Review: DUEL CITIZENS at Second City

What do you do when your neighbour to the south starts keeping you up at night? He’s inconsiderate, ignorant, and keeps talking about annexing your house.

Second City’s Duel Citizens, in the company’s 90th mainstage review, tells that neighbour in no uncertain terms to get off our collective lawn, in its usual sprightly and entertaining fashion.

Duel Citizens isn’t entirely political; far from it, in fact, and the most clearly political references aren’t necessarily its hardest-hitting moments. Its targets range from late brunchers to moody teens to rioting office workers, with sketches that veer tonally from sharp satire to the goofily absurd.

But the general unease that is being Canadian at a moment where we’re simultaneously coming to terms with our own oppressive history-slash-present and dealing with an existential threat from a bully of a former ally permeates the show, forming a special layer of connective tissue between the cast and equally apprehensive audience.

That cast (Conor Bradbury, Coko Galore, Devon Henderson, Christian Smith, Tiyawnda, Scott Yamamura) is the same as in the company’s previous review, meaning that they’ve had ample time to develop an easy rapport. This serves them well in sketches portraying families. One where Bradbury tries to finally win one over on his deceased father (Yamamura) at the latter’s funeral to the dismay of his loving partner (Henderson) really sells the physical comedy, while emotional honesty is the name of the (video) game as two teenaged boys give each other therapy while making killshots, completely changing tone whenever mom enters the room.

The working world also provides ample fodder for satire, with a DEI-based sketch where employees Galore, Henderson, Tiyawnda and Yamamura argue about who ticks the fewest boxes and is therefore the most expendable making the most of this societal moment. A brunch restaurant waitstaff’s profane lament will likely resonate with anyone who has worked in the service industry, while being silly enough to also appeal to the weekly brunch set. One particularly effective idea provides a few callbacks, the cast gleefully skewering its own employer as Bradbury discovers that the trick to scamming free snacks is to use and mention the product copiously on stage.

While they work very well as a unit, they each have an individual shining moment or two, such as Galore’s appealing singing voice being used well in a number about being unapologetically libidinous, or Henderson’s exaggerated portrayal of Canada’s former First Lady.

My favourite sketch, where Bradbury and Smith compete as dueling southern lawyers as to which one of them is more of a country bumpkin and therefore more credible in his ignorance of the law, hits ludicrous heights of absurdity while also asking why we equate bucolic obliviousness with purity that’s more trustworthy than expertise. (That’s a fancy way of saying I cried laughing as the accents went well beyond over-the-top and the comedians muscled into each other’s space like two chickens performing a threat display.)

While audience participation can always be hit-or-miss and is rarely a Second City sketch show’s highlight, a scene where a volunteer trains under the auspices of Henderson’s passionate pizza deliverer, based on a well-known pizza tracking app, is thoughtfully structured so that even the most recalcitrant participant will still get laughs.

In this iteration of the mainstage show, the usual structure of callbacks to earlier sketches in the second half provides a nice throughline, but one that seems less necessary than in other shows; the payoff could be a little greater. However, one could say that the throughline is really that existential anxiety that informs each piece of the DUEL CITIZENS puzzle, and that the ability to laugh our troubles away is the real payoff.