Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

Birdie on the Wrong Bus!

Morgan Smith’s Cheerleader! – a reading at the Timms

After taking a couple months off from posting (I’ve still been doing theatre stuff and watching shows, and I hope to share my notes with you and get caught up soon), the first production I am posting about is the one I didn’t get to see, the ticket I didn’t get to use – Human Loser’s production of Morgan Smith’s Cheerleader, scheduled to open at the Roxy Theatre last week under Clinton Carew’s direction.

Because, as anyone in the Edmonton theatre scene already knows, the Roxy Theatre building burned down last Tuesday morning, just as Cheerleader was set to start preview performances. The building was built in 1938 as a movie theatre, and had been home to Theatre Network since 1989. Theatre Network, under the artistic direction of Bradley Moss, produces an annual schedule of challenging professional theatre, often new and often Canadian, hosts the emerging-artists festival Nextfest in the spring, and also curates a “Performance Series” of works from other theatre companies, like Cheerleader. I had been looking forward to this play, being familiar with the work of local actors Joleen Ballandine (last seen in the Fringe Festival comedies Real Time and Excuse Me! and as a regular player at Rapid Fire improv), Patrick Lundeen (Kill Me Now, Sia, Christmas Carol, etc), and Lianna Makuch (U of A BFA grad I’ve also seen on several local stages since she graduated).

Playwright Morgan Smith hopes to have arrangements in place soon for a local production to do this script justice, after replacing the lost props, costumes, and set. But they were able to do a bare-stage reading last night at the University of Alberta Timms Centre Mainstage, thanks to the generosity of the Timms Centre and the Department of Drama.

What I heard and saw last night confirmed that I will definitely take the opportunity to see the full production.

I had never been to a staged reading before. The playwright and the actors were all on a simply lit bare stage with chairs and with scripts on music stands. The playwright read the stage directions. The actors stood when they were in the scene and sat down when they weren’t. Instead of looking at each other or hitting each other or embracing each other as the script called for, they all faced the audience and mimed a bit as needed. This was a bit distracting at first but was easy to get used to. It reminded me of attending the recording of a radio show like The Irrelevant Show.

The two most enjoyable parts were the parts that were acted out, which is part of why I want to see the rest of the show acted out. The show opened with a delightful cheerleading routine / dance number involving all four characters with pompoms. And partway through there was a hilarious non-verbal scene set in a row of cinema seats, with people changing seats, sharing popcorn, making out, and disagreeing.

The characters in the story were four high school students, two football players (Patrick Lundeen and Matthew McKinney of Calgary) and two cheerleaders (Lianna Makuch and Joleen Ballandine). The head cheerleader (Makuch) and the quarterback (Lundeen) seemed to be the “alpha couple” of the school, with the other two as their respective best friends. Each of the characters was shown to have some familial or personal challenges, using the narrative techniques of monologue asides or scenes with the other actors standing in as teachers and family members. There was also some narrative framing of Lianna Makuch’s character telling the story to the audience by directing the others to act it out, which was particularly amusing as the narrative ended, but because of the nature of the reading I found this framing a bit confusing. I am sure it would be more clear in a fully-staged performance.

The story seemed to be taking place in a one-week timeframe, as the other characters planned a surprise birthday party for Lundeen’s character on the next Saturday night. Some of the situations and attitudes seemed fairly predictable, although not boring or stereotypical, but the characters were interesting enough to intrigue me.

Joleen Ballandine’s character Sophie was the most interesting to me, as the cheerleader-sidekick in unrequited love with her female best friend. The scene in which she vents her internalized homophobia in a vicious phone call to an offstage gay character is compellingly awful and unfortunately credible.

Donations to Theatre Network may be made on line through Canada Helps. I know that Human Loser Theatre was collecting donations last night to re-mount Cheerleader, but I don’t know if they also have an on-line donation option. (I’ll link later if I find out anything.)

Sequence – convoluted and thinky

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Shadow Theatre’s current production Sequence is their last in the Varscona Theatre before it closes for major renovations. Calgary playwright Arun Lakra entwines two stories to explore the topics of luck, probability, providence, genetics, free will, religion, dramatic coincidence, Fibonacci series, and disability. John Hudson was director.

In one story, Coralie Cairns plays a cranky tenacious genetics professor and researcher who is going blind, and Chris W. Cook plays an unusual student. In the other story, Frank Zotter plays a very lucky man, on a book tour to promote his book about luck, and Caley Suliak plays an audience member who wants to benefit from or to disprove his streak of luck. The action switches from one side of the stage to the other, at first with no apparent connections between the themes or narratives but various similarities gradually arising. The show program includes two pages of glossary for the scientific terms and science-fiction-culture terms used by Cairns’ character. I’d like to say that I didn’t need any of it, but reading them ahead of time did add to my understanding. The cleverly-plotted piece seems to follow the Chekov’s gun rule strictly, but near the end I was not completely sure that I knew what the playwright had intended the connections and resolutions to be.

The set (designed by Lisa Hancharek) was also filled with fascinating details such as wall shelves reminiscent of representations of DNA spirals.

Sequence continues at the Varscona until this Sunday afternoon, November 16th, with advance tickets at Tix on the Square and cash tickets at the door.

Another family at a cusp, in The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble

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Beth Graham’s play The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, directed by Bradley Moss at Theatre Network, explores a familiar family crisis time with some refreshing new thoughts. In my adult acting classes, we’ve studied scenes from Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge and from The Attic, The Pearls, and Three Fine Girls by Jennifer Brewin, Leah Cherniak, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross, both of which are stories about adult children who return to the family home when a parent is dying. I’ve been through similar experiences, twice, so I can understand why such crisis times work well for a playwright, with all the characters having old baggage and resentments with each other, all stuck in a current high-stakes situation. And because I remember what it was like sharing our childhood home with my siblings while we spent our days at the hospital and our evenings scanning through Mum’s television channels and filling up her fridge with fast-food leftovers while the neighbours’ casseroles went uneaten, stories of interesting characters going through similar struggles resonate and appeal to me.

The first exciting difference about Bernice Trimble was that the widowed mother, Bernice (Susan Gilmour, recently seen in Drowsy Chaperone and in Spamalot), was a character on stage, rather than an invalid in an offstage bedroom. She turns out to be a fascinating character too, honest and determined and accepting of each of her children’s differences. Having the mother on stage interacting with her children made this a rich fascinating story of earlier stages of illness and aging than the stories I alluded to in the first paragraph. It also helped to illustrate the title. “Gravitational pull” is the playwright’s expression for how, for better or for worse, an extended family is often drawn together by one specific person (maybe a parent or grandparent). Astronomical metaphors were used throughout the narrative but not in a contrived way.

The story is told mostly from the viewpoint of Iris, the middle child (Clarice Eckford) on whom Bernice depends for the most difficult requests. The narrative jumps back and forth between one later important day and a series of scenes of family members interacting over several months. Iris frequently addresses the audience, narrating what happens between the scenes from her point of view. The set represents both Iris’s kitchen and their mother’s. It is generally clear which location is being presented, even without narrator Iris’s clue of setting out salt and pepper shakers every time the set is her mother’s house. Many family traditions and customs are referred to and repeated, from Bernice’s habits of embracing her children and her endearments for them, to the rituals of family meeting and making a classic 1960s-style casserole. As Iris tells the story, she often uses the expression “That was that … only it wasn’t” as a transition.

The other two siblings, older sister Sarah (Patricia Zentilli) and younger brother Peter (Jason Chinn), respond to the mother’s announcement that she has Alzheimer’s disease in their own fashions, Sarah with denial and plans for second opinions and treatments, and Peter with awkward taciturn acceptance. Sarah and Iris are also caught up by disputing who is “last to know” important family business, another familiar touch. I thought that Peter’s small role was presented effectively and with sympathy by the playwright and the actor, because his quiet avoidance and flashes of kindness could so easily have been overplayed into humour, and they were not.

The audience gets only a single disturbing glimpse of the progression of Bernice’s illness before she enlist’s Iris’s commitment to be accessory to her suicide. And Iris, the one who might appear least successful or least mature by some of her family ‘s measures (chatty and scattered, still single, no children, working as a temp) is the one who accepts and supports her mother’s right to make that choice, despite the pain it causes her.

I found it emotionally evocative and not manipulative, a believable portrait of a family and an illness. The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble continues at Theatre Network until November 23rd, with tickets available here.

Loveplay, a speedy trip through a history of sex

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Moira Buffini’s Loveplay opened last Thursday as part of the University of Alberta Studio Theatre series, directed by faculty member Jan Selman. I saw it the night before opening along with a very responsive preview crowd, full of sighs and squeals of delight and “Awww”s and “you owned him girl!“s, and I thought it was a lot of fun.

The play showcases ten vignettes of some kind of sexual or romantic interaction, taking place at the same location at different times in history, from Roman Britain to the present. Each scene starts with some kind of title card introducing the era, in some format consistent with the design (the Roman Britain one looked like chiseled stone). The six performers in the show (Nikki Hulowski, Maxwell Theodore Lebeuf, Kabriel Lilly, Dylan Parsons, Zvonimir Rac, and Morgan Yamada) each played multiple roles, as well as assisting the running crew with transitions.

I appreciated the playwright’s choice to include a glimpse of sexual assault but not to make it either the first or the last story. In a particularly disturbing Dark Ages scene, three men (Lebeuf, Parsons, and Rac) discuss the woman they are consecutively assaulting (Lilly) in chillingly dehumanized terms, and after they leave her for dead she howls in solitary anguish, conveying the impression of hopelessness with no expectation of revenge or justice. The performers in this scene balance the horrific situation with the ordinary dialogue sensitively.

The most light-hearted scenes in the narrative are those of the Renaissance (1584) and the Age of Innocence (1969), both of which include Hulowski and Rac playing a couple of long duration. The Renaissance scene opens with Lebeuf and Hulowski declaiming heightened dialogue about their true love, which turns out to be rehearsal of a playwright (Rac)’s autobiographical work-in-progress. This offers lots of amusing opportunity for humour about the creative process, about 16th century theatre, and about the trajectory of a romantic relationship between a young woman and her tutor. The Age of Innocence scene is about a young couple attempting to host some kind of free-love drop-in encounter for the first time and getting cold feet, while their guests (Parsons and Lilly) seek relief from their relationship ennui.

Various other scenes explore power imbalances in sexual relationships (Yamada as governess in Lebeuf’s 1823 household, Parsons as an artisan hired by Enlightenment-era scientist Lilly to satisfy her curiosity about the male form) and prostitution (Yamada’s two prostitute characters both seem to be independent businesswomen taking charge in their relationships with their clients).

More hopeful resolutions are seen in The Age of Empire (1898) and The Age of Excess (contemporary). In The Age of Empire, two men who had been friends as boys find new connection and “the birth of love” despite one being an artist and the other a married vicar. The Age of Excess is set in the office of a matchmaker (Lilly) who is preparing to introduce some clients despite her own romantic difficulties – her girlfriend/assistant (Hulowski) is angry with her for being unwilling to commit, and flirting with the clients in response. One of the clients (Parsons) embodies all the worst characteristics of entitlement and pickupartistry, from putting down the woman he’s meeting to whining “It’s not fair, why wasn’t she like that with me?” Yet the two clients who hit it off immediately and leave together (Yamada and Lebeuf) do so having each disclosed some aspects of their difficult history (she’s a divorcée and single parent; he’s a recovering alcoholic), so as an audience member I was left with the message that learning from mistakes and being open can lead to mutual happy relationships.

Throughout the journey through history, we encounter many observations on sexual politics and relationships that have relevance to current life. A character in the Renaissance comments on the perceived difference between a lover’s kiss and that of a wife, as “what you bestow and what I own.” A cloistered nun in the New Millennium (1099) scene wonders “why would a man choose such a life?” A later character mentions that there is no insult like “man-whore”, that what is an insult for a woman translates to “lover” for a man.

The simple set focuses on a sharply raked square platform, representing the square of land through the ages. Some of the set elements (walls, platforms) appeared for only one scene; others were seen later as ruins. Characters in the various eras made reference to previous uses or buildings, sometimes with dramatic irony (the Roman soldier is building a latrine, which the Dark Ages characters then assume must have been some type of temple).

Loveplay is light-hearted but not lightweight. Considering it along with the playwright’s Gabriel, I am looking forward to seeing her Blavatsky’s Tower cast with the other performers in the graduating BFA class at the end of this month. Loveplay continues until this Saturday, with tickets available at the door and at Tix on the Square.

Gabriel: first glimpse of Moira Buffini

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I was looking forward to learning about contemporary English playwright through two of her works which will be produced as part of the U of A Studio Theatre season, but last week I had the chance to expand my knowledge of her work through seeing a production of her 1997 play Gabriel in the Bleviss Laboratory Theatre on campus (the former Media Room), directed by Amanda Bergen, MFA Directing candidate.

Gabriel is set in a gloomy farmhouse in occupied Guernsey during World War II. The family occupying the house comprises Jeanne (Kristi Hansen), her daughter-in-law Lily (Zoe Glassman), her young daughter Estelle (Sadie Bowling, last seen in last year’s Christmas Carol), and their housekeeper Lake (Monica Maddaford). Dave Clarke is Von Pfunz, an officer of the occupying army, and Graham Mothersill appears as an unidentified man discovered unconscious on the beach, to whom they refer as Gabriel. One of the patterns in this tense situation is women confiding in men whom they believe won’t be able to understand them, Jeanne to the German-speaking officer and Lily to the unconscious man. This is a convenient script device allowing the audience to learn more about the women’s points of view, but also a way of illustrating how each of them is private and alone in the crowded little house. Estelle, who is aged about ten or eleven, resents the German occupiers and takes a variety of rebellious actions, from esoteric (chalking a ‘square of power’) to more practical (trying to make the soldiers think the house they’re staying in is haunted, vandalizing the commander’s boots). Sadie Bowling captures her earnest stubbornness without being cute. Jeanne’s quite different survival tactics are portrayed sympathetically by Kristi Hansen, whose set jaw and careful poise work well in the period piece.

Gabriel awakens and recovers his health but not his memory. Lily dresses him in some of her late husband’s clothes which had not already been repurposed, giving him the odd appearance of being dressed for a cricket or tennis match surrounded by people in old dark-coloured garments as would seem more appropriate for rural people in wartime. He appears to speak both English and German fluently, so while the family is determined to protect him from the occupying force, they are more interested in finding a safe background story than a true one. Stakes are raised when we learn that Lily’s background is Jewish, that her documentation has been falsified, and that the German commander knows.

Personally, I’m usually suspicious about fictional characters named Gabriel because of how often they turn out to be either dead or angelic. And enough ambiguity was left in the outcome of Gabriel that my theory still holds.

Inspired silliness and spontaneous hilarity all over the Citadel.

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Ronnie Burkett’s The Daisy Theatre is in the Club downstairs.

One Man, Two Guvnors is upstairs in the Shoctor.

And in between, Rapid Fire Theatre is at Ziedler Hall with two Theatresports shows every Friday, a Chimprov long-form improv show every Saturday at 10 pm, and next weekend also a public-workshops student show Thursday at 7:30 (I am going to be in this one, probably singing) and a Maestro elimination game Saturday night at 7:30. Tickets for all Rapid Fire shows are available through EventBrite and at the door.

Ronnie Burkett’s Daisy Theatre is returning after a long Citadel booking last year. Some of the same puppet characters are in the show this year, but there are some new ones, and all new stories with the old ones, and apparently different things happen every night. I saw it once last year and enjoyed it, but I thought this year’s show was even better. Mrs. Edna Rural is still one of my favourites. This year’s bits with Schnitzel, the poignant little creature who wishes for wings, were not as disturbing to me as last year’s (which reminded me of Robertson Davies’ World of Wonders), and they were still charming, especially watching Schnitzel climb the curtains. As last year, Ronnie Burkett includes various audience members or takes amusing liberties with them, and he also makes lots of jokes about local establishments and politics. I wish I had time to see it again.

One Man, Two Guvnors had its first preview tonight. It had a long cast list with many familiar names and faces, John Ullyatt, Lisa Norton, Julien Arnold, Jesse Gervais, Cole Humeny, Louise Lambert, Orville Charles Cameron, Mat Busby, Andrew Macdonald-Smith, and all of the Be Arthurs. Performers I hadn’t seen before were Jill Agopsowicz as the young romantic lead Pauline and Glenn Nelson as Harry Dangle the lawyer (of the firm Dangle, Berry, and Bush). Bob Baker was the director, and the script was written by Richard Bean based on Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century comedy The Servant of Two Masters. John Ullyatt is the main character Francis Henshall, the quick-talking easily-confused small-time crook who starts the show so broke that he hasn’t eaten, and desperate for money he hires himself out to two different people, the gangster Roscoe – who turns out to be Roscoe’s twin sister Rachel in disguise, Lisa Norton – and the higher-class criminal Stanley Stubbers (Jesse Gervais). Assorted wacky hijinks ensue, as Francis tries to get some food and then the affections of the accountant Dolly (Louise Lambert), various other romances play out, prison-trained chef Lloyd manages a “pub with food” (apparently a novelty in 1963 Brighton) with the help of servers Alfie (Andrew Macdonald-Smith who should probably have a massage therapist or physiotherapist lined up for the run of the show) and Gareth (Mat Busby), and criminal mastermind Charlie The Duck (Julien Arnold) is involved in some financial negotiations with his solicitor Harry Dangle that I never did quite follow, but it didn’t matter. There was slapstick, physical comedy, bad puns, lots of asides to the audience, musical interludes by the Be Arthurs playing as The Craze (Ryan Parker, Scott Shpeley, Bob Rasko, Sheldon Elter), and other funny business. The pace did not drag at all and although it was a fairly long show I wasn’t restless, I was just giggling all the way through. It was a little tiresome that Pauline’s defining character trait was a cluelessness or stupidity, but there was good contrast with Louise Lambert’s character Dolly, a 1963 model of feminist sass and control of her sexuality reminiscent of Joan on Mad Men, and with Lisa Norton’s character Rachel, who disguises herself as her brother and tracks down her missing lover (hence leading to a priceless reunion scene with a glimpse of two characters making out in matching boxer shorts and gartered socks.) The script also had lots of scope for ridiculousness in male characters, notably Cole Humeny as Alan (Orlando) Dangle, would-be actor in black turtleneck and leather and overdramatic anguish. This might be the best pure comedy I have seen on the Shoctor stage. I liked it better than Make Mine Love and possibly better than Spamalot.

The Daisy Theatre runs in the Club until November 2nd. One Man, Two Guvnors runs in the Shoctor until November 16th. Tickets to both are available through the Citadel website.

And Then, the Lights Went Out …

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The first show of the Walterdale Theatre’s season is And Then, The Lights Went Out, written by Andy Garland and directed by David Johnston. It’s partly a funny story about a writer’s life and partly a hard-boiled detective tale using all the tropes of that genre.

John Evans plays Thomas, a young novelist who is running out of ideas for his detective-story series. Erin Forwick-Whalley and Jennifer Peebles are his landlady and neighbour, providing stakes, comic relief, and encouragement for him to finish his seventh novel for tomorrow’s deadline. The rest of the characters in the play are the characters in Thomas’s work-in-progress, ‘tried and true archetypes’ of the trenchcoat-wearing private detective (Kyle Lahti), the mysterious alluring woman (Erika Conway), the thug (Chance Heck), the perky sidekick police officer (Hayley Moorhouse), and a menacing Southern not-such-a-gentleman who reminded me of a Die-Nasty character from the Tennessee-Williams-pastiche season (Curtis Knecht).

At first, there is some amusement in the concept of the characters having life outside of the story and having opinions on the writer’s work, especially the thug who wants to be different. But I’d seen that done before. I was reminded of stories about moviemaking, like Make Mine Love, or the Die-Nasty marathon weekend where everyone was a soap-opera character and also an actor. I noticed that most of the characters spoke with different accents when they were “on stage” in the story, accents that evoked the hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler and Humphrey Bogart in Maltese Falcon, and then shifted to speech similar to Thomas’ own when they were not acting out the story. Lights Went Out got more interesting and satisfying when the characters started pushing Thomas to make them more than stock characters, and then as he wrote they played out a story which had a satisfying and not entirely predictable ending.

And Then, The Lights Went Out continues at the Walterdale Theatre until this Saturday (October 25th). Tickets are available at the door, or in advance through Tix on the Square. The next show on the Walterdale stage will be John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, in early December. I’ve been helping out with that one, and I think it will be good.

Happy Toes

Michael Healey’s Proud

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Tonight I saw a preview of theatre no. 6’s presentation of Proud. Director Ian Leung said ahead of time that there might be technical glitches, but I didn’t notice any. Parking around La Cité Francophone was unusually challenging, probably due to the Alberta NDP leadership debate taking place across the street at Faculté St. Jean, and afterwards I found that a cheering thought.

Proud is a story about politicians and about some parts of the political process, and about beliefs and emotions and what kind of government people want. I hated some of what I saw on stage because I think it might be true and I don’t want it to be, and I loved how they showed it. The premise of the story started by imagining that the federal election of 2011 had generated a much larger majority for the Conservatives, if they had won seats all over Quebec by very slim margins over the NDP. (That this is completely feasible to imagine is thoroughly depressing in itself. See Fair Vote Canada for more.) As the Prime Minister says addressing his newly expanded caucus, “We have broad but thin support. If this was ice, I couldn’t recommend we play shinny on it.” There’s a funny early scene where the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff are examining a large seating chart of the House of Commons trying to plan who should sit where. All one side and about half the other side are coded Conservative-blue. There are 28 orange cards and 25 red ones, and I couldn’t be sure but I think then 4 BQ baby-blue and one green one. That wasn’t even the point of the scene, just a fun detail I got distracted by. The point of it was more to show the Prime Minister being petty and demanding about not wanting certain caucus members to be in his line of sight because he held grudges, and his Chief of Staff trying to find solutions that would keep his boss happy and not make any other problems.

Dave Horak was a perfect Chief of Staff, down to the low voice and the way he expected to fall on his metaphorical sword. Brian Dooley was disturbingly good as a non-ideological Prime Minister who doesn’t make eye contact. And Melissa Thingelstad was — I think this is my favourite role that I have seen her in so far. She played a rookie MP from Quebec, a single mother who had been managing a St-Hubert Barbecue (cultural note: that’s a Quebec chain much like Swiss Chalet only with tarte au sucre.) Her character had a wonderful mix of ferociousness and naiveté, sexuality and practicality and honesty and pragmatic ambition in which the Prime Minister seemed to have met his match. “Why do you insist on mis-underestimating me?” she asked at one point. When her character first appeared, I worried that she was going to be used as a sort of sexist shortcut and comic foil, making fun of young women in general and of the 2011-era rookie NDP MPs from Quebec like Ruth-Ellen Brossard. But she got more interesting.

Richard Lee Hsi (formerly billed as Richard Lee, last seen in the Toy Guns Dance Theatre shows at the Fringe and in the feature film Rock Paper Dice Enter) had a small role as a character from the future being interviewed about the events of the play and about his own political aspirations. His interview/monologue alluded to some very discouraging outcomes that would follow easily from the present-day of the play, which is not so different from our own, (a powerless consolidated Left and the Conservatives with a longest-serving Prime Minister very similar to Harper), but also gave the audiences some hopeful prospect in the way he spoke about his own ideals and ambitions.

On my way home from work, before I went to the performance, I heard a CBC Radio interview with David Moscrop, a doctoral candidate in political science at UBC. His research focuses on the way people choose how to vote with their emotions rather than their reasoning. This was echoed in the play, in which the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff explain to the new MP that they address people’s feelings rather than their beliefs.

Ian Leung’s Director’s Note in the program says “save all that heavy stuff for after. Tonight, it’s a comedy. Enjoy!”

I did enjoy it. I’m not sure it’s a comedy though. I didn’t think the British TV series “House of Cards” was a comedy either. (I haven’t seen the Netflix one with Kevin Spacey.) I guffawed several times, and I also squirmed in my seat and winced quite a bit. I wished it wasn’t quite so credible, but at the same time I was enthralled by the ways it was.

Proud is playing at L’Unithéâtre, La Cité Francophone, until October 19th. Tickets are at, of course, Tix on the Square.