A Public Display of Affection is currently being presented by Studio180Theatre in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre. Jonathan Wilson plays himself in monodrama-documentary directed by MarkMcGrinder about Gay life in Toronto before, during and after AIDS.
Adam Paolozza’s Last Landscape opened at Buddies in Bad Times on Tuesday night. It’s an experimental piece about environmental collapse. It’s not exactly a “play”. There are no words. What there are are puppets, movement and sound.
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.
Back to Summerworks on Wednesday night, this time at the Theatre Centre, to see a double bill of works derived (loosely) from Shakespeare plays. Both works were experimental but in utterly different ways. Lady M (Margaret) is 60 minutes of carefully crafted physical theatre intended for both Deaf and hearing audiences with great attention to detail and a minimalist aesthetic. i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson is longer at around 90 minutes and is a mad cap series of vignettes exploring Shakespeare’s punctuation, patriarchy, capitalism, life as a trans person and yoghourt among other things.
operaramblings 