Labonneviveuse's Blog
Just another WordPress.com weblogEdmonton Fringe 2009: George Orwell is Not My Real Name (English Suitcase Theatre Company) & Pipa (Present State Movement)
Sometimes going to the theatre breaks my heart. It’s not likely to happen in London’s West End, or at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, but small venues, such as London’s Finborough Theatre, are dangerous, as is any venue at the Fringe not showcasing material designed for laughs. The show that made my heart ache at this year’s Fringe? George Orwell is Not My Real Name.
The show’s premise is in and of itself heart-breaking. We’re alone with Orwell, whose legal name was Eric Blair, in a room in the Cranham Sanatorium in the Cotswolds, watching him die from tuberculosis, and Kevin Williamson makes things very, very painful — for both himself and us — by insisting on representing Orwell’s tuberculosed coughing fits with brutal naturalism. But the show is painful too because it’s not absolutely clear that he’s speaking to us. Orwell was a lonely man, and the kind of child who made up for loneliness with imaginary friends, and it’s as if we’re the one last imaginary friend he has, but he’s no longer convinced in his power to make us up. The show is about the pain of being alone, and wanting to communicate, a pain made all the worse for the character because he needs words far more than he needs the air that he can’t quite pull into the depths of his tortured lungs.
The show’s at its most heart-rending when Williamson reads the unfinished letter that Orwell’s wife Eileen wrote him before going into the operation from which she died. In the letter, Eileen describes the room that she’s in, noting small things such as the fact that she can see the daffodils outside from her bed. A writer reads, and the show crystallizes as one about the brutal fact that, no matter how much we love, and how much we live, we are all ‘little worlds’ (as Orwell writes in a tale Williamson relates) — ‘little worlds’ that eventually cease to exist in one kind of isolation or another.
Under the pressure of that, this bizarre ritual we call the theatre, in which we gather in a darkened room to watch a man stage this for us, his own veins horribly taut with pressure as he represents Orwell hacking out his lungs, becomes a terribly hard thing to endure. We know why we put ourselves through such things, but, boy, can it hurt!
And Williamson’s Orwell makes things so much harder for us by telling us (amongst other things) a story about a man walking to his execution in Burma in the 1920s (an execution witnessed by Orwell as a member of the Imperial Police Force). As he took his final steps towards the gallows, the man shifted his path slightly to avoid puddles; and once he was up on the scaffold, with the noose round his neck, he called out repeatedly ‘to his god,’ ‘Ram, Ram, Ram.’ Harrowing. Enough, in fact, to make me want to go home and weep — for the man hung in Burma, and Orwell, for having, as a young man, to witness his execution, and Williamson, for working so hard for a half-filled house at a farflung venue miles away from the Fringe’s throbbing heart around the TransAlta Barns to convey the passion that drove Orwell to keep working on 1984 even though with every day’s typing he was rushing himself faster to his grave. But I couldn’t simply go home and have a good cry. I was booked for Pipa.
And thank God for that. It’s hard to imagine a better pairing. I went from a show so intensely about language, and one man’s almost desperate relationship to it, to a show with very few words at all: just enough words, in fact, to put together the barest of narrative for a movement piece in which a shy Pipa (Tamara Ober), who seems blind because she is always bumping into what is right in front of her, transforms before our eyes into a confident girl clambering onto the roof of a house to chase a butterfly. Bumping into her microphone at the beginning, Ober is like a chick that has just emerged from its egg, and not quite got its legs, and as Pipa comes to grips with her limbs, and all the pleasures they can offer her, it’s as if we’re having our species memory re-activated: to be human, this show suggests, we must remember that we are first and foremost animals.
Photograph by Dave Stagner
I have never seen anyone make a table into a dancing partner the way Ober does here, and what a relief it was to watch, after George Orwell is Not My Real Name, another kind of striving, and another kind of art: not one about a tortured man in a bedroom like a prison cell, but one rather about a girl who in her sensual, tactile contact with the world can soar from rooftops with her ‘wings without feathers.’
Pipa’s stunning simplicity and great emotional clarity ends with Ober using her flesh and limbs as the screen upon which a small dancing figure, almost like a stick man, creates a fleeting, animated tattoo. (See video at http://www.youtube.com/watch”v=QNDOOB8E_NA.)
These final images are a stroke of pure brilliance when you remember that (from what we know) writing began as the etching of human figures into stone, and that writing in the theatre — whether it involves strutting divas (Who’s Afraid of Tippi Seagram? / Viva La Diva!), or a woman miming putting her husband’s head into an oven (Afterlife), or one man playing two brothers running side by side (Jonno Katz’s The Accident), or three young men pretending to gallop on horses towards the horizon (The Art of Being a Bastard), or a troupe of four actors pretending to be nursery-rhyme characters tumbling down a hill (Jack and Jill Deconstruct), or a character falling in slow-motion from the ledge of a building (Edmund), or a man’s hands trembling with the trauma of a ‘holiday’ that will never end (The Oculist’s Holiday), or, yes, even a man pretending to hack out his lungs with the lethal spasms of tuberculosis — is always a writing in and with bodies. Thank you, Tamara Ober, for ending this year’s Fringe, for me, on a poignant visual note that encapsulated for me what had been most moving and most powerful about the shows I managed to catch at this year’s Fringe, even if I didn’t rave about them. Viva la Fringe! And if you didn’t catch Ober this year, keep your fingers crossed that she makes the trek north again in 2010.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: The Importance of Being Earnest (Yardbird)
Nobody, I trust, needs me to tell them the plot of what is arguably the funniest English play ever written. If you do, then let me leave you the pleasure of discovering the plot in performance. You’ve got an extra chance to do that since the Central Theatre Company’s production is one of the deserved hold-over shows at this year’s Fringe.
It’s true that the company has to make a few cuts to the play in order to pull off a production with a troupe of only four actors — and that Mr. Chasuble simply has to go! — but nothing serious is lost, and a certain something gained with the doubling of parts. The transformation that Lara Bradban manages as she shifts between Algernon and Miss Prism is quite something to behold. In fact, I found it hard to get my head around the fact that it was Bradban in both roles, even though I knew it had to be. How is it, exactly, that she can transform the very shape of her face to move from the cheeky Algernon with his perma-grin to a woman in her seventies whose very jaw seems to be caving in with the loss of her teeth? I especially liked her Algernon, for Bradban plays the part with a decidedly wicked gleam in her eyes and just the right dash of stylization. (Ignore the nonsense in the Edmonton Journal review about it not ‘quite work[ing] to have Jack and Algie played by women.’)
There’s also a nice piquancy to having the parts of Lady Bracknell and Cecily doubled (by Nell Corrin), given that Cecily really is a ‘gorgon’ in the making. Corrin is more comfortable in the role of Cecily, but she’s not half bad in the role of the formidable Lady Bracknell. She’s certainly got all of the comic timing down. Carly Tarett and Dee Watson have things relatively easy in the roles of Gwendolen and Jack, which makes it a tad unforgivable that Watson does not quite pull off the two climaxes of Act 3. The opportunity to blackmail Lady Bracknell ought to be something that s/he more obviously relishes, and what actor could not want to make more of the single-word line on which so much of the play turns, Jack’s cry ‘Mother!’? Still, the only thing that Wilde might really not have approved of is the lengthy material on the program retailing his tragic story. Who can doubt that he would have much rather seen material extolling his superb epigrammatic wit and his famous aesthetic philosophy? (Why let that bastard the Marquis of Queensberry win yet again?)
Edmonton Fringe 2009: Letters to Noce (Walterdale Theatre)
In Letters to Noce, a hugely entertaining romp written and performed by Vanessa Lever, the principal character, Valerie, is overtaken by a passion for local lawyer, and sometime city councillor, Robert Noce. Local jokes include one about a hockey played named “Chris” who moved to Anaheim, but not because of anything that Valerie, who ends up stalking Noce, did to him, but this is a show that transcends the local, and would wow (one would hope) in any city across North America. Playing, in addition to Valerie, Valerie’s mother, the receptionist at the law firm at which she’s a lowly assistant, and a male friend, Ted, with whom she has sex in exchange for the information about Noce that he’s able to hack off his computer for her, Lever stirs up a comic whirlwind in which Noce himself is nothing but a recorded voice, saying, in fantasy sequences, exactly what Valerie wants to hear.
For the letters themselves, Lever uses the now iconic Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City as counterpoint. Valerie scoffs at the idea that anyone would take advice on relationships from ’sluts in New York City,’ but the real point is that as Lever-as-Valerie types away on her laptop she’s typing about passion for the kind of man that the girls of Sex and the City have no time for: someone who is not just smart, but civic-minded. As Valerie revels in the fact that Noce is so well-educated, Lever revels in all kinds of verbal play. Lever’s passion for words becomes Valerie’s passion for letters: of the fact that the letters after Noce’s name include two Q’s, including the ‘Q’ in Q.C. (Queen’s counsel), Valerie gushes, ‘I love a man with letters after his name . . . . And Q’s! Q’s are so hard to come by!’
The fun of the production includes Lever as Ted trying to hide the erection that he gets when Valerie drops by with one of her requests and he imagines the cat fight that would occur if his girlfriend happened to drop by too, as well as a final stalking episode in which Valerie writhes and tumbles her way up to Noce’s front door to the theme track for Mission: Impossible. And Lever’s love of writing nicely dovetails with the character’s passion for Noce in a long speech about Valerie’s desire to have Noce take her into custody in his bed and whip her there for being such a bad, bad girl as to stalk him. The final fun: Lever in prison garb sings a truly terrible ballad without a single rhyme in it about the passion for Noce that just won’t dissipate even when she’s behind bars.
What can I say? Since Fringe organizers weren’t smart enough to include this amongst the Fringe hold-overs, you’ve got only one more chance to see it, tonight at 8:30. Go! For you know what’s truly hard to come by, at any Fringe? A truly witty and original one-woman show.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: Secondhand Sneakers and the Hundred-Mile Hump (Walterdale Theatre)
Acting is a demanding physical art, and there’s no denying that some actors use the Fringe to keep themselves limber. You can see one proof of this over at Venue 10, where four actors from Calgary’s System Theatre are flexing their skills at everything from singing to tumbling, with a good dose of practice at Beckettian absurdity thrown in, as they make the first verse of the nursery rhyme ‘Jack and Jill’ material from which to generate various forms of theatrical gamesmanship. Over at the Walterdale Theatre, you can watch another actor take the idea of Fringe-as-exercise and make it the conceit around which he builds his entire show: the chief prop for David MacInnis’s Secondhand Sneakers and the Hundred-Mile Hump is a running machine on which he spends a fair bit of the one hour of his performance.
The story with which MacInnis works is a bizarre one: one man decides, in the wake of his brother’s death in an ‘ultra-marathon’ (are there really such things?), that he too must become a runner. At first, he wants to battle it out against Death, whom he imagines trailing just slightly behind him with his scythe, but then, after he collapses from exhaustion at his first race and has a hallucination (presided over by a Japanese origami-maker) in which he believes he learns that his brother was murdered, he wants to track down his brother’s killer (who, he assumes, must have been a fellow runner on the ‘ultra-marathon’ circuit). I defy anyone to say that the story is anything other than absurd, but it doesn’t really matter because the story is an excuse: an excuse for MacInnis to keep fit as an actor while entertaining audiences.
MacInnis can pull this off not only because he’s a good storyteller, but because he’s also something of a comedian: he’s got an eye (and an ear) on the audience the whole time, and even as he talks about the importance, to runners, of breaking ‘the wall’ he’s the one doing the wall-breaking, pulling down that so-called fourth wall between audience and performer with spontaneous quips based on audience response.
This makes for something of an interesting experiment, one made all the more interesting — and here’s the surprise, given the absurdity of the plot (such as it is) — by the fact that MacInnis can write. The elaborately structured speeches that he’s crafted for himself involve not only a good deal of wit but also a fair bit of poetic description. There is an extended metaphor (for example) in which those who shoot others are gardeners in flesh producing flower-wounds.
This is pretty rich linguistic fare for your average Fringe-goer, especially anyone who’s stumbled into the show simply because of the Walterdale’s proximity to the beer garden (as the two guys who walked out about fifteen minutes in to Thursday evening’s performance might have), but MacInnis pulls it off with some flare, possibly because the humour of the surreal tale serves as cracker to the verbal caviar.
The real challenge now, if MacInnis is serious, as the program suggests, about developing this piece further, is to build in what’s currently missing, details that allow him to deepen the anguish that the character, Trevor, is supposedly feeling at his brother’s death and his wife’s decision to leave him for ‘Kayak Mike,’ who ’spends all his day on the water’ but is, the wife claims, somehow ‘more grounded.’ If MacInnis could do that, and pull the audience back through the shattered fourth-wall with him — well, then he might really have something — unlike System Theatre, who can only take their Jack and Jill Deconstruct so far, even if they do discover that the nursery rhyme has other verses.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: Bashir Lazhar
Liz Nicholls told us in her ‘Guileless Guide to Fearless Fringe Foraging’ that we are to find this production of Evelyne de la Cheneliere’s play Bashir Lazhar ‘moving.’ I must be a cretin. I found it tedious and assaultive.
Do I sympathize with the plight of Canadian immigrants whose applications for refugee status are unjustly denied, and teachers who have the courage to try out innovative and rigorous teaching techniques with their students? Of course I do. I am not so fond, however, of being assaulted at the theatre. Don’t get me wrong: I’d pay big money for a time-travelling ticket that would allow me to see Peter Weiss’s original Marat/Sade, or either of Heiner Muller’s productions of Hamletmachine, or, for that matter, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II at the Rose theatre in 1593. (Did Pembroke’s men stage an anal rape with a poker or not?) But the assault that this production delivers is of another kind entirely, one particularly offensive to anyone who cares about dramatic writing as a verbal art.
From the opening moments, the audience is subjected to an aural assault — initially, the din of children playing in a schoolyard at recess, but there are all kinds of din to follow, including the shouting that Michael Peng subjects us to as surrogates for characters in the fiction at whom Bashir is yelling. It’s hard to imagine that de la Cheneliere’s script calls for all of the racket and distraction for which Piet Defraeye’s direction provides, which includes Peng having to stride rapidly back and forth across a stage strewn thick with papers, jangling the audience’s nerves with both the crunching of the paper and his motion while he rants at us about something. Surely de la Cheniere wants audiences to be able to hear and digest her words. The play is, after all, about a teacher trying to impart the correct use of language and an understanding of fables to his students.
It doesn’t help that there isn’t much modulation to Peng’s performance, or that he throws away important lines such as the one in which we learn that his family died in a house fire the night before they were to begin their covert journey out of Algeria to join him in Canada. It also doesn’t help that the mostly non-verbal role of Alice is played by Kim McLeod as if the character were eight or nine rather than twelve or thirteen. And it must be asked: what exactly is the point of hitting audience members in the head with paper airplanes? Are we to imagine that we are towering figures threatened with a jet-fuelled inferno if we don’t more readily grant asylum to political refugees from the Arab world?
All in all, an exhausting affair that left this audience member feeling like a lamb that had been unjustly devoured by a wolf of a production. To make matters worse, I now feel that to do justice to de la Cheniere’s play I’ll have to go read it and imagine for myself a production of it that doesn’t leave one feeling as if one has spent an hour and a half in an asylum.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: AfterLife (Sunset Gun Productions)
Twelve dollars? It almost seems like a theft to pay so little for such tremendous work. The three portraits of women that make up this triptych (co-written by actress Candy Simmons and playwright Chris Van Strander) individually pack a great deal of punch. Together, they bowl you over — and not simply because of Simmons’ performances, which are spectacular. The backbone here is the writing, which is so good that it is from one perspective heart-breaking, another, awe-inspiring, to read on the Sunset Guns Production website that Van Strander has been the semi-finalist or finalist for several prestigious writing awards and residential fellowships but has not yet won one.
The first entry in this triptych is a chilling tale, rivetingly dramatized. Are we really listening simply to a monologue? The writing and Simmons’ performance transport the audience to Appalachia in the 1920s, where Ruth, a midwife, is having problems conceiving. The monologue is a swan-song in which we experience the lethal effects upon herself of Ruth’s desire to conceive even as she tells as of its lethal upshot for others. The piece keeps its time and logic so precisely that if Swiss clocks could feel envy the finest of them would be green with it. And though this may be a historical tale, it is a story too about the present — a tale about fundamentalist America and its capacity to produce those who, even as they go so far as to kill others, claim that they are doing ‘God’s work.’
For the second piece, we’re in a kitchen in Wisconsin in 1960, initially alone with Marion, a housewife who claims to have outgrown her blouse, but has really outgrown the confines of her home. She’s busy attempting an ‘inner journey,’ with her ‘true nature’ as the Shangri-la, and thinks she can make it there through ’self-study’ of the book Yoga for Americans. Doing what character-driven naturalistic drama does best, this dramatic portrait shows us the ‘true nature’ that the character cannot see for herself, as this ‘yoga,’ as she calls herself, desperately tries to get a friend who drops by for tea to join her in her inward-bound journey. Marion can do as many downward dogs as she likes in her livingroom, there will be no inner peace for her as long as she is alone.
The last piece is the shortest (or at least it feels as if it is), but as it bears the cumulative weight of the two that come before it packs just as much punch. Simmons, who has to be tightly reined in in the roles of Ruth and Marion — and who is exquisitely so — is, in the final role of Karma, a New York film producer in 2009, explosive. Payback, as they say, is a bitch. Karma’s going half-mad because she does not, like us, know her history — know, that is, the kind of pasts that have made her, in her current historical circumstances, hell on heels.
Photograph by Stefan Falke
As Karma directs her fury at her assistant Jonathan and her ex-boyfriend Brian (via voicemail message), the show gathers its collective force as a show about our energies, and what we choose to do with them. The verbal motif that connects the three pieces (‘if my picture of heaven is accurate’) suggests that a vision of the afterlife is a beacon to each of the women, but the real beacon here is the theatre, which gives us, with these three pictures of women desperate to find the proper outlet for their creative energies, the historical perspective and psychological illumination to ask how we are spending our own.
I don’t know what you go to the Fringe for, for the Fringe is many things, but if you go to experience the theatre as shaping dramatic force, and take pleasure in whopping good acting and writing, see this show. It’s Fringe gold.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: LoveHateKill (Pony Theatre at the Varscona)
With LoveHateKill, Pony Theatre offers a supersmart medley of shorts from six Canadian playwrights united around the theme of passion that drives violence. The set is woefully cheap, but the production, dazzling. Shannon Blanchet is fabulously precise in her rendering of the wife in Stewart Lemoine’s ‘Bad Egg’ and then gets to show the extent of her dramatic range in Trina Davies’ ‘Love Story,’ a monologue-ripped-from-the-headlines in which an American woman tells the story of how she falls in love with a prison inmate charged with serial sex-killings — and does her best to kill for him.
Clarice Eckford has a brilliant turn too as the conservative wife who leads sex games and a match of Russian Roulette in Kirsten Rasmussen and Amy Shostak’s ‘Social Sundays.’ (Boy, does Eckford seem to have fun prancing about in her ivory lingerie and delicate-frame glasses!) Clinton Carew, good in the minor roles he takes on, gets his moment to shine (quietly) as the writer of the final piece, ‘Splatter,’ a mock ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ / ‘Scream’ segment in which the characters are liberated from their Hollywood schlock scripts. And Ryan Parker’s comic handling of the final scene of Ryan Hughes’s ‘Devotional,’ in which a brother reports in to his sister about his recovery from the dark devotion to the girlfriend who has left him, is crucial to the overall mood of the medley, which charts a zigzagging course between dramatically dark material and farce. ‘It’s good to have a project,’ the character notes, ‘but it has to be the right project.’
Serious kudos to this company for putting together, for Canada’s largest Fringe festival, a theatrical cocktail, both intelligent and entertaining, that simultaneously showcases contemporary Canadian writing for the stage along with the performers’ actorly talents. See this show as late in the day as possible (it’ll be hard for any other show to top it), and see it as early in the Fringe as you can, so that once you’ve seen how good it is for yourself you can round up friends to go back for a second viewing.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: Wedding Ruiner
In this smart and saucy riff on the Hollywood romantic comedy, the Haiku-spouting ‘pussy’ Felix Walsh falls for ‘the ruiner,’ Megan Carver, who has shaped a unique niche for herself in the job-market by selling her services as the interruptive agent who can bust up a wedding that her clients (usually parents) don’t have the courage to bust up for themselves. With butch gestures and body language that are clearly put on rather than inhabited, Sarah Hoyles overplays her role as the ‘ruiner,’ but Mark Stubbings is a tender Felix ironically drawn (given his past experience of the dire power that forceful fathers can exercise in the space of the household) to Carver’s bullying character. The two are a match made in traumas of the past, and in dramatizing their connection Stubbings has found a quite brilliant way to subvert the premises of the RomCom, which rarely permits its characters to deal with emotions of any real heft.
The writing is sharp, with many a good joke about the patriarchal institution of marriage and the rituals of dating. Stubbings’ talent for satire, which is acute, comes together best with his instincts as an entertainer in the rap that he writes to fulfill the ‘ruiner’s’ command that he ‘man up.’ As Walsh raps that what he really wants is ‘hugs and kisses, kisses and hugs,’ Stubbings-as-writer delivers deft commentary on the submerged psychology driving a lot of real rap while also revealing something about the character that his deadpan poems and haikus, which alway send on a withering note about the results of marriage and romance, obscure.
Stubbings’ choice to make Walsh’s poetry central to this tale, and his talent for wresting so much satiric fun out of it, deserves kudos in and of itself, and it’s a sign of his confidence as a writer that in the midst of it all he can build in a meaningful reference to Shakespeare. The script deserves to be picked up by other companies — indeed, it would make a wickedly funny independent film. Here’s hoping a Canadian producer is smart enough to see the potential. In the meantime, get yourself over to the Cook County Salon, where you can enjoy this romp over a beer.
Edmonton Fringe 2009: Full Frontal Nudity (Walterdale Theatre)
Terrence McNally’s Full Frontal Nudity has four characters, an Italian tour guide and three Americans, confronting Michelangelo’s David — four actors, that is, gazing out upon the audience as if it were the David standing in the Accademia Gallery in Florence. The three Americans, two of them young and undereducated, and the third, an older man who has recently lost his wife, all know that they are supposed to get something from David as a great work of art, but they struggle towards this apprehension, Lana (Melissa Hande) and Leo (David MacInnis) because they don’t know what language to use or what frames of reference to apply, and Hector (Andrew Mecready), because he spends too much of his time irritated at and griping at the others’ apparent ignorance. McNally’s script gives each of the characters at least one opportunity to hit an emotional crescendo, which is reasonably well achieved by all three, though Hande could be more distraught, MacInnis less parodic, and Mecready, who gets what is structurally the most important monologue, less reserved. (He wipes away tears from under his glasses rather than really convincing us that he has reached a life-shaping emotional climax.)
MacInnis is at his best when playing Leo for laughs — and he got some whopping ones at Friday’s performance — and Hande best when showing Lana’s vulnerability. But the actor who really soars here is Michele Brown as the Italian tour guide, Bimbi. Where MacInnis’s performance as Leo borders on caricature, and Andrew Mecready’s Hector is (for the greater part of the performance) one note, Hande and Brown give the female characters real heart, with Brown especially striking a difficult balance between a tour guide imperiously impatient with her charges, and a woman confessing to a desire which she hadn’t had the guts to pursue. Brown is a sophisticated and subtle Bimbi, and it is only too fitting that the play does not hit its final note until she, briefly absent, steps back on stage for its conclusion. Overall, a strong production given real depth by Brown’s performance, and worth seeing for that performance alone.
