I must con­fess, I’ve always been a fan of Joel Tobeck, so when I saw his name in the cast for ‘I Want To Be Happy,’ I was keen to check it out. Coupled with the prom­ise of a sur­real­ist premise explor­ing the par­al­lel lives of a lab sci­ent­ist and his guinea pig, I could­n’t res­ist attend­ing.

The play bril­liantly employs stage design as a nar­rat­ive tool, with the right side of the stage serving as Paul’s (Joel Tobeck) perspective—a sterile room dom­in­ated by a small cage. On the left, an over­sized ver­sion of this cage houses Binker (Jen­nifer Lud­lum), who scuttles around a steel-framed enclos­ure, that is not too dis­sim­il­ar from the lab.  This dual per­spect­ive style con­tin­ued into oth­er scenes and sup­por­ted the con­stant inter­play of Paul and Binker­’s par­al­lel storylines, offer­ing a unique way to exper­i­ence both per­spect­ives sim­ul­tan­eously. How­ever, at times, it proved a tad chal­len­ging to fol­low dur­ing action sequences.

Jen­nifer Lud­lum’s por­tray­al of Binker is noth­ing short of delight­ful. She embod­ies the ges­tures and poise of a wide-eyed and bewildered rodent from the moment she graces the stage. Her twitch­ing nose and dart­ing eyes had the audi­ence in fits of laughter before she even uttered a word.

Jen­nifer­’s depic­tion of ador­a­tion for her mate, a 6‑foot-tall Guinea Pig named ‘MyOne,’ is utterly hil­ari­ous. The play fea­tures many fun moments like this includ­ing the absurd use of elec­tron­ic toy anim­als dart­ing across the stage. And I appre­ci­ated how the absurdity is beau­ti­fully punc­tu­ated with moments of satire through­out the per­form­ance.

A recur­ring theme through­out the story revolves around how we can coex­ist with oth­ers yet fail to engage with them mean­ing­fully. Paul observes Binker for hours each day but remains obli­vi­ous to her true emo­tion­al state. In the open­ing scene, he reports “bright eyes, healthy coat, Blinker is happy,” when Binker is any­thing but con­tent. In turn, Binker pays no heed to Paul’s extens­ive mono­logues about his crum­bling mar­riage and his feeble attempts to sal­vage it.

I do feel that the play’s dur­a­tion of 90 minutes could have been trimmed. I was also dis­ap­poin­ted by the use of an e‑cigarette as a prop.  It is an over­used trope in movies to sym­bol­ise stress – usu­ally for the pur­pose of Big Tobacco product place­ment. And for this story, it seemed highly improb­able that a sci­ent­ist would be puff­ing away in their lab.

Ulti­mately, ‘I Want To Be Happy’ is an enjoy­able pro­duc­tion that also prompts reflec­tion on anim­al rights—an enter­tain­ing explor­a­tion of par­al­lel lives and human-anim­al rela­tion­ships.