The headline is a quote from late in the second half of Zaiba Baig’s double header Kainchee Lagaa + Jhooti: The Begging Brown Bitch Plays which opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy for House of Beida Inc. The plays are loosely linked in that both deal one way or another with queerness and Pakistani-Canadian identity and experience.
Yolanda Bonnell’s White Girls in Moccasins, presented by manidoons collective and Native Earth Performing Arts opened at the Aki Studio on Friday night. Co-directed by Bonnell and Carmen Alvis, it’s a play about identity and and recovering roots. The principal character Miskozi, like the playwright, is Indigenous but I don’t think the play is entirely about Indigenous identity. The other two roles are Ziibi, played by a Bermudian Trans Woman of African ancestry and Waabishkizi; played by a second generation Settler woman. So while the focus is on Indigenous identity I think it raises a lot of other questions too.
Cyclops is the only satyr play by Euripides to come down to us though I guess whether it’s “complete” is a bit of an open question. A satyr play was a kind of weird hybrid of comedy and tragedy that closed out the Festival of Dionysos after the tragedies had been performed. Unlike most Athenian comedy it was usually based on mythological source material; in this case Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops from the Odyssey. It would have featured principals and a chorus of satyrs; half man, half goat with enormous erect phalluses.
Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror opened on Thursday evening at 918 Bathurst in an ARC production directed by Tamara Vuckovic. It’s a complex play with many levels and multiple places where the boundary between play and audience dissolve. The first “framing device” has us as the audience for an “unlicensed” play which s being performed under the cover of a wedding.
It Could Still Happen’s The Herald opened at Buddies in Bad Times last night. It’s a really difficult work to pigeonhole. It’s a poetic exploration of “labour” through words and music using Ancient Greece as a sort of vehicle for discussing more contemporary, or perhaps, universal concerns. It starts with playwright and director Jill Connell making a speech in front of a projection of the “principles for work” which could perhaps be summarised as “labour should be a temple of awareness” but along the way we get a lot of astrology; night charts and day charts and Antonio Banderas and whether his fashion line includes capes.
The Surrogate by Mohsin Zaidi, directed by Christopher Manousos opened in the intimate Studio Theatre at Crow’s last night in a production by Here For Now Theatre. It’s an impassioned piece about the ethics of surrogacy. So let’s look at surrogacy and what Zaidi is trying to say about it. It’s the practice of a couple, usually wealthy, usually male, usually gay contracting with a woman, usually poor, usually vulnerable, often immigrant, to carry a baby that is not biologically hers to term. Surrogacy is legal in forty plus US states but illegal in Canada and, crucial to the play, Louisiana.
Ronnie Burkett’s show Little Willy opened at CanStage Berkeley Street on Friday night. It’s a puppet show like you have probably never seen before. It’s clever, it’s filthy and it’s very funny. Burkett is creator, puppeteer, actor and singer all rolled into one. The plot concerns a second rate, but very Canadian, theatre company attempting to stage a production of Romeo and Juliet. What ensues is frankly rather hard to describe.
On one level Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke seems like just another Southern Gothic tale of repressed small town folk with southern accents shouting at other members of their thoroughly dysfunctional families. There’s plenty of that of course but there’s also a fascinating analysis of how relationships can be made or broken according to, essentially, how individual life arcs align. This aspect is very clearly brought out in Paolo Santalucia’s production that opened at Crow’s Theatre on Wednesday evening.
Natasha Mumba’s play Copperbelt which had its premiere at Soulpepper on Tuesday evening is a very interesting work. On one level it’s a tight, well crafted drama in the “dysfunctional family” genre so beloved by playwrights. Intergenerational and gender role conflicts abound. But beneath that there’s something much more interesting.
In 1621 one Elizabeth Sawyer, inevitably a poor, old woman, was hanged as a witch in London. A play, The Witch of Edmonton, loosely based on the trial and events leading up to it, hit the boards shortly after. It was a popular success. Now Jen Silverman has taken the framework of that Jacobean tragicomedy and grafted onto it a critique of late stage capitalism. The result is Witch, currently playing at Soulpepper in a production directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster.
operaramblings 