Review excerpts
Pack of Lies
Calgary Sun Oct 2009
No question about it, Calgarian Lindsay Burns is one talented lady.
Not only can she act, but she writes with uncanny insights and a witty, theatrical flair.
Her newest one-woman show Pack of Lies may not be the best thing Burns has concocted, but it's still a winning night out at the theatre.
Burns' target this time is Calgary's reactions to times of boom and times of bust.
She sneaks a peek at the 1980s and what that meant to Calgarians to give a perspective on what we're going through at the moment.
Make no mistake, Pack of Lies is much more than a history lesson.
Burns makes that clear in the opening section of her monologue.
She begins talking about pop singer Billy Joel's first marriage and Just the Way You Are, the song he wrote for his first wife. She sees the collapse of Joel's marriage as an analogy for what happened to Calgary when the bottom fell out of our economy.
In the next 80 minutes Burns plays a dozen characters and treats her audience to old film footage of Ralph Klein, Pierre Trudeau and landmark buildings that have since disappeared.
This frivolous approach works to put the audience at ease and to bring us into Burns' world. She touches several raw nerves, but she nurses us through such moments.
This is particularly true of the quest storyteller at a kindergarten who's suffering a breakdown and a tour guide who tries to encourage her husband to get a menial job.
Anyone who went through the 80's bust will find Pack of Lies wonderfully nostalgic.
Of course, you can also just sit back and marvel at Burns' boundless talent.
-Louis B Hobson
Pack of Lies
Calgary Herald Oct 2009
Has the economy got you down in the dumps? Lindsay Burns wants you to breathe, baby, just breathe.
In Pack of Lies, her funny/ sad new one-woman show, Burns, dressed in a light, bright print dress looks like a Mount Royal married woman hopped up on happy pills, exuding the sort of brittle, mock cheerfulness you might have found in a real estate agent when the global economic heart attack hit in the fall of 2008.
She's our host for the evening, as she takes us on a tour of Calgary economic busts past--the early '80s --and present.
Playing a half dozen different characters who have signed up to take the tour-- an emotionally distressed elementary school sub, a recovering alcoholic, a raging out-of-work white collar man, a human resources manager training staff to deal with bad times, a Sarajevo housewife who relocates to Alberta--Burns takes us on the human tour of a bust as much as the physical tour, which comes in the form of slides showcasing many of the holes now occupying much of Calgary's downtown.
It's an occasionally melancholy, sometimes quite hilarious multimedia revisiting of some of the lows of Calgary's topsy-turvy economic history, which is about as stable as its weather. There is some wonderful archival footage in Pack of Lies--old promo films, CBC news reports about the influx of "non-Albertans" into the province in the early '80s, and, of course, then-mayor Ralph Klein. (There is also a medley of lovely old Billy Joel tunes).
At the same time, tough times don't necessarily mean a major bummer. In fact, if there's a theme running through Pack of Lies, it's that sometimes a bust can be the best thing that ever happened to a Cowtown. In this case, that comes in form of the Olympics, which Burns theorizes were such a smash because the bust of the early '80s produced an abundance of willing volunteers.
If there's one thing that I missed in Pack of Lies, it's an easily identifiable villain. In the early 1980s, Trudeau plays the goat, but overall, it's difficult to pin the tail on one specific bad guy for what happened last autumn. In fact, as she surveys the audience with her best cocktail party bravado, asking what bad habits we picked up in the boom, it's hard not to escape the sinking sensation that the evil villain in it all may have been us, even if we're the victims too.
Pack of Lies is a bit of a love letter to Calgary, as well. For all its hyper-corporate, suburban overkill, this place is home--boom or bust--and that's OK.
-Stephen Hunt