Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

Another week of Edmonton fun, mostly theatrical!

There’s lots going on in Edmonton this week too. Yesterday, for example, the choices included the Folkfest ticket lottery at Telus Field (popular and well-organized and a sell-out again), the Edmonton Pride Festival parade (Pride events continue throughout the month), Sprouts New Play Festival for Kids (continuing this afternoon) and Nextfest, the emerging artist’s festival continuing until June 14th with music, theatre, dance, comedy, improv, film, visual arts, and more.

Most years I’m out of town for all of July and I spend June getting ready, so I’ve been missing out on lots of the Edmonton June events. But this year I’m going to be around in July, which also means I get more of the fun of the long days of June.

Thou Art Here, the local troupe doing site-sympathetic versions of Shakespeare’s work, had a remount of last year’s successful Much Ado About Nothing at Rutherford House, the historic site preserving the residence of the first premier of Alberta . The audience followed the actors around outdoors and indoors, upstairs and down, as the banter, schemes, betrayals and amends of the story took place. Director Andrew Ritchie said that this play was a great choice for their company because the whole play takes place at Leonato’s house (Kris Joseph, recently seen in Vigilante). They did some clever things including all the audience members in the story – guests at a masquerade, deputized citizens assisting the officers Dogberry (Amy Shostak) and Verges (David Barnet), wedding guests – and they also had individual audience members standing in for some of the minor roles which they hadn’t cast. This was fun and not embarrassing. It was an easy play for me to enjoy, because unlike some of Shakespeare’s comedies this one had the sharp-tongued woman (Beatrice, played by Gianna Vacirca) happily ending up with a man who appreciates her and gives as good as he gets (Benedick, played by Ben Stevens), and because nobody was killed to make a plot point (I’m looking at you, Winter’s Tale …). Conflict was provided through the machinations of Don Joan (Alyson Dicey) and her henchman Borachio (Mark Vetsch), and eventually there was a happy ending for the other couple Hero (Marlee Yule) and Claudio (Hunter Cardinal). I thought Neil Kuefler was particularly good as Don Pedro, Don Joan’s good-guy brother, although I was a little confused about why the character was using sitcom tricks to manage his friends.

Teatro La Quindicina has moved into the Arts Barns renovated Backstage space until the Varscona renovations are complete. Their production of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, with Mat Busby and Julien Arnold, directed by Stewart Lemoine, is the start of their 2015 season. It runs until June 13th. Blarney Productions’ season is wrapping up with A Steady Rain, by Keith Huff, directed by Wayne Paquette and performed by Jesse Gervais and John Ullyatt. It closes today (Sunday June 7th) with a 1:30 show. Tickets for both are available at Tix on the Square.

This week I also attended Let There Be Height, the Firefly Theatre performance of circus/aerials students and teachers. It was enchanting and impressive, with different turns set to music and strung on a storyline of dreams and a dreamer.

I also attended the Mayfield Dinner Theatre’s production of Cabaret, which I saw on Broadway last year. This production included some local familiar faces, Cheryl Jameson (Helga), Benjamin Wardle (Bobby), Lucas Meeuse (Hans), Chelsea Preston (Angel), Pamela Gordon (Sally Bowles) and Jeff Haslam as Ernst Ludwig, the ingratiating small-time smuggler whose unveiling as a Nazi serves as unavoidable demonstration of the perilous chasm looming before all the characters in 1930s Berlin. The viewpoint character Clifford Bradshaw is played with convincing awkwardness and wistfulness by Aiden Desalaiz, and the Emcee is Christian Goutsis. I thought the shocking ending was particularly well done, in a polished performance.

A busy theatre weekend at the end of May.

Leave a reply

It’s a week of wrapping up seasons, celebrating, and honouring excellence. It’s also rehearsals or tech week for everyone who’s in Nextfest, and rehearsal for the Fringe.

And in the middle of all that, Fringe Theatre Adventures hosted another excellent workshop in their Professional Development Series yesterday. Charles Netto and Mark Hopkins of Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre in Calgary conducted an all-day series of experiences and conversations about found space and site-sympathetic theatre. This is the second of the Professional Development series I’d participated in. If the series continues next year, I recommend them strongly.

The nominees for the 2014-2015 Elizabeth Sterling Haynes awards for professional theatre in Edmonton were announced this afternoon in a smooth and speedy ceremony at the Next Act. Mat Hulshof introduced the special award winners and Louise Lambert and Ben Stevens read the nominees. I was able to reminisce about many wonderful shows I’d seen, and marvel about how many more good performances I must have missed, especially at the Fringe.

The Foote Theatre School’s Young Companies closed their instructional year with performances this weekend too. I missed seeing the Young Musical Company in Chris Wynters and Jocelyn Ahlf’s new musical Measures, but I enjoyed the Young Acting Company’s performance of Robert Chafe’s Afterimage, an ensemble piece that starts out as narrative spoken to the audience by various company members, who seem to be inhabitants of a small east coast community. This impression of a narrative chorus is continued by having all members of the company sit on chairs at the sides of the stage when not engaged in scenes. Gradually, I discovered who was who in the story they were telling. Kieran Dunch was Winston, a man badly burned while trying to repair a downed electrical line, Monica Lillo was the nurse Maggie, and Jasmine Zyp was Lise, who worked in the hospital laundry but seemed to be drawn to the injured man by foresight or some other unusual power. I appreciated the way the story gradually fitted together, with Leonard (Daniel Greenways) and Connie (Kathryn Robinson) crossing paths with Lise at important points in their lives. Aidan Burke, Clayton Plamondon, and Jade Robinson played child characters credibly without parody. Katelyn Trieu was credited as The Storyteller, continuing the role of chorus throughout the play. I was particularly struck by the plight of Clayton Plamondon’s character, the misfit among misfits, (like Wednesday Addams, but serious). Brian Dooley directed.

Tonight was the first of three nights of staged readings for the Young Playwrights’ Company. I watched Winky & Rex by Joshua Wiśniewski and Prodigy by Hayley Moorhouse. Reading was done by local performers, Candace Berlinguette, Jason Chinn, Joel Crichton, Eva Foote, Merran Carr-Wiggin, Bobbi Goddard, and Lee Boyes. In both scripts the dialogue flowed smoothly and provided enough scope for the readers to develop memorable characters. I particularly appreciated the way the writing made each character sound different. There were also some repeated catchphrases which amused the audience, “as previously stated” in Winky & Rex, and “Obviously!” in Prodigy.

Winky & Rex was a snapshot of life for three uniquely awkward young adults, two roommates and their longtime friend. It was set shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That mattered because one character had grown up in East Germany and his father could finally travel to visit him. I had some confusion early on about the relationship between the roommates and about what country they were living in (I thought they were in the former West Germany but later it seemed to be the USA).

The main characters in Prodigy were three Grade Eight students, angry and disappointed about the cancellation of their band program, and taking out their frustrations on their teacher (Lee Boyes). The young people had age-appropriate lapses in judgement on big issues (the likely consequences of assassinating school officials for example) but were careful to correct each other on word usage that might hurt people’s feelings, which was charming and credible.

There are more staged readings of new work Tuesday and Wednesday of this week at 7:30 in the Club at the Citadel, pay-what-you-can admission.

The Photo

Leave a reply

The Photo is about an hour long. I’m glad that it wasn’t longer because I was so worried about the characters that I could hardly breathe.

Elena Porter and Michael Peng stagger separately onto the stage, not quite aware of each other. At first they both seem shocked by something that’s just happened, but their responses are different enough that the nature of the awful thing wasn’t immediately clear to me. But the basic sad event is clarified quickly, so that one character seems to be grieving in a conventionally comprehensible way and the other is alarmingly detached from reality. I did keep wondering in the back of my mind whether I was wrong, or whether more horrible details would come out later, but I was relieved to have my guess confirmed, and could then watch the couple cope and connect.

I don’t think I’ve seen Michael Peng and Elena Porter on stage together before, but I’ve seen both of them in challenging roles in dark or painful stories – Peng in An Accident and in The Kite Runner, Porter in The Three Sisters and in The Clean House. And they were both good in The Photo. Peng’s thin-lipped quiet background anguish and Porter’s sparkling surface cheer over pain suited the roles well. The script provided enough resolution that I could breathe again, and I felt as if the two characters were beginning to understand each other’s needs and would be able to take care of themselves and each other.

I do not have personal experience of the kind of loss experienced by the characters. I don’t think I’d recommend this play to someone who has, without offering to warn him or her, but on the other hand without knowing what to expect I found the initial scene disturbingly effective, and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone else.

The Photo is playing at C103 until May 23rd. It’s a Theatre of the New Heart production, written by Dana Rayment and directed by Michelle Kennedy. Advance tickets are, of course, at Tix on the Square.

From Cradle to Stage 2015

Leave a reply

From Cradle to Stage is a Walterdale Theatre spring tradition. Playwrights submit new scripts. in the fall. One or two are chosen, and the playwrights work with a dramaturg over the winter before auditions and a production in May. This year’s dramaturg was Mieko Ouchi.

This year you can watch two plays in the From Cradle To Stage evening: a staged reading of Magpies by Mary-Ellen Perley (directed by Maia Pearson), and a full production of Jesus Master Builder by Mark Allan Greene (directed by Trish Van Doornum).

The first made me teary eyed and the second made me giggle uncontrollably when I wasn’t groaning at the puns.

Magpies is a three-hander, a set of conversations among a grandfather (Michael Schaar-Ney), grand-daughter (Shanni Pinkerton), and the mother/daughter of the in-between generation (Stephanie Swensrude). It’s set locally in neighbourhoods I could picture easily from the few stage directions. It worked very well as a staged reading because the important parts were the relationships, the interactions, and the conversations about the past, rather than the incidents taking place on- or off-stage during the time frame of the play. Although in a fully-staged production it would be fun to see the grandfather trying to shoot magpies with a Super Soaker. It touched on familiar themes – the allying of the older and younger generation against the uptight middle, the results of secrets kept, and the aftermath of death in the family and grief.

The second play, Jesus Master Builder – A Divine Comedy was a pun-filled exploration of the premise that although Jesus was canonically working with Joseph as a carpenter, he wasn’t necessarily any good at it. The script referred to a very large number of the familiar New Testament stories and King James Version/Vulgate quotations, sometimes in appropriate context and sometimes almost randomly. While we see Jesus (Michael Gordon) talking to God (the credibly awe-inspiring voice of Alex Hawkins), calling his disciples (Andrea Newman, Curtis Johnson, Michael Laplaunte, etc), and conducting his ministry, interspersed scenes tell the story of Jebediah (Brad Bishop) and his unnamed wife (Jenn Havens), on their own mission to have Jesus fix their badly-built house. On that quest they collect their own followers, a Condo Association board of misfits (Sean Richard MacKinnon, Curtis Johnson, Monica Maddaford). Havens and Bishop are especially funny. Jenn Havens’ character uses a lot of Yiddish words and intonations but nobody else does, and this is eventually addressed in the text. Jesus and his followers sometimes speak in a KJV-like dialect (thee, thou, -eth), modern youth slang which irritates his mother (Monica Maddaford). Kirk Starkie is an emotionally-overwrought Joseph, a step-parent complaining about the “fun weekend dad”, and Michael Schaar-Ney is Michael Hutz, a reno-salvage contractor like a version of Mike Holmes in tunic, tzitzit, and steel-toed sandals.

I thought it ran a little long. In the second half it slowed down a bit from a strong funny start. You will find the writing particularly amusing if you have experience with New Testament stories, condominium politics and repair orders, and/or father-figure rivalries, but enough is going on that it’s okay if you miss some of the allusions. I also liked the costumes (Geri Dittrich) a lot.

The double bill opens tonight (Monday May 18th) and continues until Saturday, May 23rd. Advance tickets are available at Tix on the Square, with tickets available for purchase at the theatre starting at 7 pm each night.

Script submissions for the 2016 From Cradle to Stage project are due at the theatre September 15th.

tribes at the Timms

Leave a reply

Nina Raine’s drama Tribes is the last show in the U of Alberta Studio Theatre season. It was directed by Amanda Bergen as part of her MFA Directing studies, and design was by MFA Design student Robyn Ayles.

The play explores some of the difficulties and felicities occurring with overlaps between Deaf culture, hearing culture, and the idiosyncratic culture that’s built up within a family. In the first scene, the family is gathered around a dining table, probably at breakfast time. The parents, played by Ashley Wright and Judy Ferran, have three young-adult children living at home (Zoe Glassman, Mathew Hulshof, and Connor Yuzwenko-Martin). Conversations are chaotic, loud, acrimonious, repetitive, and obscene. After a while my attention was drawn to the one person on stage who wasn’t engaged in argument but mostly sitting upstage eating his cereal, Connor Yuzwenko-Martin’s Billy. Nobody else in the family seems to expect him to be part of the conversations. A few side comments and responses indicate that he is deaf, and mostly ignored even when he tries to participate. Other family members all seem self-absorbed, troubled, and wrapped up in their own creative projects.

Billy’s life begins to change when he meets Sylvia (Bobbi Goddard), a young woman who was raised hearing in Deaf culture but is now going deaf herself. The two of them do not communicate easily either because Billy speaks with difficulty and does not sign and Sylvia doesn’t lip-read well. However, they are drawn to each other. Sylvia motivates Billy to learn ASL, suggests a job which would reward his skilled lip-reading, and challenges his family’s hostility towards Deaf community while opening up about the problems she sees there. In one of the most telling exchanges, the father Christopher asks her condescendingly what Deaf culture is like, and when she replies “hierarchical” it’s clear that he has no idea how to respond to a perceptive and critical answer.

I did not feel as if the play told me anything I didn’t already know about the issues around contemporary Deaf, deafened, and hearing-world interactions or about ASL linguistics, but it illustrated them in a compassionate thought-provoking way. But it was not just the story of Billy encountering a world where he could communicate easily and Sylvia having to cope with losing her hearing. The issues around Billy’s job interpreting video-recordings for court testimony, standards of proof and ability to fill in stories by assumptions, were fascinating. Various balances in family expectations and culture are upset when the former “mascot” of the family develops outside life and confronts his parents and siblings. None of them ever listens to each other. They always counted Billy as the sympathetic listener, but it didn’t seem to matter whether he could understand them. Another level of irony is that the father is shown studying conversational Chinese language, but has never tried to learn sign. The story ends with a small sentimental gesture of outreach, but problems are mostly left unsolved in a credible way.

I am hearing and I do not sign. I had a good enough understanding of what was taking place on the stage with the help of surtitling for some of the Sign conversations and some of Billy’s speech, as well as his postures and facial expressions and the responses of the other characters. I was uncomfortable and embarrassed about not understanding more of what he was saying with his voice, but I felt like that was appropriate. It also reminded me of the first time I saw Mat Hulshof on stage, when he was playing a disabled teenager with speech difficulties in Kill Me Now. The inclusion of Bobbi Goddard’s character Sylvia, someone who could speak clearly and also discuss nuances of Deaf and deafened life, enriched the story and also made it logistically easier for a hearing person to be engaged. I found Goddard’s performance particularly moving, alluding to the flaws in the community she’d been raised in but still feeling protective of them, and especially in the scene where she struggles with losing the last bits of hearing her own voice. At first I thought her character might be a device like William Hurt’s in Children of a Lesser god or Donald Wood’s character in the Steven Biko biopic Cry Freedom, a dominant-culture ally who is easier to identify with than the uncomfortable-making minority character, but I changed my mind, as I came to see that her conflicts were as significant a part of the story as Billy’s.

The performance I saw was interpreted by four ASL interpreters, who moved smoothly to the sides of the stage as needed, each interpreting for one of the characters in the conversation. Although I did not understand what they were saying, I could easily tell who was speaking for which character because of their gestures and attitudes.

Tribes continues at the Timms Centre until Saturday May 23rd, with tickets at Tix on the Square. The Saturday closing performance will have live ASL interpretation, as did an earlier one.

The Ugly One

Leave a reply

The Ugly One, written originally in German by Marius von Mayenberg, is currently playing at PCL Studio, a Kill Your Television production directed by Kevin Sutley.

Harsh clear lighting and a stark set (Kerem Çetinel) lead into a story with distanced and stylized dialogue, with original musical underscoring (Dave Clarke and Rhys Martin). The premise is that Lette, a middle-aged male engineering designer (Nathan Cuckow) suddenly discovers that his colleagues and his wife (Nadien Chu) have always considered him unspeakably ugly and never mentioned it. His wife claims not to mind, but his employer (David Ley) is about to send Lette’s assistant (Chris Bullough) to present their new product, since of course Lette’s face makes it inappropriate for him to go. It was interesting to explore the concept of how his unattractiveness limits his opportunities with a character for whom that was a completely new concept, rather than a fact of life and society that he’d grown up with.

When a surgeon (Ley) offers Lette the opportunity to change his face, he is apprehensive but agrees. Surgery takes place on stage, in a dental-office-type chair, with disconcerting and convincing sound effects. The subsequent unveiling displays Lette as an unusually attractive man, with various consequences. At this point, I was reminded of various fables and archetypes in which getting what one’s wished for destroys one’s life, like the classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” that we studied in high school English class. Because it turns out to be not that simple – even getting to present the invention at a trade show brings unwanted complications.

Things get weirder and worse as the surgeon goes on to perform the surgery on others, giving them all the same handsome face as Lette, so that his popularity is temporary, his marriage and employment break down, and he finds ultimate comfort only in a disturbingly narcissistic contact. In a brilliant demonstration of theatre’s ability to convince an audience without the realistic special effects of film, Cuckow’s face, voice, and physical presentation are sufficiently different before and after the surgery to make him look homely beforehand and attractive afterwards with no external assistance that I could detect. All the other actors in the piece play multiple characters, with subtle shifts in vocal intonation and posture making them easy to distinguish.

The Ugly One continues at the PCL Studio until May 23rd, with tickets available through the Fringe box office.

First Time Last Time

1 Reply

Last night was the preview of the last Shadow Theatre show at the Varscona before they close for the long-awaited renovations – the first time of the last time.

John Hudson directed Scott Sharplin’s two-hander about the relationship between two awkward diffident quirky characters, Ben (Mat Busby) and Airlea (Madeleine Suddaby). The characters start by addressing the audience directly, explaining that they’re going to tell the story of their relationship and then getting sidetracked in questions of the definition of story and the definition of relationship. I’ve seen Mat Busby before doing characters whose social awkwardness was part of their charm (The Jazz Mother, The Invention of Romance), and although Ben was not the same character as either of those I appreciated him in a similar way. Airlea was the more outgoing one of the pair, more resistant to romance or commitment, but a recurring theme is her wanting him to dance and him refusing.

A succession of scenes interspersed with bits of narration to the audience shows the progression of their lives and their interactions, from the night they first meet through deciding to stay together with “no ties and no lies”, the life-milestone of friends’ weddings, and then working out what they want as the original “contract” becomes less of a good fit. Their banter starts out charming and very believable, and the deeper issues encountered later in their lives are addressed with home truth and a light touch.

Cultural referents that wrapped around the story include “The Lady, or The Tiger?” (the Frank Stockton short story), “Let’s Do It” (the Cole Porter standard), and astrology vs astronomy. A small symbolic gesture including the audience near the end brought me to tears with its simple perfection. First Time Last Time runs until March 29th, with advance tickets available at Tix on the Square.

Fiddler on the Roof

Leave a reply

The Holy Trinity Players just finished a brief run of the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof, and were close to sold out. They’re already planning to remount the show for Edmonton Fringe 2015, so you’ll have a few more chances to see this production if you missed it this weekend. The play was directed by Morgan Kunitz with Darlene Kunitz as musical director.

Fiddler on the Roof, as you probably know, is the story of the poor dairyman Tevye in a small Jewish village in Tsarist Russia at some time period probably just before the revolution. He and his wife Golde (Cindy Gaffney) have five daughters, some of them of marrying age but without dowries, so the parents depend on the matchmaker Yente (Gail Boutilier). However, the younger generation makes their own choices, defying arranged-marriage traditions bit by bit (a love match! worse, a love match with a Communist who gets sent to Siberia! even worse, a love match with a Russian Christian and an elopement to be married by a priest!)

in this production the demanding part of Tevye is played by local lawyer Andrew Hladyshevsky. I was especially impressed by how he made the very familiar material seem fresh and original, with delight and indignation arising equally naturally on his expressive face. There’s a cast of about 30 people, managed smoothly on a moderately-sized stage at the front of the church sanctuary. The sanctuary space provided for effective staging of scenes such as many households chanting the Sabbath blessings and lighting candles along all the aisles, a wedding procession up the centre aisle, a secret Christian wedding at the altar at the far (upstage) end of the sanctuary, and the exile/emigration down the aisle at the end.

The Falstaff Project: hanging out in a bar with Thou art Here Theatre

Leave a reply

Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I is a story about the prodigal Prince Hal, the heir to the throne of his father King Henry IV. While the king is busy fighting rebels, the Prince of Wales is carousing with disreputable companions in taverns.
Thou Art Here Theatre is a local company focusing on site-sympathetic and immersive adaptations of Shakespeare.
The Artery is a small community-driven liquor-licensed arts and music venue near downtown. (They’re being forced to close their doors at the end of the month, but are working to find a new location and continue with their mandate. Their fundraiser is here.)

Put these three together and you can see where it’s going: telling the story of Henry IV Part I as seen from inside a tavern, at The Artery. Andrew Ritchie developed the adaptation and directed the show, cleverly bringing the important bits happening outside the tavern in using multimedia – clips of breaking TV news read by the Messenger (Katie Hudson), TV interviews with the rebel Hotspur hiding out in a cellar (Ben Stevens) and with the King giving press conferences in City Hall (James MacDonald), Hal’s texts and FaceTime calls with the King. Prince Hal (Neil Kuefler) and his friend Falstaff (Troy O’Donnell) hang out in the tavern managed by Hostess Quickly (Nancy McAlear) and her employee Francis (Ben Stevens), and their bluff sidekicks Poins (Alyson Dicey) and Bardolph (Jesse Gervais) drop in with rowdy schemes.

If you’re feeling hesitant about what you have to do as an audience member in an immersive theatre experience, this is a good one to start with. Because basically, you can just sit in the tavern with a drink and watch the story happen around you, with no more work than twisting your neck. Or you can get up and go get another drink, or you can engage with the players a bit more if you want.

I’m not very familiar with the source text, so I can’t tell you how the adaptation varies. It seems to have much of the original language, but all the performers are comfortable enough with the Shakespearean text that it’s easy to follow and not distracting. McAlear is especially natural as a timeless tavern-keeper. Kuefler manages Prince Hal’s transition from irresponsible scamp to a smooth officer for his father with a surprising shift in body language as well as costume. And O’Donnell was a delight as the lazy greedy opportunistic middle-aged knight Falstaff. I got a little tired of all the fat jokes, but I guess I should take that up with Shakespeare and the audiences he was writing for.

The Falstaff Project is playing at The Artery until Sunday night – and oh! I forgot to tell you the other cool thing. There’s music afterwards. Different local musicians are playing after every performance, and admission to that is free with the play ticket, or $5 just for the music. Advance tickets are here.

Vigilante: inexorable tragedy with Catalyst style

3 Replies

A new Catalyst Theatre production. Their first show in the Maclab Theatre intimate thrust stage at the Citadel. Part of the Citadel subscription series. It didn’t matter what it was going to be about; I was going to see it for sure.

The fact that it was about the Black Donnellys of 19th century southwestern Ontario, their feuds with neighbours and their brutal mass murder, was a bonus. I grew up in southern Ontario, and this was one of the true-crime stories that my classmates did fascinated book reports on (that and the story of Evelyn Dick and the murder of her husband even closer to home in the 1940s). Although I hadn’t actually read The Black Donnellys, The Donnellys Must Die or James Reaney’s play cycle, I felt familiar with and connected to the story. And with that superficial knowledge acquired as a young person, I think I probably reconciled the story in my brain as “fair” on some level – a family of outlaws commits various crimes on their law-abiding neighbours and gets murdered because of it.

But partway through last night’s first preview performance of Jonathan Christenson’s new rock musical about the family, I changed my mind. Christenson’s version provided some sympathetic portraits of the young immigrants James and Johanna Donnelly (David Leyshon and Jan Alexandra Smith) fleeing their feuding families in Co. Tipperary, Ireland for a fresh start in Canada, discouraged and cheated in acquiring Ontario farmland, and discovering their immigrant neighbours tenacious in the grudges of the Old Country. As in the best of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the family’s strengths (fierce loyalty to each other and determination to succeed) are also the qualities leading inevitably to their downfall. The performance made me care about them and mourn them.

So that’s the story. But it was a Catalyst Theatre production, with Jonathan Christenson credited as writer, director, composer, and librettist, and the Catalyst design aesthetic expressed in ragged near-colourless layers of costume by Narda McCarroll, in cold stark lighting by Beth Kates, and in the spare barn-skeleton set by Christenson and James Robert Boudreau, so it was told with style. I’ve seen two other Catalyst productions, The Soul Collector and Nevermore: the Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe (which is playing off-Broadway until the end of March). I found Vigilante more passionate and more accessible than either of them, but still stylized and atmospheric. Like the other two plays, much of the story is told in narration to the audience, in this case mostly by eldest son William Donnelly (Carson Nattrass). Most of the text seems to be prose, unlike Nevermore which is full of rhyming couplets. And there was music. The music played by Matthew Skopyk, Morgan Gies, Emily Siobhan McCourt, Nathan Setterlund, and Kurtis Schultz had elements of screeching hard-rock guitar, frenetic Irish-dance fiddle, lyrical love-duet poetry, and persistent compelling drumming, and there was singing and movement. I don’t have a very good memory for tunes, so I can’t recall anything well enough to sing it today, but I wish I could. Oh, except for the repeated motif “tick…tock… goes the clock … light the lamp and lock the lock …” I loved the music, despite some occasional difficulty hearing the singers over the band in the first act. There were also a few moments where the music, the powerful movement in boots, and the industrial shadow-lit set reminded me of the U of A’s recent Studio Theatre production of Threepenny Opera.

Neighbours and adversaries of the Donnellys were played by the same actors who also played the six sons, Nattrass (William), Scott Walters (Tommy), Kris Joseph (Daniel), Eric Moran (Robert), Lucas Meeuse (Johnny), and Benjamin Wardle as the youngest Michael. All of the characters in the story had accents with enough Irish features to be credible yet comprehensible, consistent with growing up in an immigrant community. The Donnelly sons also swore a lot when they were angered or when being wound up to fight by their mother. Sometimes the modern-sounding vulgarities made audience members giggle nervously, and pulled me out of the story a bit.

The action started slowly in the first act, with William and his brothers giving an introductory narrative then Johanna and James falling in love in Ireland despite family opposition. Things speeded up after intermission, with the family members’ doom coming closer and more unavoidable.

Vigilante is playing at the Citadel until March 29th. Tickets are available here. Tonight (Sunday March 8th) is the Pay What You Can performance, and I would imagine that the ticket line-up for that at the Citadel box office is forming as I write. I liked it and I found it challenging, so I’m trying to figure out if I have time to see it again. But on this week’s calendar I also have Fiddler on the Roof, The Falstaff Project, First Time/Last Time, and a U of A Drama production of A Winter’s Tale, and before the end of the month also Arcadia, dreamplay, and Book of Mormon. So much theatre, so little time.