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.
Perceptual Archaeology (or How to Travel Blind), which stars Alex Bulmer assisted by Enzo Massara, is a show about blindness and coping with it. It opened in the Studio Theatre at Crow’s last night. Going to see it involved confronting my worst nightmare and so I sat near the door in case needed to escape (thanks Crow’s). So what’s it about and how does it work?
I saw Fatuma Adar’s one woman show She’s Not Special presented by Nightwood Theatre and Tarragon at Tarragon Theatre last night. It’s an interesting blend of stand up, confessional and very loud music in a sort of rap meets rock vein. The comedy and the confessional element turn on the vagaries of growing up as a black Muslim woman in Canada who aspires to be a writer. Some of this stuff is familiar to anyone “in the arts”; the tick box nature of grant applications. “Tick, tick, tick… that’s sound of ticking the boxes… doesn’t work so well at the airport”. Some of t, like the throw away line there is much more about specific cultural experience. Also lots of jokes about “intersectionality”.
“An absurdist erotic lesbian love letter to the ocean” is how the programme describes Sara Porter’s show which opened last night at The Theatre Centre. It sums it up pretty well. Geographically it takes from a cow pond in Albertas to the Bay of Fundy and temporally from the creation of the Earth and the Moon to the present. And there’s lots of water. Continue reading
The Chinese Lady by Lloyd Suh and directed by Marjorie Chan opened at Crow’s Theatre on Friday. It’s a presentation of Studio 180 Theatre and features Rosie Simon and John Ng. It’s playing in the very intimate Studio Theatre at Crow’s.
True Crime, a Castleton Massive production, by Torquil Campbell and Chris Abraham opened at Crow’s Theatre last night. It’s essentially a one man show featuring Campbell (not quite… composer Julian Brown provides musical backing throughout). It’s certainly a tour de force by Campbell who is on stage continually for 90 minutes and it’s hard to tell when he’s on script and when he’s improvising. He plays a raft of characters from himself, to his father and wife, an imprisoned con man, several dogs and a bunch of others. And he does it very well. He also sings (and barks).
New, written by Pamela Mala Sinha and directed by Alan Dilworth, is a production by Necessary Angel Theatre Company in association with Canadian Stage and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. It’s currently playing until May 14th at the Berkeley Street Theatre. Now deals with the lives of Bengali immigrants in Winnipeg in 1970/1. The lives of three very different couples are turned upside down by the arrival of the young bride arranged for one of the men by his mother in India.
Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s production of Metamorphoses 2023 opened last night at Crow’s Theatre. It’s an 80 minute show, written and directed by Michele Smith, (with, it’s clear, a lot of input from the cast) taking various stories from Ovid. Most of them involve women (or goddesses) revenging themselves on men for various failings ranging from being smug to violent rape. It’s also very concerned with gender fluidity. The principal narrator is Tiresias and along the way we also meet Hermaphorditus and Caenis.
What do we mean by “forgiveness” or “redemption”? Prodigal, written and directed by Paolo Santalucia currently being presented by the Howland Company at Crow’s Theatre asks us to consider just that. It’s a curiously structured play. On one level it’s a black comedy about a seriously dysfunctional elite family but there’s an intro to each act in which a preacher exegises on the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Parable of the Lost Sheep. We are invited to compare the characters we are about to see with the dramatic personae of Christ’s teaching. But are they really comparable?”
I saw Marie Farsi’s adaptation for the stage of André Alexis novel Fifteen Dogs at Crow’s Theatre last night. I read the book back in the fall and was impressed. It’s a clever, witty, perceptive novel and I was very curious as to how it would translate to the stage; especial since most of the characters are dogs. Bottom line, it works wonderfully well.
operaramblings 