Review: The Fever (SummerWorks)

On Mortality and privilege
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

We take our seats and face a classic interrogation setting: stark black-and-white colours, a lone straight-back chair with a ceiling-fan overhead. A polished, 30-something woman walks in from the audience, casually takes a seat under the fan and begins to talk.  There is no lighting cue; in fact, she barely raises her voice.  This minimum bow to theatricality is not compromised throughout the production.  If anything the dramatic force of the piece comes from its almost total refusal to embed the discussion in any kind of spectacle.  

Review: A Song For Tomorrow (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Gein Wong)

Unhappiness
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

An old man, Ping, is lying prostrate on a threadbare carpet, moaning softly, legs akimbo, cane just out of reach.  His wife, May, enters shortly thereafter.   With heavy steps she moves around the sparse basement apartment.  We wait expectantly for her to help him up: “Make an effort, do it on your own,” she finally exhorts.  Such is the tableau of immigrant defeat and despair that confronts us at the opening of A Song for Tomorrow. 

Review: One/Un (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Production Lombric)

A Iranian-French-Québécois-Canadian’s story
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

We confront an audience, actually an absent audience, but all the chairs are there. Soon actor/creator Mani Soleymanlou takes a seat and begins to address us, the non-absent audience, as well as the tech crew directly.  He barks orders at the guy who keeps “fucking up the lights,” and casually tells us not to worry about our cellphones.  It’s a little hokey, but it gets the point across.  We the audience are implicated in his struggle to create a narrative out of a chaotic Iranian-French-Québécois-Canadian’s story. 

Review: Marine Life (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Natasha Mytnowytch)

It Only Sounds Unpromising
by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

Picture the following triangle: An idealistic environmental activist is in legal difficulties.   Her eager beaver, but sexually dysfunctional, lawyer can’t keep his hands off her – until, that is, he encounters her brother, an abysmally bad subway musician whose incestuous designs on his sister are not entirely unrequited.   Add in a murder plot and a good deal of technical information about hermaphroditic marine species . . . well, you wouldn’t necessarily think this to be promising theatrical material.  You’d be wrong.  

Review: Speed-the-Plow

Ari Cohen and Jorden Pettle (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Soulpepper's Males

Mamet's people

by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

From F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Norman Mailer, to David Mamet himself, many a serious writer has gone to Hollywood to pay the bills and then tried to create art out of the spoils.  Speed-the-Plow, Mamet’s riveting three-hander contends with the film industry’s ever-present contradiction between art and the box office.  This play, and indeed Soulpepper’s production, does what Mamet does best: lays bare the jousting/jesting relationships between male co-workers and rivals.  And so we meet Bobby and Charlie, colleagues and competitors, in a Hollywood studio which has just elevated producer Bobby into a position where he might for once attempt to rise above the usual schlock.  This threatens erstwhile friend and co-worker, Charlie, who, swallowing his humiliation after being passed over, has just brought his rival a sure-fire prison-buddy script, with a hotshot Director thrown in for good measure. 

Review: The Judy Monologues (Fringe)

by Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

The Judy Monologues is a piece of verbatim theatre, the source of which is the recordings Ms Garland made for a never-completed autobiography before her death at 47, by drug overdose, in 1969. 

The show’s main attraction is Kimberly Roberts, whose likeness to Judy at the end of her life is uncanny.  Ms. Roberts captures her glamour and fragility as she projects the star’s twitchy backstage mannerisms.  The great disappointment of the show is that Roberts is never allowed to speak.  Rather she primps and flounces silently around the stage, which is set up as a dressing room, at different,  seemingly random intervals.