You can sit (in) with us!

Think what you like about the demands made by Black Lives Matter – Toronto, the honoured group in 2016’s Pride Toronto parade. (I think the list ranges from “of course” to unfair; that’s my cis white male opinion.)

But their mid-parade 30-some-minute sit-in near the media area was a perfectly appropriate piece of street theatre. Perhaps even a welcome gesture, if you don’t factor in the increased rates of heat stroke and sunburn along the route and the risk of making the Prancing Elites late for their performance.

Politics in the Pride parade? Who would have thunk? But just how did Prime Minister Justin pass the time waiting for the Black Lives Matter sit-in to end?

Parades—Toronto’s Pride parades in particular—are platforms for speech, performance, self expression, unexplainable dancing styles and wardrobe choices, community awareness, celebration, politics and everything in between. The whole thing is a jumble of performances that may or may not make sense or be effective individually or as a whole.

The Pride parade has never been curated, though there have always been sources of tension about what should be included and what shouldn’t be.

To the extent the parade adopts a theme, enforcing it is untenable. Who wanted to police the “Bursting with Fruit Flavours” theme back in 2004? (This year’s theme, You Can Sit with Us!, was clever, but perhaps unbearable for nonconfirmists who don't want or need the cool kids’ permission to take a seat.) If a parade entry is uplifting and inspiring, that’s fantastic. If it’s challenging or even nonsensical, that’s fine too. This year’s edition provided my most intense and most meaningful parade-watching experience so far. When the names of the people murdered in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub—just plain little signs with names and ages—were carried down Yonge Street, I cried. I didn’t want to or expect to, but I did.

In 2004, the Raelian group was required to cover parts of signs featuring a picture of the Pope (JP II) and text like, “Official sponsor of AIDS.” Though naked marchers were arrested in 2003, they have been for the most part welcome in the parade, despite years when they were asked if they really, really, really had to bare all. For seven years, the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) was the wound in the parade that would not heal. People wanted them out and they wouldn't leave. After years of debate and acrimony, Pride ended up creating a dispute-resolution process that affirmed that QuAIA could march, despite real threats to revoke Pride’s city funding if they were not given the boot.

Perhaps the biggest get-out-of-jail-free card handed to Pride executive director Mathieu Chantelois when he took over in 2015 was QuAIA’s announcement that they weren’t interested in marching anymore.  Whew! Controversy off the table! Done and done! Let the good times roll!

And then the sit-in.

What’s not suitable for a Pride parade? My first test is: Is the entry composed of queer people expressing something, or allies expressing something queer? For Black Lives Matter, the answer is most definitely yes.

I have written before about how boring the Pride Toronto parade has become—and remains. So the second and final test: Is it boring?

Well, many spectators would say that standing in the hot sun watching the same float or, more likely, the same uncostumed marching contingent of bankers for a half hour while a protest and negotiations take place is a textbook definition of boring. But only if they have failed to let their minds ponder larger issues and themes.

Watching a parade is usually about catching quick glimpses of eye candy. We love a float because it’s creative or the people on it are sexy and talented and fun to watch—for a few seconds. But when those seconds expand to minutes, we grow antsy. First, we don’t know what’s going on, and complain about the quality of marshalling.

Then someone says there’s a sit-in. Now the event is theatre. It’s not random bits of delight anymore. It’s a larger, more cohesive narrative that someone has brought to the cacophony. A story has been imposed.

This show is not in front of you. It’s all around you, like in plays where the actors leave the stage to wander amidst and interact with the audience. In this case, not literally. But suddenly the actors have framed your experience in a way that’s completely unexpected, that brings you into the story. Like a piece of conceptual art, the sit-in was a frame focusing attention.

Focusing on what? Firstly, I suppose, on our feelings. Intrigue, annoyance, validation, indignation, solidarity, you name it. Radical art means to get in your head. For parade watchers, it was boring non-boringness or non-boring boredom. It was as boring as the conversations we were having as it unfolded. That, much more than the presence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made the 2016 parade unique and memorable—a true achievement.

Whether spectators took the 30 minutes to think of the experience of Black Lives in Toronto, Canada and around the world, whether they thought about how Black Lives are policed or their relationship to Pride Toronto… maybe they didn’t. But a frame of reference was created, regardless of what spectators saw in it.

That’s theatre, and theatre belongs in a parade. Hence the ostentatious TV-camera-ready feathered pen Chantelois was given to sign the list of demands. It’s a stylized prop in a show within a show.

Politically, the sit-in was astute. Maybe not in the hot sweaty moment, but in the days and weeks of debate that will follow. Black Lives Matter­ – Toronto has created a large-scale conceptual frame for their issues. They turned something as ephemeral as a parade into something longer lasting. What’s the point of being given the power that comes with being honoured and not doing anything with it?

Some gay men and others have described the sit-in like it was a hostile act. “LGBT people would never stop the Caribana parade to protest homophobia.” Um, why not? Well, we got beat to it and would have to think of something else. The sit-in is a hard act to follow.

It’s not war—people get killed in those—it’s play, a much preferable and more parade-friendly substitute. Something can be playful and serious at the same time.

Yet there’s a larger political risk for Black Lives Matters organizers.

’Cause, when you give theatre, you usually get theatre back. 

Ideas and their enactment

Attending theatre festivals like the Fringe or SummerWorks, which is on this week, I usually focus my attention on the ideas behind the plays, what they might become rather than what they are.

Now, a lot of festival shows are fantastic. But even great festival shows (especially great festival shows) are often on their way to something else, like a main stage full-evening mounting. So there can be times when you have to let your imagination fill in the gaps of what might be under more optimal conditions. The creators are often trying things out, seeing what works within the limits of the festival's time frame (usually an hour) and logistical constrains (limited tech time, limited rehearsal time, limited time to erect and strike a set). The bells and whistles that come with a long theatrical run are denied festival productions. To watch (some of) these shows fairly, you have to accept that the intentions and spirit of the production are more important than their execution.

And then you see blow-you-away performances like Atomic Vaudeville's Ride The Cyclone and Edwidge Jean-Pierre's Even Darkness Is Made of Light. You realize there's no reason to handicap festival shows.

With Ride the Cyclone, a young cast sing and dance their way through numbers that personify the lives of their (dead) characters. The electricity coming off the stage is amazing. Each song crackles with bravado when it's not pulling at your heart strings.

It feels weird to describe a play about suicide as a tour-de-force but that's exactly what Even Darkness is. Harness up Jean-Pierre to the grid and we could pretend nuclear energy was never an option. She covers ever inch of the stage (and much of the theatre), taking her character from self-pity to joy to depression to silent redemption in the blink of an eye. She finishes the show bathed and sweat and, inside our heads, so does the audience.

Exceptional performances can happen anywhere at any time. How was the lighting and the sets? Who noticed?

Pilot Automatique

There's something just so French about Nathalie Claude's one-woman, three-robot show Salon Automaton, which had its English-language debut at Buddies this week.

Claude's introductory monologue, with its polite bluster and assertive indirectness, has a Proustian quality, as does the very idea of a Friday night salon where the The Dandy Poet, The Cabaret Artist and The Drinking Patroness gather to entertaining their obliging hostess, who serves them champagne and cucumber sandwiches, whether they are able to eat it or not.

For the first hour of the two-hour production (which is about 30 or 40 minutes too long by my nodding-off measure; the original French version is apparently a bit shorter), this circuitousness is something of a theatrical strategy, a distraction from what the audience is seeing on stage. Which is an overeager woman talking to three seated robots, each with a moving mouth, a soothing voice and a set of proscribed movements which include emphatic gesturing but, alas, not eating. While the hostess chatters away--sometimes about human existence, sometimes about nothing particularly memorable--we're unsure whether she knows her company is spring-loaded, whether the guests themselves know they are robots or what kind of world has created this situation.

The reveal is slow, much too slow, and somewhat beside the point. The show has far less to say about the "why" of how humans find themselves turning to mechanical companions than "how," which is to say, with apprehension and naive optimism. When you've created an illusion designed to protect you from the vagaries of human behaviour, anything less than perfection might very well drive you bonkers.

The production works best when it's showing, not telling. We see Claude as all-too-human, blathering over-dramatically like a nervous hostess filling gaps in the conversation, so when the automatons (voiced by Clinton Walker, Moynan King and Leni Parker) offer up their scripted, banal cliches, they come as something of a relief. Their speech and motion are restricted, but fascinating nonetheless. They're playing to type because they have been created as types and there's theatrical pleasure in having our own perceptions of the world mirrored back to us, confirmed as accurate, even if that accuracy emerges out of our own manipulations.

Claude's core idea is a spot-on critique of our increasingly personal relationship with technology, even as it suffers from the very human trait of overkill.

The new season looks a lot like the old season

I know that in some circles, Soulpepper can do no wrong. But, really? Four remounts, including two shows, Glengarry Glenn Ross and Billy Bishop Goes to War that were highlights in the season we're just three-quarters of the way through.

Then we have works by David French and Joe Orton again, admittedly different ones. Sure, they're great plays by great playwrights but there must be others kicking around. Is the modern theatrical canon that Soulpepper loves so much really that tiny? Obviously, they made money off these plays--last season was exceptionally strong--but what does it say to subscribers, who would have seen Billy Bishop less than six months earlier? In some ways, it's less a theatre season, closer to a Broadway run, with shows running until all the available audience has seen them.

There are a few interesting and surprising choices. Sharon Pollock's Doc gets a little female can-con in there, and A Raisin in the Sun much needed colour. The academy pieces, especially Daniel Brooks' non-traditional mounting of The Cherry Orchard also look promising.

More Fringe notes

We're almost at the end of the "debut days" at the Toronto Fringe Festival--I have just one more show Saturday afternoon and I'll have done my reviewing duties. A few thoughts.

* The techies are an unforgiving bunch. Says one in the beer garden. "There was this one show today and they asked me for chairs! Chairs! What do they think this is? Are they going to be asking me for costumes next?" Then she started talking about what techies would do if they ran the world. I expected it to sound like Fascism, but it was more about some kind of automated lighting system.

* Most obvious piece of dialogue today: "Life is so... alive."

* Thursday's best line: "Nobody likes the aging divorcee but everyone loves a widow."

* If there is a choice between a no-name act that seems to come from a place of passion and an act with a few "professionals" on its roster--references to L.A. or London in the program bios, for example--always take the amateurs. Big egos spell indifferent work ethic and you have to wonder: If you're doing so well in L.A., why are you in the Fringe?

* In a similar vein, I am often left wondering about what it takes to make something "entertaining." I've seen plays that have been workshopped, dramaturged, workshopped again, performed and directed by trained theatre professionals that have been vastly less entertaining that somebody just hopping on stage and telling funny stories. I suppose if Hollywood hasn't figured it out, the chances I will are slim.

* Past Fringe success is an unreliable indicator of what this year's show will be like. The best expectations are no expectations.

Fringe phrasing

I just had to share the best line I've heard so far in the Fringe, though I think its hilarity was inadvertent.

Gansta to his high-school-attending sister, while giving her drugs to retail (The sister happens to be prostituting her best friend): Let me pimp the bitch!
Sister: I'm not comfortable with that.

Eye Weekly's Fringe review site is here and my review of Lockdown is here.

Way to go Waawaate

I must admit, when I first interviewed Waawaate Fobister, I walked away somewhat distressed by the nagging feeling I had that his first solo show could all go very wrong. I mean, he was smart and had the wisdom of someone who had lived an interesting life in his 24 years. I knew that Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and his director/dramaturge Ed Roy had great confidence in him.

But really.

He was 24. He seemed like he was painfully shy. He seemed unsure of himself. He was going to be writing and performing a mainstage, full-length show based on a short personal (and traumatic) anecdote he had told on a youth performance stage. He was performing multiple characters, solo. He talked about making last-minute changes to things. Buddies was opening its season with something so untested? Really?

As I wrote up my piece for Eye Weekly, I wondered if too many expectations had been placed on somebody much too young and inexperienced--and what the fallout would be.

Boy, was my pessimism misplaced. Fobister's Agokwe took six Dora Mavor Moore Awards this week, teaching me never to underestimate what comes out of talent and hard, hard work.

Book of Judith could have used a little more Snow

When writing about a play that's about the making of a play, I figure it must be all right to write about writing about it. In the case of The Book of Judith, which plays till the end of May in a tent on the lawn of the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction on Toronto's Queen West, that also might be the appropriate approach. Being self-reflexive also gives me the chance to violate a couple of other rules I try to maintain: not writing about what's not on stage but could have been (under normal circumstances: what's the point of coulda, shoulda, woulda?) and not pulling apart the production's intentions from its execution.

Let's start at the beginning. I met the show's creator Michael Rubenfeld for an interview for Eye Weekly and found him totally likable and smart. My first questions, as they often are, were about how the show came to be and he had a compelling narrative. As we talked, I realized that this creation narrative--how he met the play's subject, Judith Snow, a quadriplegic who is an international advocate for the inclusion of disabled people, how they started working on a play, how it fell apart and how he pulled it back together again--was the spine of the play. Interesting enough. It got me wondering what the play itself was going to say about the experience. If the play was about his journey from seeing Snow as little more than a freak to seeing her as a person whose very existence in the world challenged our views of it, I was curious what it was about Snow that triggered this awareness and what it was about Rubenfeld that was different now.

The resulting play is difficult to write about without sounding like an asshole. I think there was a lot of talent on the stage, including the choir. I think we need more art--more dialogue in general--on concepts around disability and inclusion. I think Judith Snow is a worthy subject of hagiography. I think the play's heart is in the right place. I think the play will make people think more about disability and, because Rubenfeld is more connected to Toronto's artsy scene than its disability community, it will touch a lot of people who may not have otherwise thought about disability.

But I was surprised how wafer-thin the play's thinking was. Rubenfeld introduces Snow as an "oddity and an inspiration," someone defined by her disability, her physical dependence on other people to help her get through her life, and then talks about how, through the process of creating the play, he discovered how she is so much more than that. But he doesn't give that "much more" to us. The play, for all its whole-person thinking, still focuses on Snow's disability. We don't get a sense of her as a person or a sense of her intriguing views of the world except in the quotes from her contained in the beautifully designed missal. I would have liked to have had much more Snow--what are her hobbies? if she wants to get laid, what kind of a man is she interested in?--and much more of how specifically she changed Rubenfeld. But the show only skims the surface. Rubenfeld performs the piece in evangelical revival-tent style and it's almost as if this approach prevents him from digging down: What was Snow before this project? What was he? What are they after? We're told over and over again how she changed him, but, aside from the fact that he's doing the show itself, he doesn't really show us. The audience is kept on the outside and, for a show about inclusion, I think that's a shame. It's like the process of the play and his emotional journey through that process--the government funding, his girlfriend breaking up with him partway through--overwhelmed the play's original mission: to show what Judith Snow, in particular, brings to the world.

So that's what I thought the show should have been: more Snow, less belly-button gazing. But I also think that, despite my qualms, the show is an important one to do, about a theme that deserves more attention.

Was what's there interesting enough? Mostly. The music by Andrew Penner was great and fun. Rubenfeld is a compelling performer but the preacher-style felt one-note. The audience participation was a nice touch, as was the surprise almost-ending. As for the ending itself: There wasn't one. The Book of Judith is a worthy production offers breezy entertainment and feel-good sentiment. But if you want to have a sense of the emotional journey of Snow and Rubenfeld, you might have to produce a play yourself.

CBC calls my four-star review of Anne of Green Gables 'unkind'

So the CBC has published a story claiming that Toronto theatre reviewers were "unkind" to Anne of Green Gables - The Musical, which is in Toronto for a couple of weeks.

There I was girding myself for attacks on why I praised it and gave it four stars out of five--I'm an Anne fan and I don't deny it--and, out of left field, I'm held up as an example of a meanie Toronto critic who trashed it.

The irony of the whole thing is that theatre artists are always complaining, "You should get rid of the star ratings. People just look at the stars and don't read the reviews which are often a better indicator of whether they themselves will like the show," an argument I totally agree with. But here's a case where the rating has been discarded in the writer's attempt to dig up the dirtiest parts he can.

I've submitted this comment to the reader comments on the story:

I'm Paul Gallant, the critic who wrote the review for Eye Weekly that is quoted here.

I've always laughed at movie adverts that take a review phrase like "an astonishing achievement in boredom" and turn it into "Astonishing achievement!" For the sake of a sharp headline--and presenting Toronto as a snobby place, I guess--this CBC piece has done the opposite, quoting 50 of the most negative words--the only negative words, really--of my 670-word mostly positive review.

I gave Anne of Green Gables - The Musical four stars out of five, which is a far more important indicator of my feelings about the play than the qualms quoted in here. Please check out Eye Weekly's website to read my full review.

Green goggles

Islanders have a strange relationship with Anne of Green Gables--the musical and the book more than the TV movie, though that, too, gives us ambivalent feelings. Early exposure embeds the story deep in our DNA. "Ice Cream" might or might not be a better show tune than "You Won't Be an Orphan for Long" from Annie (which debuted 13 years after Anne, I'll have you know) but that's like a left paw wondering if life would be better if they were right-handed. You just don't know. We grew up proclaiming, "School again! School again!" every September, which was enough to cue giggles. It's not much of a song, really, but everybody knew the dance number that was being invoked.

Provincial minds can overrate their own marginal distinctions, but Islanders have the hard data to prove Anne's more than a local obsession. The provincial population is about 140,000 but 3.3 million people have seen the musical. Summertime on the Island sees a flood of Japanese tourists, mostly female, many wearing to dress up in frocks and wear braided red-haired wigs as an ode to their heroine. Anne has turned much of the province into a Victorian-era theme park, which Islanders resent, but it generates lots of cash, which we like, a lot.

At the opening of Anne of Green Gables - The Musical at Toronto's Elgin Theatre, P.E.I.'s Minister of Communities, Cultural Affairs and Labour was on hand for opening remarks. Carolyn Bertram was a total charmer, but the effect was to turn the whole show into a living, breathing tourism advertisement. One suspected the P.E.I. government might have underwritten Dancap's partnership with the Charlottetown Festival. Liked the sets? See them rendered in water, soil and sand as you drive from Cavendish to Brackley Beach! Liked the picnic scene? Try Cow's handmade ice cream next time you're in Charlottetown!

As a critic, you have to push aside nostalgia in order to set the script against the expectations of nowadays, the acting/directing against past productions. Though the musical has been tinkered with over the years, the current incarnation is a back-to-its-roots effort, with the original 1960s sets and choreography. Does that make it a museum piece or is it an artistic decision that has some contemporary resonance?

It's been at least 15 years since I last saw Anne of Green Gables and this time I was surprised by its imperial themes, particularly the strange school pageant where depictions of Eskimos and Indians flirt with racism. I had forgotten the cavalier treatment of teen pregnancy--treated with more levity than, say, school teasing. I had remembered Anne and Diana's platonic love song "Kindred Spirits"--it's the name of a fan magazine. But I had forgotten that it was the visit to the horrible Mrs. Blewett--we know she's horrible because she doesn't hang her laundry to dry sorted by colour and size--that made Marilla change her mind about keeping Anne. It's a funny scene, but there's no song in it and the Blewett character doesn't recur, so it didn't penetrate into my psyche. But the moment I saw the laundry, I knew exactly what was coming. Mrs. Blewett was there in my brain whether I knew it or not.

I can say this about the current production: Amy Wallis is probably the best of the four Anne's I've seen. And I always get excited when they start the egg and spoon race which is, strangely, more thrilling than the three-legged race that precedes it. But I didn't cry when... you know who... you know whats. A ritual is supposed to provide satisfaction each time, but get one ingredient wrong and the spirits will ignore you.

Cups floweth over

I've spent the last couple of days taking in the City of Wine festival, a cycle of seven plays by Kingston playwright Ned Dickens about the mythical city of Thebes, which I wrote about for Eye Weekly. The whole shebang gets two performances, the first of which is a preview and therefore not for review.

But for a theatre writer, the experience has been enlightening. It's not every day you get to watch seven plays by the same writer played in quick succession. You start to notice Dickens' quirks that would have become lost with larger gaps between performances. It's not every day you get back-to-back performances by students at some of the country's top theatre schools, directed by seven different directors. You see real talent amidst confused direction--and vice versa. Students from Studio 58 at Vancouver's Langara College, for example, stood out as particularly naturalistic in their technique, while the Humber students were thrown into a production that was more experimental and fussy. Every class, it seems, has a big lug performer willing to play the clown for laughs and every class has more women than men.

Although the cycle has some kinks to work out in the amount of repetition necessary to connect the stories, what's remarkable is the structure of the whole project. The first show is full of gods but by the third one, it's humans talking about gods. The stories become more layered and ironic, with the actions of later generations resonating against what happened before.

A confession: The first four plays took up about 11 hours over two days so I needed to take a break, which meant I missed the cornerstone play, Oedipus. But I figured that I knew how that one ended.

Looking at the Sky

It's tricky reviewing Sky Gilbert if you have any sense at all of his career as a writer and theatre artist. In any production, his voice is always one of the most overwhelming factors. This time, you think, I'm going to focus on the performances or the set design or even the music, but no. You can't not dedicate the lion's share of a 300-word review to a voice that drives everything else. This time especially, Gavin Crawford so explictly channelled Gilbert, it was impossible to ignore it. Then there are Sky's writing habits: the fantastic one-liners and the wry observations floating along on a shaggy structure. For audiences who have seen Gilbert's work before, the most important information a review can give them is whether these two boxes--inscapable voice and whether it needs editing--are ticked or not. For newbies, I suppose they'll find out for themselves.

Angry old men

Glengarry Glen Ross is not one of my favourite movies. It's way much too bleak and pessimistic for that. It's a snapshot from the particularly grueling cold-calling circle of hell, a dystopia cynically presented not as a warning but as a callous reprimand against a callous humanity. With its real estate salesman strugging to keep their awful jobs, it is one of the movies I can watch over and over again and watch in pieces--15 minutes of Al Pacino seducing a schlep or five minutes of Kevin Spacey in a high prick dudgeon. It's one of the the only DVDs I own that's earned its keep as something to re-review, not as something that sits on a shelf proclaiming my superlative taste in film.

While the film version is fluid and textured, following our real estate retailers from argument to argument, sale to sale, the camera tying each diatribe together into a rain-soaked whole, the stage version is much more episodic (and does not contain the famous Alec Baldwin rant: "Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only. You think I'm fucking with you? I'm not fucking with you. I'm from downtown."). Each of the first act's two-handers ends with an exclamation point, while the second act is an extended set piece where the men act out during a police investigation into who stole the real estate leads.

Soulpepper's production of what is probably David Mamet's best known work corrals the scenes into tight pens, so tight they flash by before you quite know what's happened. In the first act, only one of the characters even gets up out of his seat. Certainly the well-stuffed red booths at the Chinese restaurant seem comfy enough, but the tables so restrict the movements of the actors, it denies them the possibility that they might reach out to each other (to hit each other, of course, not to comfort--this is Mamet, after all). Though there is more motion in the second act, the blocking seems particularly self-conscious, just a way to get the characters on and off the stage at the right time so there are no snarls in the dialogue. The effect is engrossing--we're left to focus on the words, which is the intention--but distancing.

Eric Peterson, in his second nasty role post-Corner Gas (after Festen last fall), does exceptional work as Shelley "The Machine" Levene, his pathetic pleading gradually slipping away to show the angry scheming underneath. But it was actually Peter Donaldson as Moss, in his conspiring with William Webster that seemed most authentic and original. The weakest link was Albert Schultz as the salesman of the moment, Ricky Roma. Schultz just didn't seem to be able to find the character's throughline, which moved through charismatic outlaw to spoiled brat to generous cheerleader and back to hack. I realize that nobody can beat Al Pacino, but there were times when Schultz's lack of charisma threatened to slow everybody else down. when, of course, they're all supposed to be catching up to Ricky Roma.

ALSO: This is two Soulpepper productions in a row that use a set backed with a flat, symmetrical linear design. I think they're taking too many cutes from the wood slats on the seating--I'd love to see a little chaos up there.

Chekhov's rebar

Watching the premier of Missing at Factory Theatre last night, I was reminded of the rule of Chekhov's gun: Don't show the audience a rifle if nobody is thinking of firing it. Most of the play's action takes place at the front of the stage which mutates from local diner to farm kitchen to the home of a female cop investigating the case of a missing woman. But near the back there's a huge metal tree, a structure so ugly I figured that it could not possibly be decorative. At a certain point, somebody must climb on it, or it will grow or changes shape or will be inventively lit up. As the characters bickered about this and that--affections and quarrels emerging suddenly from playwright Florence Gibson's ether--I sat quietly waiting for the tree to do something. For someone to at least mention it. Maybe it had something to do with the sugar bush they were talking about. I attributed the branches sticking out of the front of the stage to the sugar bush, so why not the metal tree?

At play's end, the metal tree had played no part in the events and revelations. I went to the afterparty in Factory's lounge and was standing by the door that looked back into the theatre. "I thought the set was cool," said somebody who had been sitting in the front row. "I guess the rebar had something to do with the bypass they were building."

"Rebar?" I said.

"Sticking out of the front of the stage."

"I thought they were branches." But it wasn't till I got home that the other shoe dropped. The metal sculpture wasn't a tree; it referred to the construction of a highway and its accompanying bypass. The thing wasn't a Chokhovian rifle; it was just cryptically ugly.

Mystery solved.

Preaching to the converted

Seeing Toronto the Good at Factory and Travesties at Soulpepper (by Soulpepper?--do they own the Young Centre?) in the same week left me with debate-play brain freeze.

Andrew Moodie's contemporary work follows a black lawyer who must defend a female cop against charges of racial profiling. He happens to be married to a Franco-Ontario (read: white) woman and the story frequently abandons its legal-procedural core to show her worrying about her jaded students while waiting for street cars. The acting is excellent and some of the lines are quite good, but its left-right axis and middle class focus (the few characters who are on the front lines of the gun-violence issue get little to say though, in fairness, the snooty character who traces his lineage back to the family compact is also given only perfunctory treatment). In trying to balance the classic left-right arguments so perfectly, Moodie leaves out other voices that would have made the debate more dynamic, more unpredictable.

Travesties is a debate about the social usefulness of art that playwright Tom Stoppard has ramped through a vaudeville act that includes singing, dancing and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I don't buy the arguments that what Travesties has to say about the culture wars is relevant today. Yes, we still debate about art, but the debate has evolved and changed, making Stoppard's main question here--does art have to be socially useful?--largely irrelevant. No, art doesn't have to be socially useful. Art can be anything. Canada's current debate about art is: Given that art doesn't necessarily have to have any social use, should the government fund it? Which makes Travesties seem awfully dated, despite how hard it tries to make us giggle.

Moodie's play might lack the Stoppard's encyclopedic theatre knowledge and self-referential smugness, but at least it's an argument we're having right now.

Travesties

Doing some research on an Eye Weekly piece on Soulpepper's upcoming Travesties, I came across this website concerning a recent Seattle production. Panic. You have to know all this to understand the play? But I think it was a bit of an overreaction on my part and on the part of the theatre group. I think Stoppard only really cared that we were familiar with the outlines of Stalin, Joyce and Tzara--the Che T-shirt image of them--to get the play. I think it's more about the joy of words and art than history. Or so I hope.

Greek and modern tragedy

Seeing Medea and Jerry Springer - The Opera in the same week demands some kind of comparison, if only just for fun. An immortal work versus temporal trash? The perennial entertainment value of high emotions? The bells and whistles theatre has accumulated over the years, culminating in JSTO's barrage of operatic, religious, television and musical conventions, served up with a wink and a grin.

But what really makes Medea a work for the ages is its irony. Seana McKenna's performance highlights the distance between what Medea is telling people and what she's thinking -- motivations, goals and public perception all operate on their own tracks. In my experience of the play on the page, I had always focused on the emotions she must have been feeling in order to act so brutally. McKenna totally turned her into a schemer--arranging for other people to carry out her killing and arranging her getaway, leaving no one any wiser until her plan kicks in (signalled by a burst of flame on the stage--is it possible to eliminate all the cheese from modern productions of Greek tragedies?). There is more "how" than there is "why" in Medea.

With Jerry Springer -- the opera and the TV show -- our ignorance of the motives of the actors/guests is part of the pleasure. We don't want to know how they came to be cheating, how they managed to coax their lover onto the stage. We want it to be a mystery, their participation on the show, the pleasure they derive from their compromising engagements (affairs and perversions--all the same, all the same). The audience can stay back, keep its distance and experience them as freaks. But because we can see Medea's mind at work, we become engaged in her intentions and their deployments, even though, child murderer she is, she's the biggest freak of all.

Zona Pellucida

We think of dreams as fuzzy but there is always a precision to them: we may not know the make of the car my high school English teacher was driving to Vegas, but it was a very specific colour of green; it wasn't the current you running around and around the block but you circa 1995, wearing that red hoodie you wore that year. Zona Pellucida by 2boys.tv, on stage at Toronto's Buddies Theatre till Jan 24, is the kind of dream-as-machine concept that could only come out of Quebec. The soundtrack is the engine here, each syllable of silver screen divas demanding an exacting lip sync performance. Stephen Lawson does not struggle to keep up--the ease of the performance keeps it hypnotic--but he's merely a prop in the dream's forward momentum. There is a wolf/bear in pursuit. His growl is the only male sound. The rest is mouthed words from famous films (All About Eve, of course, and Suddenly Last Summer), which kinda funny, really, because the performance is so silent-movie, exagerated and mannered. Lawson moves from tableau to tableau that create mirrored worlds within worlds--one riff has him holding a dollhouse, the image of which is projected onto a screen, but the image contains a projection of his character, with whom he argues. By the end, the projectins and simulacrum pile on top of each other and you reach the point where you don't know if Lawson is actually on stage or not.

Mondo trasho - EYE WEEKLY

Richard Ouzounian: sweeter and kookier than I expected.

Theatre 'Next' to the heater

A theatre festival in the middle of the winter is a curious thing. Not quite the party of the Fringe, not quite the artsy break from beach time of Summerworks, Next Stage has its own log-cabin vibe. The bar/box office tent in Factory Theatre's courtyard provides warmth while you wait for the doors to open and a pleasant kind of forced socialization--you'd be shivering if you waited by yourself off on the sidewalk, so you might as well have a glass of wine. The performers I've recognized seem more likely to drop by the tent before and after shows. Conversation starters--"You're about to be dripped on"--abound.

As for the theatre--I've been impressed. The four shows I've seen are more developed than Fringe shows (though probably not as ambitious as many Summerworks productions). In its second year, Next Stage's identity isn't fully formed but, considering the black cultural hole this second week in January, there should be lots of room for it to grow.