This year’s offering from the Artists’ Studio of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company was Judith Weir’s The Black Spider. One doesn’t get many opportunities to see a Weir opera, let alone one composed for young performers, so this was very welcome. That it’s a very funny mash up of several gothic/horror tropes is a definite bonus. Throw in a lively production with whole hearted and skilful performances and it makes for a great show.
Karma, by Aksam Alyousef, is the latest in what seems to be a genre of plays about second generation Canadians or people who came to Canada at a very young age needing to return to their ancestral homeland to discover/resolve some mystery. See, for. example, The Green Line at Buddies last year.
Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation is a very cleverly constructed play that sucks the audience into it’s world of shifting relationships and coincidences that, at first blush, seem too pat. Along the way it explores what makes us creative and what makes us lose our creativity and, interestingly, how that’s related to the most basic act of creativity, biological reproduction. It’s currently playing at the Young Centre ina production directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu.
Andrew Kushnir’s new play, The Division, currently playing in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre, is both a very personal story and an interrogation of some very uncomfortable aspects of Ukrainian history. It’s told, in the present, as a letter to Kushnir’s nephew to be read in maybe fifteen years time when, perhaps, it will be easier to divorce history from current events (and then maybe not…)
Erin Shields’ Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary is currently playing at Crow’s theatre in a production directed by Ellen McDougall. It aims to shed new light on the Gospel stories by seeing them through the eyes of four Mary’s; the mother of Jesus (Michelle Monteith), Mary Magdalene (Sabryn Rock), Lazarus’ sister (Belinda Corpuz) and the mother of James and Joseph (Nancy Palk). It doesn’t really provide much illumination.
Clyde’s, currently playing at the Bluma Appel Theatre, is so much more than a play about ex-cons making sandwiches. There are layers of meaning here that I’m only beginning to unpack. But let’s take a step back and summarize. Lynn Nottage’s play is set in the kitchen of a truck stop owned by Clyde; a woman with a short fuse, a sharp tongue and a thoroughly jjaundiced view of the human condition. The kitchen is led by the enigmatic Montrellous who seeks to create the perfect sandwich and is making progress. His calm enthusiasm captivates the three other ex-cons who work the kitchen and who aspire to meet Monty’s standard of sandwich excellence while coping with their fractured lives and keeping out of reach of Clyde’s wrath.
Clare Barron’s Dance Nation is a grimly hilarious examination of how cut-throat competition culture affects the lives of children in small town America. It’s currently playing at Coal Mine Theatre in an Outside the March production directed by Diana Bentley.
Jen Silverman’s The Moors is a sort magic realist comedic parody of the Gothic novel in general and the Brontës in particular. It’s currently playing at The Theatre Centre in a Riot King Art Market production directed by Bryn Kennedy.
The headline is a quote from late in the second half of Zaiba Baig’s double header Kainchee Lagaa + Jhooti: The Begging Brown Bitch Plays which opened on Thursday night at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by Tawiah Ben M’Carthy for House of Beida Inc. The plays are loosely linked in that both deal one way or another with queerness and Pakistani-Canadian identity and experience.
Yolanda Bonnell’s White Girls in Moccasins, presented by manidoons collective and Native Earth Performing Arts opened at the Aki Studio on Friday night. Co-directed by Bonnell and Carmen Alvis, it’s a play about identity and and recovering roots. The principal character Miskozi, like the playwright, is Indigenous but I don’t think the play is entirely about Indigenous identity. The other two roles are Ziibi, played by a Bermudian Trans Woman of African ancestry and Waabishkizi; played by a second generation Settler woman. So while the focus is on Indigenous identity I think it raises a lot of other questions too.
operaramblings 