Reminiscencia is a performance piece created during lockdown by Chilean playwright Malicho Vaca Valenzuela. Valanzuela is the sole live performer and from his desk on stage he taskes us through series of scenes and themes using AV material on his laptop projected onto a giant screen. It’s ultimately about memory. How we create a footprint in history and how that does and doesn’t endure. His examples are all taken from his home town of Santiago de Chile.
Mukashi, Mukashi; Once Upon a Time, currently playing at the Theatre Centre, is a collaboration between two companies; Toronto’s CORPUS and Osaka’s KIO. It explores two characters who feature prominently in the folklore of Europe and Japan; the wolf and the crane. This is done via a playful exploration of two well known folk tales; Little Red Riding Hood and the story of the Crane-Woman who weaves miraculous cloth.
Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Roberto Zucco (translated by Martin Crimp) is currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by ted witzel. It’s a piece from the 1980s, written as Koltès was dying of AIDS and set in the mean streets of the less salubrious part of a European city, perhaps Paris.
1939, written by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan and directed by Jani ,opened last night at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street theatre. The setting is a Residential School in Northern Ontario which is set to host the King and Queen as part of their 1939 tour of Canada. The Welsh, but fiercely anglophile[1], English teacher decides that putting on a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well would be suitable fare for the royals.
Crow’s Theatre opened the season last night with a production of Ibsen’s Romersholm in an adaptation by Duncan Macmillan directed by Chris Abraham. It’s not perhaps Ibsen’s best known play but it’s powerful and somewhat topically relevant and the production at Crow’s is excellent in every way.
Infinite Life, by Annie Baker, in a production directed by Jackie Maxwell, opened at Coal Mine Theatre last night. It’s a play that has garnered acclaim in both London and New York. It’s not hard to see why. It’s the sort of play that perhaps appeals to theatre people (including critics) more than it does to the general public, though it’s not without wider appeal. It requires great skill and precision to bring off precisely because nothing really happens. There’s no narrative thread for a general audience to grasp. That said it is remarkably effective on its own terms.
Versus is a one man show (more or less) by Adam Lazarus about a day in the life of the rather unfortunate (if distressingly normal) Gerald Bloom and worse the day is his birthday. It’s part of Summerworks and playing at the Theatre Centre. While it is mostly a monologue, Lazarus gets assistance from Nicholas Eddie and Irene Ly who do rather more than shift props. He also ropes in audience members, from time to time, to, for example, make him a smoothie or clean up dog poo. If being acutely embarassed is not your thing then don’t sit in the front row! Continue reading
Slug Meal, part of Summerworks, is a one woman show presented by Camille Huang at Theatre Passe Muraille. It’s a sort of dance X performance art piece inspired by unfortunate childhood memories of her mother’s eggplant dish, Western ideas of immigrant food and the idea of “dirt” as “matter out of place”
The highly athletic Huang performs an hour long routine, occasionally talking to herself in (I guess) Chinese and accompanied by a soundtrack that ranges from body noises to a kind of Chinese muzak. Along the way she: Continue reading
Bimbos in Space from Femmepire Theatre is currently playing at Factory Theatre as part of Summerworks. It’s the first play I’ve seen where the content warnings included BDSM and cannibalism! It’s billed as a homage to sex workers and trans people and riffs off every cliché of the B sci-fi horror genre.
Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre. On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.
The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included. I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.
