Migraaaants is a theatre piece by Matei Visniec translated by Nick Awde and currently playing at Theatre Passe Muraille in a production directed by Siavash Shabanpour. The programme describes it as a “dark comedy”. I’m not so sure. It certainly has absurdist elements and is occasionally funny in a very uncomfortable way but “comedy” I’m not so sure. Besides, the subject matter; forced migration and people trafficking into and around the EU, is seriously grim. The “dark” part is on the money.
Where better in Toronto to do a site specific version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol than Campbell House (built 1822)? Apparently The Three Ships Collective and Soup Can Theatre have been doing such a show for five years but it had never appeared on my radar until this year despite having seen and enjoyed other Soup Can shows. So last night I went.
Hypothetical Baby; written and performed by Rachel Cairns and directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster for the Howland Company and currently playing at Tarragon Theatre, is about abortion… sort of. It certainly centres on one woman’s abortion; Ms. Cairns’ in fact and the somewhat weird and tortuous processes involved in obtaining what is, after all, a medical procedure in Canadian law. But it’s also about that loaded word “choice”. I think I’ve been hearing the slogan “A woman’s right to choose” all my life and I’ve never dissented from it but I’ve never though very hard about what “choice” was being implied. Rachel Cairns takes us there in all its complexity. Because one possible choice is to bring another human being into a profoundly problematic world. Can one afford to raise a child (because even in a rich country like Canada parents don’t get much help)? What is the carbon footprint of an extra human? What impact will it have on the lives of everyone concerned. What if one is a lousy parent?
Daniel MacIvor’s Here Lies Henry is the other half of the pair of MacIvor one man shows currently playing at Factory Theatre. It’s quite different from Monster. For starters Damien Atkins plays a single character, Henry “Tom” Gallery rather than the multiple character of Monster. The only things we know for sure about Henry is that he is a liar and he wants, for some reason, to tell us his life story, or rather several versions of it. The only thing he says that we can be fairly sure is true is that you are born, then you do stuff and then you die.
So you are a nerdy kid who lives next to a weird family. So weird in fact that they eat “naked spaghetti” and one day the police show up to find that your contemporary has dismembered his father alive with a hacksaw (a joint Christmas present from their mother/wife) and put the bits in a cardboard box labelled “Some Assembly Required” to a repeated sound track of “Raindrops keep falling on my head”. That’s how Monster by Daniel Macivor starts and it’s an unforgettable image that recurs as recollection, dream and film scene throughout a 75 minute one actor tour de force by Karl Ang in the Studio at Factory Theatre.
Jani Lauzon’s one woman show Prophecy Fog, currently playing at Coal Mine Theatre, is essentially a remount of her 2019 show at The Theatre Centre. I still feel pretty much the same about as I did then; i.e. it’s an excellent and very personal show that will hold different meanings for different people. I was curious to see how my perception might have changed after four years in which ever weirder conspiracy theories have become mainstream so that stories of space aliens seem the least of it. Wes Anderson seems to have felt much the same in his latest film.
Necessary Angel Theatre Company’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Letters From Max, a ritual opened at The Theatre Centre on Wednesday night. It’s based on the correspondence and relationship between Sara Ruhl; a middle aged academic, mother of three, and Max Ritvo; her student and aspiring poet/playwright, 20s with a persistent and very nasty cancer. For almost two hours the characters exchange poems, thoughts, philosophy and more while Max tries to fulfil those dreams we all have when we are young against the backdrop of knowing he probably won’t live to, while Sara gets on with being a middle class mom.
To Crow’s Theatre on Sunday to see Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads; translated by Sasha Dugdale. It’s play set during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s extremely skillfully and well constructed in six vignettes. Collectively they explore aspects of the conflict; especially sexual violence and the dehumanising effects that war has on just about everybody caught up in it.
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.
operaramblings 