A trip to the back 40 of your brain

Jeff Miller (top), Mike McPhaden (bottom)

Poochwater exists in that far away part of your mind that you know exists but are too afraid to indulge on a daily basis.

From rapid-fire dialogue with yourself in an empty room to hastily scratched equations that amount to little more than nonsensical gibberish, containing meaning only to the author of such equations; Poochwater sends you from the theatre with the eerie feeling that author/performer Mike McPhaden has done a little time inside your head.

Ultimately, Poochwater asks the timeless question: "Who am I and how did I get here?" and veers from Chaplin to Quantum Theory at the speed of Robin Williams on a blow bender during the course of its 70-minute performance.

The first knock at the door of an empty room sets the tone for McPhaden’s characterization of a seemingly obsessive compulsive good Samaritan who has been charged with the task of returning a wallet to a Mr. Martin Poochwater. McPhaden does a first-rate job of commanding the stage alone for the first quarter of the play, delivering a perfectly timed soliloquy to himself as he tries to uncover just how he got to be in his current predicament.

Jeff Miller, the newest addition to this production, blazes into the room with an entrance that startles and shakes the already energetic piece to a new level. Whose room is this? Who is Poochwater?

In classic Beckett-meets-Pinter style, the two men are trapped in a room together inadvertently chewing on cerebral bones and the unbearable reality of being human. Indeed, McPhaden’s Rainman-on-speed exclaims, "Caution is what separates man from the animals. Animals are day and night behaving in unsafe manners, swinging through treetops and climbing up eavestroughs, and flying very high up in the air. Squirrels, for example, are notoriously reckless. Human beings are much more sensible, and walk on sidewalks. Where we’re going is never as important as not falling."

Director Patrick Conner guides his cast through a veritable minefield of intelligentsia to arrive at a comedic and self-deprecating look at how comedic and self-deprecating we are when attempting to explain our genius to others.

Constantly filled with surprises, Poochwater does not let up until the lights go down, (both times - the Morse code dialogue in the pitch black has to be one of the funniest moments in theatre in recent memory). McPhaden and co-star Miller support each other like trapeze artists tethered at the waist, and drop philosophical one-liners like cuss words.

Now in its third incarnation, the Dora Award winning Poochwater should be catching the eye of theatres across the country and hopefully find its way back home for another run before settling into the history books as another great Canadian play.

Poochwater runs to Sun. Feb. 27 at the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto. For tickets call 416-504-PLAY (7529) or artsboxoffice.on.ca; Poochwater’s website is Poochwater.com

Photograph by Aviva Armour-Ostroff