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The Unseen (Chorus Productions)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 31, Varscona TheatrePlay by Craig Wright. Directed by John Hudson. With Dave Clarke, Doug Mertz and Glenn Nelson. Stage design by Lynette Maurice and C.M. Zuby.
American playwright Craig Wright has said that one of the reasons he writes for the theatre, as well as for television shows such as Six Feet Under, is that he feels less pressure there to worry about commercial success.* That’s how it should be. The theatre may — on Broadway and in London’s West End — be as commercialized an enterprise as any other, but the theatre in principle is one beleaguered refuge for collaboration outside the laws of the all-devouring Market. On the gorgeous Sunday afternoon that I entered Edmonton’s Varscona Theatre to see Chorus Production’s last performance of Wright’s The Unseen at Edmonton’s 2011 Fringe, the carnival may have been ramping up to full tilt outside the doors of the Varscona Theatre, but the house was nevertheless half filled with Edmontonians serious about the theatre, and wanting something more from it that can be offered by productions involving women in fancy lingerie or titles with the word “cock.”
Wright’s The Unseen is a clown show of the macabre kind, a verbal and imaginative circus for the cerebral cortex. About a third of the way in, we discover, when Glenn Nelson walks on-stage as the torturer Smash, that the play we are watching is not, as we may have thought, an absurdist two-hander working within a notable theatrical lineage most commonly associated, in Anglo-American theatre, with Samuel Beckett. No, we’re watching a three-hander that gives that lineage a challenge by marrying it to horrors akin to those of King Lear. I can’t decide if it’s worse to hear about someone plucking someone’s eyes out or to watch it represented. The chilling detail here: the person having his eyes plucked out reportedly looks up at Smash as if (Christ-like) he’s “sad for everyone.”
Dave Clarke as Valdez and Doug Mertz as Wallace have different ways of responding to their systematic torture by Smash, which has been going on for years, and much of their early conversation involves them trying to establish the topography of the prison, and the possibility, if any, for their escape. I would need the script in front of me in order to give you a sense of the intricacy and gorgeousness of their ideas and their metaphors, but every time the brilliant soundscape for the production furnished aural punctuations to their conversation my guess it was corresponding to the lighting up of the audience’s synapses. If that’s the idea — that the representation of other people’s torture produces enlightenment for those who watch — it worked for me.
It worked for me in great part because of Dave Clarke’s performance as Valdez. There’s no question that of the three characters here Valdez’s has the greatest appeal. The cynical, snide Wallace may be able to imagine the possibility of escape from the prison via a hot-air balloon from the top of the structure, which he thinks is a hive, but Valdez is the hot-air balloon, the man who despite the torturing of his body keeps managing to animate it from spirited depths within. I see that reviewers of earlier productions in Louisville (Kentucky), New York, and Los Angeles, as well as the Edmonton Sun’s Colin Maclean, have defined Wallace and Valdez, allegorically, as either Reason and Faith or Reason and Emotion. That does not seem to me, however, despite Wallace’s admittedly empirical bent, to be quite right. Wallace and Valdez represent different kinds of creative intellect, one binding itself within the scope of what can be verified as fact or as true, the other, refusing any such limitations as it reaches with a heart bursting smilingly towards the furthest boundaries of the imagination, striving to make them infinitely extendable. I hope I will never be able to erase from my mind’s eye Dave Clarke’s various ways of communicating, non-verbally, the pained glee of that commitment.
I so wish that Doug Mertz’s Wallace had been able to match Clarke’s Valdez in the ability to communicate, without a word, the psychology from which his utterances come. There’s a reason that Wallace can claim that Smash likes him. Wallace is as much of a sadist as Smash. He’s simply the sadist who, after he is tortured by another, returns to the cell in which he is incarcerated in order to torture someone else. He is in a position to do just as much if not more damage to Valdez than Smash can do, and sometimes simply so he can declare himself the winner in their various games.
The damage Wallace would do is of an everyday kind. It’s the damage done by those who find various small ways to put down others, but also the damage done more broadly by the naysayers who refuse to believe in any heaven, utopia, or fiction. This was most palpable for me from the scorn he heaps upon Valdez when he shares a tale about his mother, a seamstress, who could, even from the cramped seat of a sewing-machine, imagine the holes in buttons as portals to new worlds. (There’s an extended metaphor from the life of a humble worker to make Marx sit up in his grave and smile!) But when Wallace sneers at this, we shouldn’t want to sneer along with him. We should want to side with Valdez.
The trick for the audience is, of course, also to empathize with Wallace. In this production, it would have been a great help if Mertz could have put the lines he has to utter into relationship with the torture that Wallace has supposedly suffered. This production also needed him to do something absolutely vital at the play’s climax —something non-verbal that conveyed what it means for him finally to use his own body as the instrument through which he tests reality. What a triumph it is for him to risk his life with that one choice! And what glorious mind-altering relief there should be in discovering that his supposition about reality is wrong! But we don’t get enough sense from Mertz in the hour or so that builds towards this moment to revel in the man he becomes in it, the man capable of joining Valdez in the real means of escape. But at least Valdez’s Clarke is there to lead Mertz’s Wallace and the audience towards the joy of the ending.
One last note. I grant that someone may read — or hear of — this review and respond with, What the hell is she talking about? I saw that play and I thought it was pure torture! And it’s true that while this production of Wright’s play worked for me, and I will look forward to seeing, in the future, what other actors may do with the roles, it may not work for you in this incarnation or any other. That’s the risk that serious theatre takes: that it will not work for, or please everyone; that it may not sell many tickets. Thank God for playwrights willing to take the risks of writing such material, and small theatre companies willing to take the risk of producing such work. By the time Shakespeare wrote King Lear, both he and the King’s Men could afford such a risk, and the jury is still out on how well that paid off! At least this play leaves us with a “her” to cling to. And to understand what I mean by that you’ll have to seek out a production of your own to see. Or buy the script.
* Here’s the link for a 2009 article in the LA Times on Wright and his work: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-craig-wright14-2009jun14,0,2840057.story
Mrs. Lindeman Proposes (Teatro La Quindicina)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 31, Varscona TheatrePlay by Stewart Lemoine. Directed by Stewart Lemoine. With Shannon Blanchet, Belinda Cornish, Jeff Haslam, and Mathew Hulshof. Costumes by Leona Brausen.
Edmonton playwright Stewart Lemoine’s new play may be a comedy but it has a nasty premise. A 1950′s “authoress” (Belinda Cornish) who has carved out a successful career as a writer of murder mysteries, but who has yet, as it turns out, to make a name for herself, decides to get the young man (Mathew Hulshof) whom she has hired to assist her with her next novel, a romance, to perform for her a task that could not be spelled out in any job ad. She wants him to cross paths with a supposedly good friend of hers, Margot Mitchinson (Shannon Blanchet), and pretend he’s the kind of man for whom Margot has a penchant — the wind-blown, tuberculosed, poetic type. Adam is a willing conspirator because he thinks he will gain, through their little plot, experience more meaningful for his own prospective career as a writer than he would if he simply acted as Nuala’s secretary. They will, in short, jointly toy with a woman’s emotions for Art’s sake. Or at least the sake of writing and selling pulp novels.
Nuala’s motivation? Well, you cannot expect a woman who dresses as beautifully as Nuala does, in tuxedo-style vests, pencil skirts, and smocks with bouffante sleeves, to issue melodramatic declarations about her purposes. She may in fact be so well put together that she does not acknowledge her motivations to herself. She shudders at overly strong cups of coffee, not at her own behaviour. And she certainly does not let us know that she is in the mood for manipulating another woman because, you know, the other woman — a good friend! — married her ex-husband behind her back.
Poster for "Mrs. Lindeman Proposes." Poster design by Dimensions Graphic Studio.
Nuala’s motivation may in fact appear selfless: she’s simply an established writer who has come up with a clever way of giving a no-name writer an opportunity to collaborate with her. They will write a story together by seeing how a living-and-breathing woman responds to their scenario. It’s a game, nothing more.
There is quite a bit of light humour in Lemoine’s script, though too much of it stems from the mocking of Margot as a dumb blonde who doesn’t know better than to go trotting around A National Park in flared party skirts and high-heeled red pumps. As a bemused retired policeman who first stumbles upon her on a park trail, and later has to listen to her wonder if she is in A Forest, Jeff Haslam gets to utter most of the lines for which the audiences gives up its laughs.
As Little Red Riding Pumps totters around the Forest unaware that her good friend is the Wolf, Haslam’s Ed Napier acts as the counterpoint to the other three characters. He’s plain-spoken and unaffected, and careful with his words and actions. The only water that he has to go fetch fills a thermos for Nuala, but he’s the kind of guy you want organizing the flow of water when trees are on fire. And the kind of guy whose diminutive is Ed rather than Ted because there is no good reason to waste a letter that can otherwise stay in the alphabet supply box. On the face of it, Ed is eminently likeable. You’ve got to admire a male character who does not utter a word of complaint when he is left standing in a hotel lobby when not one but two women refuse to have a drink with him.
Ed’s also the kind of guy you might regularly stumble across in Jasper National Park some half a century later, even though you are unlikely to find his contemporary counterparts on a picnic blanket reading a novel by Louis Lamour. I can’t help worrying that Ed’s real-life comrades in the Sensible are not big fans of Art or Literature or the government funding of any enterprise or institution that supports them, but my guess is I am not suppose to worry my head about such things when watching this play. I am supposed to give into its fantasy — the fantasy of a smart woman falling for a tall, dark stranger about whom she knows very little, a stranger who calls things as they are and doesn’t have much truck with the poetical. The performances are fine all round, and there is something very touching about Haslam’s laconic Ed that almost makes the fantasy palatable, but a certain loaf of bread sticks in my craw, and the ending that seems to take the other Mrs. Lindeman West into the possibilities of the 60′s isn’t enough to counter-balance the retrograde turn that comes last. And with the final scene presented so far upstage with Haslam’s back is to us, it is not clear whether even Ed is giving into the proposed ending. Literal-minded, he may be answering only the question before him.
The Fringe is over, but you can catch “Mrs. Lindeman Proposes” in performances across the week at the Varscona Theatre. You’ll find all of the actors in beautiful garments made by Leona Brausen. And you may find the play’s fantasy appealing. To each as he or she likes it.
Forsooth, My Lovely (Acme Theatre Cavalcade)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 30, Holy Trinity Anglican ChurchPlay by David Belke. Directed by Troy O’Donnell. With Julien Arnold, Mat Busy, Jesse Gervais, Nancy McAlear, Karyn Mott, and Garett Ross. Musical direction by Bill Damur. Saxophone and other wind instruments by Dan Davis, lute and other string instruments by Bill Damur. Fight choreography by Garett Ross. With characters “shanghaied from the rich imagination of William Shakespeare” and a plot inspired by the novels of Raymond Chandler.
Oh, my God: what a scream! And I say that as someone who has a professional investment in Shakespeare. A private detective finds himself in Renaissance Padua, where he has been hired by Baptista Minola, father to the Kate of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, to find out who has been taking compromising photographs of his supposedly virtuous daughter Bianca. As he attempts to solve the case, as well as the question of who is smuggling what in and out of the Minola establishment, the “dick” Birnam Wood encounters characters from various Shakespeare plays including As You Like It, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and The Comedy of Errors.
But Belke hasn’t simply stolen characters from Shakespeare to produce Fringe entertainment that will draw in the crowds. (Let’s face it: Shakespeare sells.) No, this play is informed by real knowledge of Shakespeare, as well as a playfulness with language that has a debt to Shakespeare but also a verve all its own. Belke is thus able to take a character such as Much Ado About Nothing’s Dogberry, the incompetent constable who continually mangles the English language to produce laugh after laugh with his malapropisms, to offer verbal mistakes that Shakespeare would laugh at. But he also puts some wickedly funny and tart language all his own into the mouth of his Katherina, played by Nancy McAlear, who declares (for example) that her sister Bianca cannot be married until she first is “matrimonially mortified.”
Karyn Mott as Bianca, Jesse Gervais as Birnam Wood, and Nancy McAlear as Katherina in David Belke's Forsooth, My Lovely. Photograph by J. Procktor.
In other words, this is great entertainment not simply because of the smart generic mash-up — a Chandleresque detective finds himself in a Shakespearean comedy — but because the writing is very witty. Sure, you’re gonna laugh harder if you know your Shakespeare, but the writing is so clever you don’t need to know a thing. When Mat Busby’s Romeo declares that he is Fortune’s tool, you’re gonna laugh because of the current slang meaning of tool whether or not you know Romeo and Juliet well enough to know that Shakespeare’s Romeo declares he is Fortune’s fool.
The cast is uniformly strong but McAlear deserves special praise for handling the many acerbic lines Belke assigns his Katherine with a dexterous tongue. McAlear would do spectacularly well as Shakespeare’s Kate! In tandem with Karyn Mott, she produces a scream of a scene as two of the weird sisters from Macbeth who have to furnish Birnam Wood with a prophecy without their third, who has been held up at Customs. And while all of the cast does well shifting (as the actors in Shakespeare’s company had to) between multiple roles, Mott shows special versatility shifting from Bianca to a weird sister to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Titania to the bitter fool of King Lear.
As Oberon, Julien Arnold, who is a bloody funny Dogberry, produces, along with Mott, a scream of a comic scene as the second most famous squabbling couple in Shakespeare after Petruchio and Kate. Some strange asterisking in the program, which indicates that Mott was not, like everyone else, “directed by Troy O’Donnell,” suggests that there may have been some behind-the-scenes drama, and this drama may be reflected in one of the last and funniest scenes, in which Mott, as Lear’s bitter fool, is pitted against the trio of festive fools played by Busby, Ross, and Arnold, but the production as a whole is so well paced and crafted, and the apparently self-directed Mott so good in her roles, that the whole thing plays not only as if the teamwork was effortless and conflict-free, but as a testament to the joys, for actors and audiences alike, of Fringe theatre. And it’s hard to imagine the production without the comic colouring that Bill Damur and Dan Davis contribute with their saxophone, lute, and other instruments.
Without giving too much away, I’ve got to give it up to Belke for coming up with a plot that builds towards an ending that involves an interpretation of Taming of the Shrew that depends upon a celebration of the feisty “dame” of Chandler’s novels. If you’re lucky enough to have a ticket for one of the two remaining sold-out performances, you can go for see yourself what the hell I’m talking about. And if you don’t yet have a ticket it’s worth trying to score one of the few unused comps that may get freed up an hour before showtime. Or you can catch it in next week’s Holdover performances. See http://fringetheatreadventures.ca/holdovers.php for details.
Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline (Surreal Soreal Theatre)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 5, King Edward SchoolPlay by George F. Walker. Directed and designed by Vincent Forcier. Sound design by Jon Lachlan Stewart. With Jamie Cavanagh, Ben Dextraze, Chad Drever, Evan Hall, Kyla Shinkewski, and Gianna Vacirca.
Surreal Soreal Theatre has great satiric fun with George F. Walker’s 1977 play, loosely based on the gothic novella of the same title by the teenage Percy Bysshe Shelley (first published in 1810).
On the face of it, the story is a little silly — exactly the kind of thing you might expect from a teenager writer: the so-called criminal master-mind Zastrozzi wants revenge upon the apparently saintly Verezzi, who thinks he’s a messenger of God, for having raped and killed his mother, and the whole thing builds towards a sword fight. But this ensemble of actors gets the tone exactly right, with Cavanagh leading the way with a perfectly calibrated Zastrozzi, who is at one and the same time a cartoonish villain and a man suffering psychologically from his choices. That’s a hard balance to strike, and a lot of actors would be tempted to overplay the role, but Cavanagh, as a master of actorly discipline, nails it. Chad Drever has a lot of fun with his role as the sexually confused and egomaniacal Verezzi, waiting for his followers to show up (even caterpillars will do) and torn in the meantime between love for the virginal Julia and the aggressively sexual Matilda. He is very funny declaring that he finds Matilda’s desire to have him kill her unhealthy.
- Jamie Cavanagh as George F. Walker’s Zastrozzi
Kyla Shinkewski is really good too at wresting some serious freight from her role as the tortured and torturing Matilda, who, in Walker’s script, is unsure whether she would like to dominate Zastrozzi or submit in full grovelling obeisance to his authority over her. And Gianna Vacirca gets to shine not only in an early exchange with Zastrozzi, who seduces her without laying a finger upon her, but also a climactic scene with Shinkewski in which she plays the startled virgin caught in bewildering circumstances to the hilt. Great, frothy fun, with a nicely dark psychological undercurrent for those who like their fun to have a serious element. Congratulations to Surreal Soreal Theatre on doing so well with such a savvy choice of production for the Fringe. Now if Fringe organizers could find a way to make sure that audience-goers do not waltz into Fringe venues with massive bags of popcorn that they chomp all through the performance . . . .
Guernica (Hidden Harlequin Theatre)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 26, Phabrik Art and Design CentrePlay by Erika Luckert. Directed by Jon Lachlan Stewart. Designed by Kevin Boyer. With Alyson Dicey, Lauren Kneteman, Joëlle Préfontaine, Zvonimir Rac, Mat Simpson and Nikolai Witschl.
The Edmonton Journal has oversold this show as a 4.5 on its 5-star system. It has done so for understandable reasons: this short play about events in the town of Guernica, Spain the day it was hit by bombs by the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazionne Legionaria in a military operation, Operation Rügen, designed to help put Franco and the Nationalists into power, is written by a local playwright, Erika Luckert. It is important for local media to rally around new, locally produced dramatic work. It is also important, though, to hold new, local work to the standards to which reviewers would hold well-established dramatic work, and distinguish between the writing and the quality of the production.
The writing in this play mimics the style of Picasso’s painting: it is stark, non-naturalistic, and crude. Its depiction of character is as blunt and simple as Picasso’s.
Detail from Picasso's Guernica (1937)
That is not necessarily a criticism. There are all kinds of theatre. But I wish Luckert’s play assembled a more interesting group of characters for her depiction of the people of Guernica going about their day — market day in town — just before the bombs hit. For women, we get a distinctly clichéed assortment: a little girl, a mother, and a prostitute (sigh). Unfortunately, there isn’t anything particularly interesting about either the first or the last. Luckert is more adventurous in the writing of the male characters, who include a husband off to buy cauliflower and chili peppers for his pregnant wife and a fruit- and vegetable-seller who speaks about the colours of his wares as if every time he sells one of them he is selling a piece of a still life. (That’s inspired.) But it is strange that these characters have so little to say or so little to suggest about the social tensions and political developments behind the bombing of Guernica.
The social tensions enter only obliquely, from an upper-class mother concerned with things such as how her daughter holds herself in public. She doesn’t want anyone imagining that they are poor. And in the play’s most interesting speech, she sneers at the husband hunting for cauliflower that there is no point in him giving his child a name since this name cannot possibly bestow on the child the heritage that would come from being born into a landholding family. That speech is really smart, and I wish there’d been more writing of this kind — more writing that conveyed the social and political tensions that resulted in the bombing of Guernica. Picasso’s painting is vaunted as the most famous anti-war painting ever, and this play, in its generality, may lead people to draw connections between their Fringe entertainment and scenes of carnage playing out right now on the planet in which civilians like the civilians of Guernica are dying, but the specifics of what made that day in Guernica happen ought to matter too.
As it is, the romantic focus on Picasso as the painter who has to deal with the ghosts of that day, and give them another kind of life in his painting, is unfortunate not just because it is hackneyed but because it detracts from the politics. A frame that established that Picasso was struggling for inspiration for the mural he’d been requested to paint for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Expo in Paris when the news about Guernica hit would have added a whole other dimension to the play. And it’s really odd that the director, Jon Lachlan Stewart, does not use the bits of radio news that we hear at the beginning to deliver, quickly, some important historical context. Even the program has nothing to say about the history or the political turmoil behind that day at Guernica. It’s hard to swallow the turning of a day of carnage into art when the art does not adequately convey why the people it is symbolically representing died.
Detail from Picasso's Guernica (1937)
The production also asks, with more than one stylized pause in which the actors strike postures of horror, that we imagine that the actors are the figures in the painting. These moments desperately needed to be lit in ways that would visually distinguish them from the rest of the action and turn them into proper tableaux. And in a short ensemble piece like this, in which each of the actors gets very little individual time to establish their characters, the acting needs to be much sharper and more polished than it generally is here. Mat Simpson as the husband and Nikolai Witschl as a vegetable seller do reasonably well, but only one of the actors, Joëlle Préfontaine, who plays the upper-class mother, delivers a performance that is truly memorable for the right reasons.
P.S. Why no horse?! 
A Different Woman: A True Story of a Texas Childhood (Texpatriate Productions)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 9, Telus Building
Play by Veronica Russell, based on My First Thirty Years by Edna Gertrude Beasley (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925). Performed by Veronica Russell.
This was not at all what I expected! And apparently it was not what the audience strewn with grey heads expected either: I’ve never heard a more restless audience in my life. The cheap plastic chairs with metal frames make the Telus Building a cruel venue for a solo performer, but the star of this one-woman show, Veronica Russell, soldiered on, only once breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge that she was dealing with a tough crowd when she noted that we had not laughed, as audiences in the South had, at a quip about socialism. So if you go to this show, go knowing what you’re in for: a beautifully acted dramatization of a tough story about a woman growing up in a “poor and ignorant” family in Texas in the 1920s.
And go knowing that you’re in for adult material in the form of accounts of the continually looming threat of incest and actual bestiality. True, these do not generally rank high in conversational topics, but that’s partly what the theatre is for: to give us a darkened space apart from the everyday in which we consider, in groups, stuff we avoid dealing with in quote-unquote real life. And thankfully Russell’s handling of the material kept this dark material from playing out as if we were in a group therapy session.
Veronica Russell as (Edna) Gertrude Beasley. Photo by Ron Prados.
What Russell is offering in this one-woman show is her dramatization of the early life of Gertrude Beasley, an early twentieth-century Texan woman who grew up, along with a dozen siblings, under the rule of a tough mother, from whom she managed to break away when she managed to get (with the assistance of a kind of fairy godmother) what none of her siblings were able to, an education.
I was expecting the play to be more wide-ranging because Beasley’s story involves, by the account that Russell offers in the program and accounts that you can find on the web, more than one fascinating aspect. Amongst other things, Beasley spent time in Russia in the years immediately after the 1917 revolution. And the autobiography or memoirs that she wrote when in England in the year 1920s, My First Thirty Years, was banned under obscenity legislation in the United Kingdom in 1925.
In other words, there’s a much bigger story to be told about Beasley — a story about an American woman writer caught up in international politics in a particularly volatile period in history and subject to government oppression because her writing was perceived as dangerous. Given that the writer was not only a woman but one brave enough to put in print things others would not dare — perhaps would not even dare to do so now, several decades later — there’s another, longer play in Beasley’s story, one in which the early reference to Beasley as an “intellectual” in Russell’s play would make more sense. (Literary heavyweights on both sides of the Atlantic in the ’20s, H.L. Mencken and Bertrand Russell respectively, stood up for Beasley’s banned book.) Russell chooses to keep things focused, however, around Beasley’s account of her childhood in Texas. Only very late and very briefly do we get a hint of the “politics” that mattered to Beasley.
But don’t get me wrong: while I can see the potential here for a longer play — even a movie — Russell is serving up plenty as it is. She gives us a dramatization of the lives of *two* women, Beasley and her mother, and shows us how their personalities intertwine. There is as a result a universal quality to this short play, which brings home with great force just how dependent we all are on the people to whom we are born, and just how fundamentally they can shape who we become. Russell is formidably good at suggesting how one woman shades into and shapes the other from the inside out even as she also suggests the daughter’s capacity to break away from the baleful influence of her terrifyingly bitter and harsh mother. The story is subtle, and well told. But now that I know a little bit more about Beasley — after the show I poked around a bit on the web — I wish that the play was framed a little differently.
Russell could certainly do more with what Beasley becomes after she manages to get away from Abilene, Texas. It is true that to do that in grand style she would have to write material that would take the play beyond the time-limits that the Fringe can accommodate, but even so she could rework the frame slightly so that audiences have a better sense of from where and precisely when we are to imagine the tale is being told. After Beasley published the book in 1625 and before she is deported from England in 1628? Or from the sanitarium on Long Island where it seems she was unofficially locked up for the twenty-seven years of her life after she sailed back to the US? There are ways to nail this down through which Russell could give audiences a better sense of Beasley’s larger story. But even on its own terms this is great stuff, for Russell powerful conveys the lives of women of the past. Go when you’re in the mood for a short play of serious substance. You can always go for something that will generate lighter laughs after.
Come & Sleep: An Operatic Fantasy for Voice, Cello, & Silence (Alchemical Opera Project)
Edmonton Fringe 2011, Venue 3, Walterdale Playhouse
Created and performed by Todd Trebour, in collaboration with Rachel Capon.
Ok, confession first: I know nothing worth knowing about opera. Sure, I’ve been to operas. And like all good listeners of CBC radio I’ve heard more than one broadcast of “Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.” I’ve even been to an opera at the Met. But I don’t know a technical thing about it. I do, however, know when I am hearing a beautiful voice. So, boy, was I disappointed when Todd Trebour, who created and sings this short piece about a fox-turned-man, walked out of one of the Walterdale theatre doors at about the 40-minute mark of the performance. I was just becoming fully enchanted by this piece, which involves, as the program notes, music excerpted from and inspired by Schubert’s 1827 Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) and snippets of the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Robert Hass, when it was over! I wanted Trebour to come back through that door — or go round to the other! — and sing another song for us. I was truly disappointed when everyone else started to clap. It really was over? C’est dommage!
Todd Trebour as the Fox-Man of "Come & Sleep: An Operatic Fantasy"
Apart from the delightful reverie this piece induces, I quite simply wanted more of Trebour’s gorgeous voice. I may not have the language to describe its timbre and range, but, boy, did I want to hear more of it! So dear Todd, if you’re taking suggestions on how to draw out the enchantment, how about making more drama out of the fox’s first encounter with the typewriter? It is a little strange, after all, that the fox-man knows so readily how to work its keys! I’m sure there must be other ways to give us a little more of your magic, and Rachel Capon’s on her cello. One more song, please! P.S. How do you sing like you do and run and do cartwheels at the same time? Extraordinary!
Fringe-goers, I hope the message is clear. Take the time to duck into the cool cavern of the Walterdale Theatre sometime across the week to catch this sweet piece, this thing as delicate and ephemeral as life. One thing’s for sure: there isn’t anything else at the Fringe like it.
Jem Rolls is Pissed Off (Ashek Theatre)
A one-man show in which Jem Rolls turns heavy matters such as the art-threatening happiness of romance, why we need poets, and the futility of trying to get smart into good laughs. I’ll be looking forward to hearing Rolls get even more pissed off about other matters in the future, but in the meantime you should go see this show. Your “Brainberry” — “brain for short” — will be glad you did. You’ll be treated to literary criticism turned into stand-up comedy with Rolls’s account of his schoolboy objections to William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” and with his critique of our relationship to technological toys freshly primed to resist the “Ten Demandments.” Me, I’ll be catching his play “The Same Joke Twice” later in the week at the Yardbird Suite. Given that Rolls’s more overtly theatrical “One Man Riot” was so brilliant at the Fringe last year, I am looking forward to seeing what Rolls has crafted for a couple of actors to do with his immensely playful language and wicked view of the world.
True Life (Break the Wall Productions)
A charming show, that you’d be pretty hard pressed not to enjoy, but one that it’s difficult to talk about without giving too much away. Let me just say that two young adults depressed with the thought of living their lives out as Blockbuster clerks or similar are prepared to do themselves in, and find a support group whose leader, while standing up for a philosophy of “True Life, True Joy, True Bliss,” is prepared to show them how to do it. The cast of three — Joleen Ballendine and Jessie McPhee as the depressed duo, and Lianna Makuch as the “True Life” colony leader — hit just the right note of serious and light-hearted throughout, with Makuch bringing perfectly calibrated zest and pathos to her role. Go spend a very pleasant hour watching them in action.
My only complaint: given that the company is, as its title implies, committed to a theatre that breaks the imaginary fourth wall between actors and audience, I can’t help wondering how they might have come up with a climax that would have depended upon the audience (even if they needed to plant an actor or two in the audience to make the necessary happen). That would have been real fun, and really accomplished their larger goal, which is to affirm the importance of the playfulness of the theatre to life. If they’d done that I’d be out on the streets selling tickets for them! But Makuch is so good at wresting something true out of life from her character, that everyone really should figure out how to squeeze this piece of fun into their Fringe-going schedule.
From my computer, a virtual “sonic embrace”!
(Real) Gone (Girl), Cowardly Kiss Theatre
The Edmonton Journal gave this show such a low score that I had to rush out to see it. Yes, I am a little perverse. But I mainly had to rush out to see it to see if the Journal’s assessment was fair. A high score from the Journal can make a Fringe show, and a low score break it, and as this woman-driven show was on my provisional short-list partly for feminist reasons I wanted to know ASAP if it deserved to get a show-killing score of 1.5. And it sure doesn’t. It does, however, require a good deal of patience, and it is fair of Iain Ilich, the Journal reviewer, to question the show’s premise.
The premise is this: that a different actress will, for each performance, work her way through a dramatic piece for which she has learned the choreography, delivering, as she goes, a narration that she is hearing for the first time. In other words, she knows part of the script — the script for her body — without knowing in advance the words that she will utter. Given that too much contemporary theatre has divorced itself from theatre as an art of the body, the premise has something very hip about it. For the actors, the premise is however unbelievably demanding, and requires an immense leap of faith: each of the actors has to trust that the storytelling in which she is engaged with her body will match up with what she is required to say on the spot — at least to the extent that it will all cohere for the audience. The two aspects have got to add up to an effective act of communication.
The danger is two-fold: the audience may feel that its role is simply that of observer to a technical exercise, and that technical exercise could fail in the execution. I felt that I was watching a technical exercise that had really great promise, one that the actor for the performance I saw, Elisa Benzer, executed well. For her to have executed it spectacularly something more would have had to occur in the preparatory phase: there would have had to be a distinct sense that the actor was delivering words that mattered as much as the movements she was executing — words that were in fact poetry. The lines that come out of the actor’s mouth are delivered in three-, four-, five-, six- and seven-beat units that, more artfully combined, would always have added up to blank verse, but even broken up as they are lend themselves to Beat-style delivery. If the actors delivered the lines as if they were poetry, then the language could match the choreography by Raena Waddell, and combined with it add up to something truly exciting. But for that to work they needed to prepare to treat the lines being fed into their ears as music.
As it is, we are supposed to watch — as I see it — an actor telling the story of several women caught up in Beat lives because the men they loved from the late ’40s onwards were Beat writers (Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady). The women are mostly destroyed because of these relationships — one gets a bullet in her head, and another leaps out a seventh-storey window — but they are all figuratively maimed because of the subordinate roles they choose to play in relation to these drug-fuelled self-serving men. The choreography captures this quite well, especially in the climactic sections in which the actor has to draw together various gestures, introduced and performed separately at first, to render the distortions of these women’s lives in a physical alphabet. And sometimes Benzer was able to deliver the lines being fed her through earphones in a way that captured the rupture and frenzies of these women’s lives. But more often than not the lines that she was required to recite purveyed narratives that were hard to keep separate in a delivery that became monotonous — a delivery that lacked Beat flair for and love of language. It is certainly a great shame that the writing, though it involved some amusing lines, was not more playful. The piece needs to offer more of a sense of why these women let the men draw them into their lives — what it was they offered in terms of sensual excitement, sometimes rendered as poetry, and sometimes as sex, and sometimes in the form of artificially-fuelled forms of intoxciation.
Additional multimedia aspects would have done wonders for this production. Projected images of the women whose stories were being told — Joan Volmer, Edie Parker, Joan Haverty, Carolyn Cassady,Elise Cowen, and Joyce Johnson — might have helped, along with audio snippets of the writing of some of the men with whom they became entangled. But what I can’t help wondering about is the politics of the premise. The story that emerges is of a kind of generic Beat Wife, and that story is one of a woman included in but also marginalized in relation to a heady world of words. To ask six actresses to spout words that they are hearing for the first time — words dictated to them through earbuds — is to put them in a position like that of the women that they are representing. An actor’s usual relationship with the language of a playwright is a considered one. And so my question as I was watching was what was the actress gaining by being put into this radically different relationship with the language she was required to speak? And what were we gaining as the audience by watching her put through an exercise in which the language was secondary material fed to her on the spot? How would the performance have been different if the actress had learned the lines in advance? Why was she being kept from learning them? For if she’d being able to learn them, wouldn’t her performance have been able to marry the words to her movements in a far superior way than she could do having to deliver them the instant after she first heard them? And are we supposed to walk away from every performance wondering if we’d might have had a superior experience if we’d come for a performance with another actor in the role?
Given that the performance was so obviously an artificial exercise, at least in the sense that there was no obvious rationale for the actor to have been hearing the words of the script for the first time through her earbuds, it might have helped if the director Andrea Beça had said a few words at the outset about the motivations behind it, and what she hoped it would achieve. I’m trying not to believe that Beça wanted to deprive her actors of the opportunity to think in regard to the words they were uttering. The choreography was interesting, and Benzer was valorous (amongst other things, when a teenage girl in the audience cried out that her mother was having a seizure she soldiered on), but I’m still not sure what the experience contributed to my understanding of the women of the Beat generation — well, other than to inform me that they had a predilection for Benzedrine, and were a little too willing to throw away their lives over men.
