So you are a nerdy kid who lives next to a weird family.  So weird in fact that they eat “naked spaghetti” and one day the police show up to find that your contemporary has dismembered his father alive with a hacksaw (a joint Christmas present from their mother/wife) and put the bits in a cardboard box labelled “Some Assembly Required” to a repeated sound track of “Raindrops keep falling on my head”.  That’s how Monster by Daniel Macivor starts and it’s an unforgettable image that recurs as recollection, dream and film scene throughout a 75 minute one actor tour de force by Karl Ang in the Studio at Factory Theatre.

Over the course of the play Ang becomes a recovering addict, a teenage boy, both halves of a doomed couple, an aspiring film maker, several film producers, an entire AA meeting and more.  It’s spectacular acting and the character changes are made even more effective by brilliant lighting by Trevor Schwellnus.  It’s startling how a change of lighting can make a guy in a T-shirt transform from a psychopath to a nerd in a split second.  It really reinforces the extraordinary physicality and vocal acting skills that Ang brings to each persona, as does the evocative sound stage created by Thomas Ryder Payne.

We see horribly doomed relationships, hopeless addiction, broken careers, movie fraud, vehicular suicide and much more.  And the terrifying thing is that it’s often hilariously, laugh out loud funny in the most inappropriate way.  Ang, director Soneil Parsa and dramaturge Ric Knowles have combined to create a weird alchemy in which we can almost identify with Ang’s brilliantly portrayed characters.  We are even explicitly invited to become them at times and we kind of do which is also terrifying.

The ending caps off the creepiness brilliantly but I’m not going to spoil it for you.  It’s a fitting conclusion to some brilliant, awful, very funny and very disturbing theatre.

Monster continues at Factory Theatre until December 10th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz