Winners and Losers

Project Arts Centre

**

Marcus Youssef and James Long are old friends and collaborators undergoing something of mid-life crisis. They sit on either side of 40 and have of late begun to question the world around them and their place within it.

Winners and Losers is structured as a semi-improvised game. Youssef and Long sit on either side of a table batting back and forth topics for debate: the Middle East, the Russian revolution, masturbation, abortion, druids, and a variety of local issues that they have thinly researched. As each topic is proposed, the men discuss whether, say, Pamela Anderson, is a winner or a loser. The conclusion, as with each subject they interrogate, is that she is both. She has a house on Malibu Beach: winner. She has virtually prostituted herself for wealth/fame: loser. The point, as Youssef explains in one of several "significant" scripted moments of revelation, is that no argument is "black and white"; it is merely a case of positions taken.

This is about as profound a philosophy as Winners and Losers offers in a 90-minute show that is alternately glib and pretentious in its attempts at profundity. "Money is power," Youssef concludes at the end of a debate about capitalism, and the refrain "we all come from somewhere, right?" rounds off several arguments about the effect childhood has upon the people we become. It is palatable pop-psychology for a privileged audience.

Of course, Youssef and Long know this and are happy to remind us, even while continuing to bemoan their own circumstances. Will Youssef find a way to transform his inheritance into ethical capital? Will Long let go of the emotional barrier erected by his absent father? Will either of them stop talking? Their circular return to self-involvement threatens to go on for a very long time.

It would be easy to ask are the men themselves winners or losers. Indeed, they ask each other, but come to no conclusion. Youssef and Long would say it doesn’t matter; that equivocation and ambiguity is the point of their show. Even so, I know which side I am on.

Ends Saturday