There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow is perhaps the longest play title ever but the play itself, written by Caleigh Crow, is a fast moving ninety minutes. It’s a collaboration between Native Earth Performing Arts and Buddies in Bad Times and it opened on Thursday night in a production directed by Jessica Carmichael.
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.
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?”
A version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters opened last night in a collaboration between Hart House Theatre and the Howland Company. It’s described as “Adapted and directed by Paolo Santalucia after Chekhov” . What this means is that is given a contemporary Canadian setting with changed character names and so forth. The structural purpose of each scene, pretty much each speech, remains the same but the words are not a literal translation. And, Alex Vershinin is a woman lieutenant colonel in the RCAF which gives a very different spin to her “affair” with Masha.
operaramblings 