Review: A Thousand Words (SummerWorks)

Clinton Walker (photo credit: Shira Leuchter)

Picture Perfect

by Jason Booker

Nothing in this review can capture the essence of A Thousand Words.  Only an image will do.

Taking its title from the cliché, A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – which it debunks the origin of during the captivating opening monologue – this play is efficient and effective.  Staged using a burlap backdrop with projections and some utilitarian wooden chairs, the four actors involved with the show weave such a compelling tale that the audience remains riveted.

Well-paced and thoughtful, A Thousand Words catches us off-guard then challenges what you think you already know. Expediently and cleverly written and directed by Chris Hanratty, the piece tells the story of three Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and what happens when photos surface online that call into question the actions of those soldiers while guarding a checkpoint.  Adding to the dilemma, two of the soldiers are deceased, the images are leaked anonymously onto a blog that criticises the military and a legal inquiry must be undertaken.

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. 

Reviews: Wondermart / Purge (Live Art, SummerWorks)

Mercuriali

Live Art at SummerWorks: Have an Experience

by Jason Booker

Wondermart:

A two-person podplay (one of a pair in this year’s festival) in which a guerilla narrative is created to have the participants explore a chain supermarket. For those that do not know, a podplay is a pre-recorded art piece created by Silvia Mercuriali for an audience to listen to while experiencing the piece, often exploring a location or neighbourhood.  Wondermart questions the commodification of food and the aesthetics of commercialism – why such cold fluorescent lighting or full shelves of product, sitting right at the edge, labels facing out? A fun experience with a partner or a chance to meet a stranger, this “Live Art” – as the festival has dubbed it – deals with the anonymity of being present in a controlled public space intended for browsing and consumption, as the participants go about unnoticed, sometimes observing those around them, before having the surveillance cameras pointed out too.  Highly recommended to change your perspective. Performed daily for two people at a time at half-hour intervals.

Op-Ed: Stuart Munro on Iconography (SummerWorks)

(screen grab from SummerWorks promo .pdf - see below for link)

The Iconography of Censorship
A consideration of the images used by SummerWorks
by Stuart Munro

When you receive your ticket for a SummerWorks show you’re greeted with an interesting image: a giant eye (not unlike the all-seeing eye) with beams of what appears to be light flowing from it. On top of the beams is a black bar with the name of the play. The suggestion is simply that we, the audience, are here to see a play, and in the most literal way possible, the art implies that the play is being placed within our line of sight, thanks to the festival. But anyone walking around a festival venue or looking at the festival’s program will notice three other images in the series in addition to the eye: a speech bubble with a black bar across it, a computer with a black bar across its screen, and a piece of writing obscured by yet another black bar. Other than on the ticket, all four of these images lack the name of a play. Instead, it appears as though the black bar is hiding some kind of information. Something else is being suggested here and I’m forced to ask, “What is the festival trying to hide?”

Review: Your Side, My Side, and the Truth (SummerWorks)

More than admiration required

by Christian Baines

Rebecca Auerbach’s Your Side, My Side, and the Truth is an easy work to admire. It tackles the difficult subject of how we respond when someone dies; you have to admire Auerbach’s bold frankness, both as playwright and lead, playing herself. You also have to admire her bravery, and her willingness to dramatize these events, drawn as they are, from her own life. 

The central plot, following Auerbach’s relationship, is quite compelling. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough on which to hang a full play, not even in this lean, one-act format. As a result, the show’s focus shifts between the two leads (Jeff Gladstone portrays the other half of the pair) and a trio of supporting characters, whose links to the primary story are, at best, tenuous. While it can be assumed these are real figures from Auerbach’s life, they bring little to the play from a dramatic standpoint. 

Review: Huff (SummerWorks)

this true downer of a tale unfolds with a dead mother, a self-involved stepmother, a neglectful alcoholic father, a sexually obsessed older brother with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome as well as the relatively neutral narrating middle brother and the addicted younger brother, huffing gas and Lysol

when people become punchlines

by Jason Booker

A meandering, overlong monologue without message or moral, Huff is predictable, self-indulgent and a tour-de-force of stand-up-comedy style drama. Cliff Cardinal, the writer and performer, plays over twenty roles in the show including every member of a family of eight (if you include their dog), the children’s teacher and a personification of “Smell” (don’t ask). Using stereotyped characters, Cardinal portrays these people in the worst possible light and fails to make anyone sympathetic, other than the two school-aged younger brothers. These are not people an audience roots for, nor do they get many laughs.

Review: Terminus (SummerWorks)

Dubliners

by Christian Baines

A distraught telephone crisis worker “A”, a lonely young woman disillusioned by love “B”, and a serial killer with hidden gifts “C” - one remarkable night in Dublin will bring these three souls together in a vivid, lyrical journey by playwright Mark O’Rowe.

With no stage direction to speak of, Terminus is a shared, rhyming monologue between its characters. Dancing elegantly between horror, humour, fantasy and tragedy, O’Rowe’s play is a refreshing reminder of theatre’s central purpose – to tell a great story. And what a story it is, artfully interweaving the all too human trials of “A” with the otherworldly, infernal evening of “B”. And while Adam Wilson may occasionally take things a little over the top as “C”, he’s a nice counterbalance to the more measured, but no less solid performances of Maev Beaty and Ava Jane Markus.

Review: Medicine Boy (SummerWorks)

A Script that Struggles

by Christian Baines

A play that promises to bring out the good, the bad and – as its narration makes extremely clear – the ugly of First Nations' history, Medicine Boy has been one of the hottest tickets at this year’s SummerWorks festival. Certainly, there are few plays on the program with more deserving ambitions. Written by Waawaate Fobister, the work follows Mukukee (Garret C. Smith) as he attempts to reconnect with his beloved, late mother (PJ Prudat), his heritage, and his identity in relation to these ancestral ties.

Review: Breathe For Me (Summerworks)

A Playwright to Watch

by Christian Baines

Breathe For Me is not a play interested in giving its audiences a straight answer. After all, Edith (Deborah Kipp) has been trying to get just that out of Edna (Peggy Mahon) for over 50 years. Now confined to a wheelchair, and the victim of increasingly violent seizures, Edna may be running out of time to atone for her chequered past. Or is it all a manipulative ruse to stop Edith from leaving her?

Review: Dutchman (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Brian Telzerow)

Hot-Button Theatre
by Dave Ross

Wander down Ossington Street, and listen for the hum of a generator near Queen Street. Poke your head around the corner and you’ll see a city bus parked at the back of a parking lot strewn with gravel pot-holes and litter. This is the site-specific setting for lemonTree Creative’s production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.

This production isn’t only site-specific, it is period-specific as well. Board the bus, and take a seat. Then spend a few minutes reminding yourself that it isn’t 2012—rather, it’s 1964. Racial tensions are still high, even ten years after desegregation. The civil rights movement is growing in strength. You will need to keep this historical context in mind as you watch the play, or it’s meaning becomes fuzzy.

Review: Ajax (por nobody) (SummerWorks)

A Tango With the Crowd
by Jason Booker

 “There aren't any more bullets,” shouts one character – earning one of the funniest moments of the night. Ajax (por nobody) proves that isn’t quite true. Within the first four scenes, the play deals with polyamory, bestiality, incest, homoeroticism, bulimia, genitalia, disability and pornography – the show casts its net far and wide for subject matter, often hoping to offend and provoke. However, it also manages to find a funny way to bring all these issues to the surface – assuming you have a macabre sense of humour.

Review: Petrichor (SummerWorks)

(photo credit: Richard Penner)

“That bitter-sweet smell, after the rain… there has to be a word for that.” 

by Dave Ross

Petrichor opened last night at the Factory Theatre Mainspace. It is described as “a story of work and land, home and loss and how you can find love hoeing a row of tomatoes.” The story, written by Erin Brandenburg with songs and music by Henry Adam Svec and Andrew Penner, is so beautiful, so touching, and so real. My companion walked out of the theatre and as we waited for the streetcar, he exclaimed to me that while there were flaws in the story he “still LOVED it.” 

First-Person: Johanna Nutter on My Pregnant Brother (SummerWorks)

Starting SummerWorks
by Johanna Nutter
[ED: This article is a reprint from Ms Nutter's blog. You can follow the entire saga of My Pregnant Brother at the company website mypregnantbrother.com]

For those of you who followed my Good People blogs in Boston, you’ll understand why the picture at the top was a funny thing to walk past on my way to Theatre Passe Muraille. 

Review: Barrel Crank (SummerWorks)

Spartan and Lush and Right
by Dave Ross

Barrel Crank has to be one of the best pieces of small theatre I’ve seen in a long time. A cast of four, a barrel, and a canvas sail as a backdrop are all that is used to tell the story of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. Tackling this subject matter, and the oversized glitz (and glamour?) of Niagara Falls on the stage at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace would be a challenge, but this production from Suitcase in Point in St. Catherine’s pulls it off in such a way that it seems utterly ridiculous in the best possible way. 

Review: France, or The Niqab

Charlotte Gowdy (l) and Beatriz Yuste

Social Commentary...and humour
by Dave Ross

“You are no doubt aware of the law that prohibits women from wearing a covering of the face in public.” This line, borrowed from a gendarme in France, or the Niqab, highlights the central issue of this play. The issue of women wearing traditional garments such as the niqab or burqa in public came to a head in France during the presidency of Nicolas Sarcozy, who passed a law stating that it was illegal for women to cover their faces in public.  Playwright Sean Dixon was inspired by the column “Minister Kenney, can I become a citizen in these shoes?” by Tabatha Southey.

First-Person: Playwright Jeremy Taylor on his play Big Plans (SummerWorks)

... let's say ... difficult
A true story of consensual cannibalism rendered theatrical
by Jeremy Taylor

When I wrote Big Plans in 2008, I knew the subject matter was … let’s say … difficult. 

The play is based very closely on the real-world events of the so-called Rotenburg Cannibal. As many will remember, Armin Meiwes gained international infamy in 2001 when he killed and ate most of a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes (beginning with the penis while Brandes was still alive). 

What separated this story from the all too constant barrage of similar news items was that there was a complicity between the killer and his victim: Brandes actually signed documentation declaring his desire to be killed and eaten by Meiwes. It was this complicity—and how it complicated the subsequent trial—that so fascinated the world at the time. And it was this that made the story interesting to me as theatrical material. Who were these men, what did they find in one another, and what happened over the course of that night?

First-Person: Playwright Rebecca Auerbach on her play Your Side, My Side, and the Truth (SummerWorks)

I resented the idea of putting my experiences on stage...
Now is the time to share
by Rebecca Auerbach

It's a funny experience putting one's life on stage. 

Your Side, My Side, and the Truth is based on true events that happened in my life; events that haunted me for years. Finally, in an effort to no longer be haunted by these memories, I decided to write down my experiences almost, I guess, as a form of exorcism. I had zero intention of turning these memories into theatre. 

Instead of freeing me, the exercise of writing turned into an unexpected journey, a process that evolved first into a solo piece before quickly morphing into the five character play we’re presenting this year at SummerWorks. 

Beyond Plays at Summerworks

Where the genres blur
Performance Bar and Live Arts Series 
by Émilie Charlebois

The Performance Bar returns and the new Live Art Series promise exciting, immersive and potentially unsettling experiences at this year’s SummerWorks. You might even make some new friends along the way.

In case it wasn’t already apparent, we are very excited for the upcoming SummerWorks Festival. Although we’ll be focused on providing critical reviews for the Theatre Series throughout its run, the Performance Bar and Live Art series are not to be missed. Bringing music, theatre, art and performance together in unexpected, interactive and challenging ways, these events are sure to have their audiences experience the full spectrum of human emotions. 

The Show, August 6, 2012

Yes, yes, yes, SummerWorks is a festival of discovery, of shiny young faces and new works, but there is one work that sticks out that you should be lining up for and it is a classic. (As one US TV network used to say about its summer reruns, "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you!") 

Forget your Mamet and his vague, irritating plays with some vague, irritating hot-button issue in the middle. Before all of the pinkos and fascists in theatre, there was LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka - a hot button issue in his own right) and before the Oleanna's and the Race's there was Dutchman. First performed in 1964 and subsequently made into a tiny and terrifying little movie, Dutchman is the kind of work which, when performed well, leaves you walking out of the theatre in a daze, and remembering the experience forever.

A black man, a white woman, and - in this case - a bus where the audience members are passengers.

Nuf sed.

Dutchman is at SummerWorks