who is suffering from an impacted molar. Fortunately, Doc has been studying mesmerism and in his role as town dentist tries to hypnotize Herschel to facilitate the removal of that tooth.
Thanks to a player piano that has a mind of its own (and unbeknownst to either Doc or Amos), the mesmerized Herschel turns into a mad rooster every time the piano springs to life. (Did I mention that Pinkerton Comes To Prospect has an outlandish plot?)
Of course, the similarity of names leads Doc to believe that Herschel is the deadly marksman the Pinkerton Agency has sent to gun down Tallahassee. As the hackneyed saying goes, much hilarity ensues.
Then there is the mandatory romantic subplot involving Doc’s niece Lacey (Evelyn Wiebe) and Herschel the land surveyor who falls head over theodolite in love with her. Unfortunately for him Lacey is an independently-minded young lady intent on fleeing Prospect to pursue a college degree in Chicago.
In the second act, the arrival of a mysterious figure identified in the programme as Widow Hazard’s Friend (Jessica Sherman) turns the plot of Pinkerton Comes To Prospect inside out and now my lips are sealed.
Playwright Williams is the Artistic Associate at the Foster Festival and has appeared in a number of Norm Foster plays (On A First Name Basis, The Christmas Tree) so it might seem reasonable that some of that Foster magic has rubbed off.
So it has. Pinkerton Comes To Prospect is peppered with a fair quota of genuine laugh lines, a few of which are on the raunchy side.
One of the attractions of farces like Pinkerton Comes To Prospect is that they can feature overacting, bad acting, even no acting at all and still be enjoyable. In fact, they wouldn’t be as much fun if they didn’t include at least some of those characteristics.
While director Steven Gallagher acknowledges all of those facets in his production, he is working with a nimble cast that knows how to take a fall, smash a fellow cast member in the face with a spade, milk a laugh, and take a joke to the very brink of too-much without falling off the cliff.
In the hands of the wrong actor the deliberately overdrawn Amos could be excruciating. The rubber-limbed Shepherd-Gawinski makes him a non-stop hoot. I was in awe at the way he hopped drunkenly across the stage on one foot while trying to put on his shoes.
Wiebe and Bommarito are really sweet as the love interest and I found myself rooting for them. Wiebe brings genuine depth to the spunky Lacey and, not incidentally, Bommarito makes a most amusing mad rooster.
Olver handles the twists and turns of Doc’s fear and frustration quite nicely and Sherman brings just the right tone to Widow Hazard’s Friend.
As I have come to expect at the Lighthouse, the production values are first rate. The set by Megan Cinel, which seems to be comprised largely of boards salvaged from a construction site, straddles frontier grit and Sunday afternoon cartoon most amusingly.
Once again, Alex Amini has contributed terrific costumes – Widow Hazard’s Friend’s outfit is especially droll – and Alex Sykes has lit it all nicely.
No programme credit was given for the sound design, but it was first rate, especially that player piano and those ricocheting bullets.
Pinkerton Comes To Prospect continues at the Lighthouse Theatre in Dover through August 16, 2025 and then transfers to Port Colborne where it plays from August 20 to August 31, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Lighthouse Festival website.
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