On Saturday Feb. 10, I went to the Comedic Dinner Theatre put on by the East Three Theatre Club. I was there to report on it for the Inuvik Drum, but I really did enjoy the show while I snapped photos and took notes.
The student show “Complaint Department and Lemonade” was as humorous as it was clever.
The production was about the complaint department – a place where anyone and everyone can go to voice their grievances with their spouses, their parents or even their television.
The problem is that no one likes to be the complaint department attendant – the person who listens to everyone else’s complaints. So, the role was delegated to each new and unsuspecting complainant who entered the office.
Everyone handled the role differently, but they all ended up helping solve each other’s complaints.
Usually, the source of someone’s complaint wasn’t with someone or something else. Usually, the thing that was being complained about was an issue that could only really be solved if the complainant looked within themselves and made changes there.
For example, one woman came to the complaint department to complain about how her husband was losing his hearing, and he wouldn’t go to the doctor and get his ears checked.
The complaint department attendant asked her to call her husband, and slowly speak louder and louder. When that didn’t work, and he seemingly couldn’t hear her, the woman handed her phone to the attendant.
The attendant could hear the woman’s husband just fine, and he could hear her. Clearly, it was actually the woman who was losing her hearing, not her husband.
The suggestion to look inward to solve one’s complaints was subtly addressed in the play.
I can’t remember the exact context, and it doesn’t really matter, but near the end of the play, two characters discuss whether it is grammatically correct to say “it is me,” or if the proper form is “it is I” when answering the phone and someone asks for you.
“It is I or it is me?” they asked each other in several different but equally tongue-twisting ways over the course of a scene or two.
When I first heard this, I thought it was just supposed to be an absurd bit about grammar.
In hindsight, though, I think it was a really clever way to summarize the takeaway message of the play: to ask yourself if you are really the problem you’re complaining about, rather than blaming someone else.