Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

When That I Was

The Shadow Theatre production of When That I Was played earlier this month at the Varscona Theatre. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the various temptations of local theatre websites lately, so the first I heard of this one was on a LivingSocial discount ad. But it sounded interesting, so I bought a ticket with the LivingSocial voucher.

Like The Kite Runner, the program for When That I Was had lots to read ahead of time, with a page-long glossary of terms and definitions and a couple of pages of historical timeline. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you might have recognised the title more readily than I did – it’s the first line from the song in Twelfth Night, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain”.

When That I Was was is a one man show (Christopher Hunt) about a character who has spent his life as an actor in Shakespeare’s company. It was written by John Mortimer and Edward Atienza, around 1981. It’s the same John Mortimer who wrote Rumpole of the Bailey. The show is mostly the character telling stories about Shakespeare, and acting bits of them out. He’s speaking from a perspective of being old and impoverished, hiding from the Puritans who had closed all the theatres, but when he’s telling a story from his youth his whole bearing and voice change so you can see him as a small boy, an ambitious young actor playing women’s roles, or an older man recounting events later in his life and in Shakespeare’s life.

As far as I know, the stories in the play are consistent with known canon. So the part about Hamnet was sad but not a surprise. I thought the treatment of Shakespeare’s relationship with Henry, the Earl of Southampton, was particularly deft, with the narrator explaining that he didn’t know for sure whether or not their love had been expressed physically but that he thought so himself. That left it open for the audience members to accept the possibility they preferred, and not to feel distracted by a story that didn’t fit the canon or their own previous ideas.

The narrator’s costume comprised various layers of ragged beige and brown garments, as well as hose which were in noticeably better shape. A more realistic creation might have included holes in the heels that were big enough to be visible above his slippers. He also must have had really impressive poacher’s pockets, since he kept pulling things out of a flimsy-looking worn jacket without ever losing anything or clinking anything. At one point I decided that the whole set was like a sort of Chekov’s mantelpiece, since it appeared to just be a mood-creating frame of dusty grey and beige abandoned space with the occasional red cloth, but I think that the character picked up and used almost every property during the play, mostly things that I hadn’t even noticed before he touched them.

The run of When That I Was is now over. The next Shadow Theatre production at the Varscona is Flight of the Viscount, a David Belke comedy which starts May 1^st.

The Kite Runner

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The current offering in the Citadel season is The Kite Runner, adapted by Matthew Spangler from Khaled Hosseini’s novel. I hadn’t read the novel or seen the movie, so the story had me biting my nails in worry and taking my glasses off to wipe off tears.

The story unfolds in mostly short scenes introduced and narrated by the present-day Amir (Anousha Alamian). The setting moves from Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s, to San Francisco, and then to present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The different locations and moods are quickly and effectively evoked by lighting and simple props, and by music. Salar Nader performs original percussion music before and during the play. I wonder if it was difficult to adapt this storytelling format for the stage, making decisions about how many scenes and settings and characters were necessary and figuring out how to keep both the observer and the immediacy.

The play program has several pages of notes on the cultures, languages, and history illustrated in the play, showing the westernised or permissive times of the 1970s in Kabul and the discrimination against the Hazara people by the ethnic majority Pashtun, contrasting with the modern-day Taliban regime and its brutalities. The kite runner referred to in the title means someone who runs to salvage a prize kite after its string has been cut in a kite-fighting tournament – specifically in this story, the Hazara servant boy Ali (Parnelli Parnes) who grows up with the narrator Amir, son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant (Michael Peng).

But the crux of the story is universal. There’s a situation where Amir betrays Ali out of fear, and then Amir feels horribly guilty about it and does worse things to push him away. There was a heart-wrenching inevitability to that part of the story that had the audience gasping. Much later, there is a promise of redemption, and a dramatically-satisfying return to Kabul, but it is not a story with an easy happy ending.

The story is also about the awkward relationship between Amir, a boy who loves storytelling and kite-flying but is clumsy at soccer and fearful of bullies, and his confident intimidating father. Amir continues to feel like a disappointment to his father as he grows up in San Francisco and studies creative writing, but the closeness between the two of them gradually becomes more apparent as his father becomes old and ill. Amir’s love interest, Soraya (Dalal Badr), is a smaller part of the story, but we see enough of her to see that she’s a complex character with backstory of her own.

The Kite Runner is playing at the Shoctor Theatre until March 31^st. I won’t write my thoughts about the later parts of the story and the outcome of the plot, because if you don’t already know it, you might want to see it without spoilers.

Ephemeral gets mobile

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I haven’t been posting on Ephemeral Pleasures lately because the household of ephemeral pleasure has been preoccupied with buying a car, and then a large portion of the budget for ephemeral pleasures has been temporarily diverted to the costs associated with buying and operating a car. Fortunately, I had cleverly invested in a lot of theatre tickets beforehand, so there are still events to look forward to without second-guessing the expense, including the rest of the Citadel season. And I still have a small backlog of entertainment and adventures to report on, which I will get on with soon.

It’s been a long time since I’d owned a car. When I moved to Edmonton, people in my previous hometown as well as here said “well, you can’t live in Edmonton without a car…” and that sounded like a challenge, so I said “Just watch me.” I’ve lived a mostly-comfortable life in Edmonton for almost five years without a car, thanks to Edmonton Bike Commuters, Edmonton Public Transit, Yellow Cab, Budget Rent-a-Car Southside, and my friends who have given me many rides. I even played a season of hockey, after finding a teammate who was willing to pick me up and take me home.

But having a car is like … You know the video game Civilization, where the grid map is concealed in shadows until you explore each tile? And then it opens up, so that you have the feeling that the geography was always there, just never seen, and it changes your whole perspective? It’s like that. My mental map of Edmonton is opening up more and more from my initial tiles of Whyte Avenue and Downtown. All kinds of explorations suddenly become feasible, or at least feasible in the right weather. I’m even starting to get to know other parts of Central Alberta – I’ve explored Fort Saskatchewan and Vegreville and some of the villages on Highway 14, and I can see lots more nearby places on the map that I’m looking forward to checking out.

That is, after it stops snowing.

Ride the Cyclone!

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I saw Ride the Cyclone last weekend in a preview show. I wanted to watch it again before writing it up, but I also wanted to post fast to encourage other people to see it if it sounds like their kind of thing. So I’ll make some notes now, but also figure out whether the budget and the calendar can manage seeing it again later in the run.

By that you can conclude that I liked it, but that it wasn’t simple.

Ride the Cyclone is a new musical, by the company Atomic Vaudeville out of Victoria BC. It’s written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, and directed by Britt Small and Jacob Richmond. The premise is that six teenage members of a school choir have been killed in a rollercoaster accident just before the show starts. The characters are actually dead, but they each get to sing in a competition to win a fresh start. These six songs, plus conversations in between and some other ensemble numbers, make up a fast-paced 90-minute show. One of the most fun things about the show is the wide variation in genre of the songs, with accompanying dance, costume-changes, and props, from gangsta rap to Ukrainian folkdance. I’m pretty sure that if I was more intimately familiar with the canon of musical theatre I might have picked out homages to lots of styles, writers, or specific shows – as it was, I was giggling away at the part that reminded me of Tim Curry in Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, and was touched by the bits that reminded me of “Journey to the Heaviside Layer” in Cats.

The writing and the actors were good at making the characters different from one another and all interesting. Shortcut characterizations were apparent from the start: the gay boy (Kholby Wardell), the would-be gangsta (Jameson Matthew Parker), the kid with elbow crutches (Elliott Loran), the fat sidekick (Kelly Hudson), the perky achiever (Rielle Braid), and the mystery Jane Doe (Sarah Jane Pelzer), each wearing Catholic-school uniforms but instantly distinguishable in how they wore them. But as the show progressed, each of the characters became more interesting and likeable and the ways they reacted to each other also changed. The main reason I don’t watch the TV show Glee (despite the fun music) is that when I did watch I found the characters flat and predictable, fitting various stereotypes about teenagers and teachers that I don’t find either true or helpful. But even within the limitations of a short musical performance, I thought these six characters became real and intriguing. Kelly Hudson’s song made me cry. Sarah Jane Pelzer’s performance as Jane Doe, the girl nobody remembered, was enhanced by a fascinatingly awkward physicality – nothing as obvious as a limp, but just a sense from her walk and gestures that she wasn’t quite connected to her body.

The narrative says interesting things about the trope of every kid being somehow a misfit with his or her own troubles, but it also shows some of the complexity behind the trope of growing up in a dead-end town.

A seventh character, represented by Carey Wass in voice and James Insell in puppetry, was the carnival fortune-telling machine who acted as the sort of MC for the show.

A four-piece musical ensemble accompanied them and contributed to the moods and the exploration of musical genres. In the first few songs the music was a bit too loud for me to hear the lyrics, but this problem was corrected later. There were also some video bits, most notable of which was projected not onto a backdrop screen but onto a white circular folkloric skirt extended by the character who was wearing it.

Ride the Cyclone is playing at the Maclab Theatre in the Citadel until March 10th. Tickets are available through the Citadel box office.

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CaptainAwkward’s thoughts about friendship, affection, hunger, taking care of each other, and Valentines’ Day. I hope you all find ways to acknowledge the love in your life, in whatever shape it comes in.

CaptainAwkward.com

Valentine’s day is tomorrow, right? These are pretty much still my thoughts about that. It’s a terrible night to eat out. Don’t buy anyone an expensive necklace that looks like two butts stuck together. People like to be told that they matter.

Today’s question is also a love story.

Dear Capt. Awkward,

I have depression. It’s diagnosed, I’m on happy pills and everything. It varies, sometimes I’ll be completely fine, other times I’ll have a sobbing emotional breakdown in the middle of a bar. The breakdowns don’t happen very often, and I’ve talked to my drug!shrink about my medication. Unfortunately it appears my options are to be more drugged during the good times in order to compensate for the bad times, which are sporadic and unpredictable. Since I don’t really like being on drugs in the first place, we decided to continue the meds I’m on and cope with the…

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The non-sparkly vampire swoops through Red Deer

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Red Deer College’s Theatre Performance and Creation program is producing Steven Dietz’s Dracula, a 1996 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel.

I hadn’t read the novel or seen any of the movies or stage plays based on it, so I didn’t really know the story, just the cultural common ground about the bloodsucking Transylvanian count. This meant that some of the plot twists surprised me, which was fun.

Dracula starts off with a prologue at one edge of the stage delivered by Renfield, a woman in an elegant dress of a previous era (Daryn Tessier), being served wine and a meal by a servant while discoursing on Bram Stoker and immortality. The meal turns out to be a rat, and the woman is swept off to be clothed in rags and chains by attendants of an asylum. I was a little confused later on because a reference to a “men’s asylum” left me unclear whether she was supposed to be a male character, as in the original novel, although the part otherwise worked well as a woman in thrall to her master Count Dracula.

The other side of the stage is then revealed as the bedroom of a young woman, Lucy, (Kirsten Harper) as she talks with her friend Mina (Raegan Aleman) about Mina’s far-away fiancé and Lucy’s suitors. The middle and upstage is still dark, but then a small glimpse of a rocky fortress is starkly lit while we hear Mina’s fiancé Jonathan (Nathan Johnson) recite a letter he’s writing to her from his business trip to inaccessible Transylvania. The story progresses from there in brief scenes of foreboding and flashbacks, as Dracula (Callahan New) arrives in England and targets Lucy, and Mina, Jonathan, Lucy’s suitor and friend Dr. Seward (Mitchel Roelfsema), and Dr. Seward’s colleague Van Helsing (Steven Pecksen) try to protect her and then save her. Among the other characters, Natascha Shulmeister and Elise Dextraze were particularly noteworthy as “vixens”, or seductive thralls of Dracula.

The shocking and creepy story was complemented with lots of special effect cues, flashing lights, smoke, holes opening in floor, walls, and somewhere else that I won’t write in order not to spoil future audiences, blood, dead creatures, and so on. These all worked well and added to the horror. The many shifts of scene required lots of furniture moving, which wasn’t always silent but was speedy and smooth. The music was sometimes helpfully eerie, but sometimes that kind of minor-7^th organ chord that’s so cliché as parody suspenseful music that it kind of pulled me out of the story for a minute.

On the other hand, I was interested to notice that Count Dracula’s accent was much more subtle than the parodies on parodies of “I vant to suck your blood” that everyone thinks of as a Dracula accent. I have no idea if it was authentic, but it felt credible and not overplayed. Similarly, the other characters had various hints of English accents, and in the case of Van Helsing, Dutch, just enough to feel atmospheric and not enough to make any of them hard to understand for a Canadian audience.

In the first few scenes, I found Mina and Jonathan both a little hard to understand. I think it was because they were speaking quickly while being fairly far back on a large stage. After that I had no problem hearing or understanding any of the characters as the grisly tale unfolded.

Dracula continues through next weekend, on the Mainstage of Red Deer College Arts Centre. Tickets are available here.

Zodiac Arrest – a circus cabaret

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The Westbury Theatre is the big theatre space at the Transalta Arts Barns. I’d only ever seen it with the risers pulled out on one side and a flat proscenium stage, but the other night when I walked in, it was transformed with a few rows of seats on each of the four sides, zodiac symbols projected on a curtain on one side, and a big empty sprung floor, set up for a show by Firefly Theatre, the Edmonton troupe specialising in circus arts and physical theatre.

There were twelve performances, each introduced by patter from a costumed host evoking the characteristics of each zodiac archetype. About half of them were arial acrobatics acts, and they were all amazing – Kadri Hansen, Lisa Feehan, Danny Gorham, Kim Precht, Meghan Watson, Kristi Wade, Annie Dugan, Michalene Giesbrecht, and Kim Precht. The lighting, music, and costuming contributed to different moods from playful to romantic to creepy. I don’t have any interest (or aptitude!) to attempt arial work myself, but the Firefly Theatre website has lots of information about workshops and beginner classes in their various disciplines.

Other acts included some clown performances (Candace Berlinguette and Mike Kennard), some stage magic by Billy Kidd, a dance version of the story of Ariadne (including Jamie Cavanagh as an egregiously self-absorbed Theseus), and some contortionists cum rhythmic gymnastics performers (Mackenzie Baert and Caitlin Marchak)

I thought that some of these acts dragged a bit, and that the astrological monologues were likewise too long, but on the whole I had enough awe and delight to make it a worthwhile evening. Zodiac Arrest’s last show is tonight, Sunday at 8 pm, with tickets still available at Fringe Theatre Adventures.

The Missionary Position is uncomfortable.

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If you found this page while searching for advice on a sexual problem, let me pass on my best wishes for comfortable resolution, along with a link to the sexuality-information resource website Scarleteen, directed at young people but useful for anyone with questions or curiosity about sex. This page is a good starting point, with lots of links elsewhere. I’m sorry to detour you with my wordplay.

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The Missionary Position was uncomfortable.

But I’m sure that was one of the intentions of playwright Greg MacArthur, in developing the play The Missionary Position for the U of A drama department and the BFA class of 2013. The preview performance of this world premiere was tonight at the Studio Theatre in the Timms Centre for the Arts on campus.

It didn’t make me cry. But it definitely made me squirm, and I got the feeling it made a lot of the audience members squirm too. It touched on disaster tourism, international adoption, various shallow or pathological reasons people would go on a mission trip, and the potentially tragic consequences of well-intentioned badly-planned gestures. In the play, the visitors are Canadian (from Edmonton) and the country suffering after an earthquake and tsunami is carefully not identified, but I kept thinking, This is Haiti. This is everything the Haiti activists talk about. And in fact, in the theatre lobby at intermission I noticed a news article about the New Life Children’s Refuge case, which had some similarities to the story of the play.

It’s a horrifying compelling story, told in alternating scenes of the past and present. In the present, the young people are being detained in some type of prison because of something about some children, while the scenes of the past and occasional video clips shown on a screen behind the stage develop the story of what happened and why.

The storytelling is much more effective on stage than it would be in a movie. Because in a movie, they’d have to show the children, the people living under tin and tarps, the scenery, and the jail, rather than the way the audience of the play sees these things through the narration of the visitors. “Like little brown dolls”, a character describes the children – and without real child actors to distract us, we are limited to this disturbing exoticised view.

There was some recurring imagery, in particular several sets of allusions to water. A memory of baptism and a newspaper photo of a dead child underwater become analogous in a creepy way. Glowing water is used in a story about visiting Chernobyl but also in attempts to evoke magical escapism. And sprays of water pour onto the stage when one character takes a shower, and in another scene where I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be showers, tropical rainfall, or something more darkly symbolic.

The outsider character who seems like the most reliable narrator, the one through whom we find out the truth, is Ben Gorodetsky’s embassy employee, who is distracted by cocaine and celebrities and who also seems somewhat enthralled by Lianna (Lianna Makuch), the leader of the missionary group. His partner Angie (Angelique Panther), a translator and aid worker who’s been in the country or the region for ten years (so she should know better), has her own smaller version of the tragedy arising through badly-thought-out actions from good intentions.

At the end, the audience didn’t start clapping right away. Maybe people were sort of stunned. Then I heard people around me discussing whether the results of the investigation were fair and how much responsibility people should bear for their uninformed parts in other people’s crimes. Which was probably another of the playwright’s intentions, so I’d say he succeeded.

The Missionary Position plays until February 16^th. You can get tickets at the Timms Centre box office or through Tix on the Square.

Ride, by Jane Bodie

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The audience for Northern Light Theatre’s latest play Ride, by Jane Bodie, arrives in the black-box space of the Transalta Arts Barns’ PCL Studio Theatre and we take our seats, before studying the set. It looks like a large comfortable bedroom for a young adult, with a platform-futon, various shelves around the room with neat stacks of clothes and books, and then a couple of sets of last night’s clothes thrown around on top. After a few minutes of studying the set, we realise that there are actually people in the bed! They seem to be asleep under a comforter, and they seem to be naked.

The play opens with the two characters waking up and realising in shock that they aren’t alone – and that each has no memory of who the other character is and whether they had had sex. The actors are Cole Humeny, whom I last saw as the younger accused soldier in A Few Good Men at the Citadel, and Sereana Malani, whom I remember from last summer’s Fringe production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

The last time I saw a play with a similar premise, it was by Erika Ritter, who at the time was the host of a CBC Radio afternoon show. It may have been The Automatic Pilot, and I saw it a long time ago, when I thought that the characters who got drunk and picked up strangers in bars were at some kind of brittle cynical unhappy life-stage that I hadn’t gotten to yet. But in Ride, both characters seemed like likeable reasonable people with understandable motivations, not overly unhappy, and, well, young. (I’ll leave the exercise for the reader about what this says about my intervening life.) But I don’t mean that the characters were the same; they had different responses to the situation they were in and I definitely had a favourite.

One interesting feature of this production is that it is crammed full of references to local Edmonton landmarks relevant to the characters, including delightful and familiar snarky asides about various bars on Whyte Avenue and downtown. Application to the internet tells me that the playwright is Australian, so the local colour must have been added for this production. It really works, especially in the context of the two characters struggling to figure out whether their social circles interlock but agreeing about their impressions of, say, the LRT and Filthy McNasty’s.

When I mentioned to a friend last night that I’d just come from seeing Ride, he said “Oh, the naked play!” which I guess is the other notable feature of this story. Each character’s nudity is briefly visible to the audience as he or she gets out of bed to get dressed, but because they are making a point of not wanting the other character to ogle, it feels particularly inappropriate to do so as an audience member. So if you want to know where to sit in the theatre for the best views of the full-frontal, you can ask someone other than me.

One of the things I liked about this play was that it wasn’t too big a story. It probably wasn’t a life-changing moment for either character. Neither of them turned out to be horrifyingly messed up. There was some resolution to the plot, but not too much, and the resolution was completely consistent with the character-building. And the actors didn’t overplay it; they were credible and subtle and like people I’ve known and people I’ve been. Cole Humeny was particularly good at revealing some ordinary heartbreak in a quiet way that was completely consistent with his character. Sereana Malani’s character was funnier, and she played the mix of self-protectively sarcastic and vulnerable in a believable way.

Ride plays until February 9^th and it runs just under an hour and a half. Tickets are available through Fringe Theatre Adventures – which means that you can buy tickets on-line for same day performances. Last night’s show was sold out, though, so you should buy yours ahead of time.

Rigoletto’s Cafe – unpretentious good Italian food downtown

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A friend from back east was in town on business, so we met for dinner near her hotel at Rigoletto’s Café, 10305 100 Avenue. The atmosphere was comfortably informal, the service was good, and so was the food. And, significant in this week of wind chill warnings, the dining room is warm enough and free of drafts.

I started with an Italian salad, which was garnished with anchovy slices and olives and came with a piece of herb toast. My dining companion had a Caesar salad and I forgot to ask her how it was because I was too busy eating.

For a main course, I asked about ordering the beef tenderloin on the menu but with the honey jalapeno glaze offered for the “bronzed” rib eye steak on the menu, because this combination had been strongly recommended to me by my hairdresser. The server was willing to order this variation, but she suggested that if I liked steak with fat marbled through it, I’d probably prefer the rib-eye, so I took her recommendation. My steak came with some ordinary lightly-steamed vegetables, some gnocchi, and the aforementioned honey-jalapeno sauce. That wasn’t a combination of tastes and textures that I would have expected to go well with steak, but it did. I ordered my steak rare and it came closer to medium-rare, but it was tender and savoury, and the leftovers were really great in a sandwich the next day. My friend had penne pasta with chicken and portabello mushrooms. She was kind enough to let me snag a few noodles. The penne, one of those pasta shapes that’s not sensitive to overcooking, was a suitable vehicle for a simple sauce of heavy cream, tasting of garlic, pepper, and the mushrooms.

We didn’t have room for dessert.