THE MARIJUANA LOGUES

Arj Barker, Doug Benson and Tony Camin

Athenaeum Theatre, until April 20

This show is a deliberate and brazen take-off of the long-running Vagina
Monologues, that wildly successful and deliberately iconoclastic airing of
taboo and prejudice, enthusiastically embraced by many famous female
performers. The Marijuana Logues also tackles a taboo head-on, the illegal
practice of smoking, eating or anyway ingesting that banned substance.

Its three performers are, naturally, laid-back dudes who are way cool. They
quickly establish a rapport with the audience that presumes a shared
enjoyment of the weed. They even do a quick clapping response survey in
favour of legalisation.

The jokes are many and often based on an insiders' knowledge of the
experiences of drug-taking they describe. They range from fun facts about
marijuana to a list of what marijuana wants, with many wry, personal
confessions of the way it has affected their lives. Occasionally the
material touches something sad and serious, as in the exchange between an
angry father who was never there for his child, and the son for whom
marijuana was a more reliable presence.

Some of the dark side of drug taking is touched upon. Much is made of the
hypocrisy of laws that condone alcoholic excess and sexual licence but
ferociously punish the apparently far less harmful marijuana. Many jokes
are based on the fact that these guys, under the influence of their
seductive drug, can hardly remember their last sentence at times.

In fact, the show itself rather messily winds down into a mumble of
irrelevant anecdotes and jokes - sign of a much less polished and
politically committed show than its feminist model, and an ironic
confirmation that marijuana tends to make sharp edges fuzzy. The show in
fact is a bit too relaxed for its own good, funny though it may be.