shaniqua in abstraction is a one woman show written and performed by bahia watson that deals with her search for identity as a (light skinned) Black woman in Canada. It starts with a casting call and works outwards from there. She sings, she dances, she runs on the spot, She interviews characters who aren’t there and gets caught up in banal daytime TV shows. If you can have a kaleidoscope in black and white it’s a kaleidoscope of experiences.
Francis Končan’s Women of the Fur Trade opens tonight (Thursday) at the Aki Studio in a production by Native Earth Performing Arts. I saw a preview last night. It’s not an easy play to describe. It’s a comedy. But with several twists. It has a historic setting. But it plays fast and loose with time. It’s funny, disturbing and relates events from a female point of view that rarely get seen that way.
So it was back to the Bluma Appel on Thursday evening to see part 2 of Matthew López’ The Inheritance. Part 1 had certainly left plenty of active plot lines to be resolved (or not) so it looked like being an interesting ride.
Matthew López’ The Inheritance is an epic adaptation of EM Forster’s Howard’s End. It’s epic in scale and scope. It runs for two evenings; each over three hours long and it features a rich, and sometimes bewildering, cast of characters. I was going to wait until after part 2 before writing about it but I actually think it will work better to review it in two parts. So here is part 1 as seen on opening night (Wednesday) at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
Charlie Petch’s No One’s Special at the Hot Dog Cart is a one man show about his experiences as a hot dog vendor in Toronto and his subsequent life working as a 911 dispatcher, on the front desk of an ER and as a hospital bed allocator. It’s currently being presented by Theatre Passe Muraille and Erroneous Productions.
Collage and poster design by Emily Jung | Pictured: Charlie Petch
Dana H, by Lucas Hnath, is a rather unusual piece of theatre. The sole actor, Jordan Baker, lip synchs to tapes of Dana Higginbotham (Lucas’ mother) being interviewed by Steve Cosson. In these interviews she relates the events of five months of her life where she was kidnapped and held prisoner by a psychotic member of a racist criminal gang.
Mohammd Yaghoubi’s Earworm, currently playing in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s, is a hard hitting story of what the Islamic Revolution has meant for Iranian women. Unfortunately it hangs onto to more ideas than the narrative can comfortably support which diffuses the impact.
I really wasn’t sure what to expect from DION; A Rock Opera, currently premiering at Coal Mine Theatre. It’s billed as a “rock opera” which worried me as very loud music in. a very small space is so not my thing. On the other hand it’s based on Euripides The Bacchae and I’m a sucker for a really good reworking of classical Greek drama. So I went. It was absolutely the right decision. This show rocks in an entirely good way.
Aluna Theatre’s production of Jorgelina Cerritos’ On the Other Side of the Sea (translated from Spanish by Dr. Margaret Stanton and Anna Donko) opened at The Theatre Centre last night. Cerritos is from El Salvador and the play is set on a beach somewhere in that part of the world. There are two characters (three if you count the sea). Dorothea is a no longer young civil servant sent from the capital to a remote fishing village to issue birth certificates, ID cards and the like. Every day she sets up her desk on the beach but she has no clients until the Fisherman arrives. He has come from the Other Side of the Sea in his rowing boat. He needs a birth certificate; “something that shows who he is”, but has none of the information needed for Dorothea to issue one. She gets angry at his bugging her day after day; especially as he is her only client and she can’t do anything for him. They quibble about the possibility of names (he wants his ID to read “Fisherman OftheSea”) and argue the finer points of grammar concerning what may, or may not be, possible. This is often very funny but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail is an adaptation by Gregory Prest of the famous letter that Wilde wrote, page by page, to Lord Alfred Douglas while he was in prison. It opened; a world premiere, last night in a Soulpepper production directed by Prest at the Young Centre.
operaramblings 