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.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2009 play Rockabye is currently playing at Factory Theatre in a production directed by Rob Kempson. It’s an odd play. Ostensibly it’s about an aging rock singer; Sidney Jones (played by Deborah Drakeford), who hasn’t achieved much for 20+ years and desperately needs her come back album to be a success before she’s written off as a has been. She’s also obsessed with adopting an African baby. We’ll come back to that. She’s at the centre of a coterie of personal staffers and hangers on who are almost as shallow and self obsessed as she is. There’s the manager; Alfie (Sergio di Zio) endlessly congratulating himself on sticking with Sidney rather than taking on a “hot sixteen year old”. There’s boy-toy Jolyon (Nabil Trabousi) who has curtain phobia, a U-boat fetish and a big dick. Sidney’s every wish is the concern of her plummy lesbian publicist Julia (Julie Lumsden) who races around to locate the absolutely vital Peruvian wheatgerm or to send to Uzbekistan for a swatch of cloth to repair a button. Only the cook/maid Esme (Kyra Harper) seems to have any connection to reality.
The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (I’m going to abbreviate this to Shadow) is a theatre work created by Geelong based collective Back to Back Theatre. It’s currently playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre as part of Canadian Stage’s season. Back to Back is an unusual company. Its actors all have perceived intellectual disabilities but, collectively, they have created theatre that has been seen on stages all over the world, on film and on television.
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?
