WILDWOMAN, by Kat Sadler (who also directed), is part of the {{her words}} festival at Soulpepper and I attended the first preview performance on Thursday night at the Young Centre. It’s not usual to review previews but I’m out of the country for most of the run proper so there it is. It’s an interesting piece. It weaves together two (more or less) real stories that are quite tenuously related into a single integrated narrative that explores humanity, power and the role of women in society.
Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning opened last night in a production by the Howland Company in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s. This is a play about a group of people who have assembled in the wilds of Wyoming for the inauguration of a new President at a small, extremely conservative, Catholic university. All of them, to greater or lesser extent, buy into the mix of ideas; an essentially pre-Vatican II Catholicism, traditional American Conservatism rooted in an idea of “Western Civilization:” and a kind of neo-Spartan survivalism, taught at the university in question. The play is a long (over two hours without a break) conversation between these characters about ideas and values. I strongly suspect these ideas and values are not shared by the author or the director (Philip Akin). but they are treated in the play on their own terms with no attempt at satire or parody. I don’t share those values either but I shall try in this review to keep my own feelings out of it as well.
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, which is currently running at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre has garnered impressive accolades since its 2001 New York debut. It’s won a Pulitzer and been named, in 2018, as “the greatest American play of the last 25 years” by the New York Times. It’s well written, dramatically well crafted and often very funny but, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t deeply engaged by it.
work.txt by Nathan Ellis is an interactive, participatory theatre piece that explores work. art and the end of the world. There are no actors, except for the audience and whoever is pushing the buttons that move things along. There’s a computer screen. It instructs the audience what to do, what to say, what to sing. It asks for volunteers. But the volunteers don’t know whether they will be given a task that lasts seconds or whether they will play a major role in the unfolding drama. One volunteer becomes the principal protagonist of the show. They alone have a name. But I’m jumping ahead. First we must create the city where millions go to places called “workplaces” to do stuff called “work”. We do this with Jenga blocks. It’s fun and looks cool. But back to our protagonist.
The Master Plan by Michael Healey opened last night at Crow’s Theatre in a production directed by Chris Abraham. It’s based on Josh O’Kane’s book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy and deals with the tortuous relationship between Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, Waterfront Toronto and the various other stakeholders involved in developing the (relatively) small parcel of land, Quayside, at Parliament and Queen’s Quay and the wider future of the Eastern Portlands.
Factory Tneatre opened the season last night with The Waltz by Marie Beath Badian in a production by Nina Lee Aquino. It’s a one acter that’s partly a sort of classic “coming of age” story and, rather more, about what identity and belonging mean in Canada today. Our two characters are Bea Klassen (played by Ericka Leobrera); sixteen years old, part filipina, part Scandawegian growing up in Saskatchewan; currently on her own at a remote cottage armed with a crossbow, and RJ Alvarez (played by Anthony Perpuse); second generation filipino, clever and nerdy, has lived all his life in Scarborough but is off to UBC to be as far as possible from his family. He has made a diversion from his trip to meet someone from his mother’s past who is somehow connected to Bea but that character never shows up.
Back to Summerworks on Wednesday night, this time at the Theatre Centre, to see a double bill of works derived (loosely) from Shakespeare plays. Both works were experimental but in utterly different ways. Lady M (Margaret) is 60 minutes of carefully crafted physical theatre intended for both Deaf and hearing audiences with great attention to detail and a minimalist aesthetic. i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson is longer at around 90 minutes and is a mad cap series of vignettes exploring Shakespeare’s punctuation, patriarchy, capitalism, life as a trans person and yoghourt among other things.
Suddenly Last Summer is a 1958 play by Tennessee Williams set in New Orleans in 1936. It’s currently being performed by Riot King at Sorry Studios in a production directed by Kathleen Welch.
Seventh Fire, part of the SummerWorks Performance Festival, is an immersive experience currently happening at the Aki Studio. It’s a ceremony/performance in which the participants are invited into a prepared, dark space where they can sit or lie down on cushions or chairs (lying down strongly recommended) and experience 90 minutes or so of a carefully constructed 3D soundscape.
Armadillos by Colleen Wagner opened at Factory Theatre last night. It’s really quite complex and I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to meet with cast and crew to discuss it last week. It’s simultaneously a play about two different takes on the myth of Peleus and Thetis and a sort of meta-theatrical questioning of which stories we tell and how they affect us. In the process it examines ideas about the origins of patriarchy and oonsent/non-consent in sexual relations.
operaramblings 