By Jenny Henkelman
Winnipeg Sun, July 14, 2004

Charlie Kovacs is a lawyer. He's also a "marijuana midwife" with a prize-winning grow-op in his basement and a loving devotion to weed that's earned him the nickname The Reefer Man. Russell Bennett plays the title character as well as 24 others -- a Jewish mother, a bankrupt motivational speaker and William Lyon McKenzie King, to name a few -- in this one-man play, written with director Gillian Stevens-Guille.

Bennett spends 80 energetic, well-choreographed minutes onstage, and keeps the pro-marijuana polemic from becoming a dry lecture. A court trial becomes a boxing match, and a history lesson becomes a seance with some of "oppressive parents of a dysfunctional drug law." This comedy has a surprisingly tender heart. Sure, it delivers the standard reefer jokes but it's also a compelling story about one man's twofold search for identity and the backbone to stand up for what he believes is right.