Just Kidding!

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.

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Some assembly required

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.

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Prophecy Fog redux

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.

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Letters from Max

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.

LETTERS FROM MAX, A RITUALPerformed by Maev Beaty and Jesse LaVercombe Photos by Dahlia Katz Set _ Costume Design by Michelle Tracey Lighting Design by Rebecca Picherack Sound Design by Debashis Sinha_(5)

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Sex, death and despair; a Ukrainian tragedy

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.

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WILDWOMAN

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.

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning

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.

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Topdog/Underdog

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.

Mazin Elsadig and Sébastein Heins in TopdogUnderdog-photobyDahliaKatz-5695

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work.txt

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.

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The Master Plan

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.

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