Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

Starting the year off with a SHOUT!

1 Reply

Over the winter-solstice theatre dark nights I had intended to post my notes on everything I saw in December, but it didn’t seem to work that way.  I’ll work through the backlog as I can, even though the busier schedules of January and February mean that programs are piling up again.

SHOUT! is a 1960s musical revue produced by Round Barns Productions, which played at C103 in early January.  Kristen Finlay directed it, and Sally Hunt was the musical director.  During the show, five young women in England (Leslie Caffaro, Nicole English, Kristen Finlay, Erin Foster-O’Riordan, Monica Roberts) move through the years from 1962 to 1970, with songs, dancing, and glimpses of their lives in that era.  They’re called “The Red Girl”, “The Orange Girl”, “The Yellow Girl” and so on, after one of those magazine-article personality quizzes (voiceover by John Dolphin), and the quick lists of traits are turned into five distinct and attractive characters by the performers.

A magazine called Shout provided a framework moving through the show, with the characters reading articles about 1960s phenomena like Twiggy, the Beatles, and the sexual revolution.  John Dolphin’s voiceovers provided assorted magazine content, and the characters also wrote letters to “Gwendolyn Holmes” a women’s-magazine advice columnist of the era (voice by Elizabeth Marsh) who responded to most problems with suggestions like cheering oneself up by getting a new hairstyle.  Much of the advice and other magazine content was terrible from a 2015 point of view (the cigarettes diet, the asbestos dress).

The music was great, mostly songs I was familiar with.  I loved the “Coldfinger” parody of the James Bond theme, “I Only Want to Be With You”, and “Shout!”, and the “You’re My World/All I See is You” medley made me cry.  And there was enough character development arc under the mostly-lighthearted show to provide satisfying outcomes for the characters “I got pregnant!”, “I got sober”, and “I got Penelope!”  Especially the one who takes over for the advice columnist.

Zombies and the Bard

Leave a reply

Red Deer College’s William Shakespeare in the Land of the Dead, which played in October of last year, was a performance that didn’t fit tidily into a genre.  The title gave a hint of what to expect though – a juxtaposition of Shakespeare and zombies.

The play was written in 2008 or so by John Heimbuch, and directed by Kelly Reay of Calgary.   The cast of fourteen are all students in the graduating year of the Theatre Performance and Creation program, last seen as an ensemble in Ten Lost Years last spring.

The set, constructed in the black-box space of Studio A, created the sense of being in the greenroom or other backstage space at the Globe Theatre shortly after it had been built, with warm yellow lighting and a light mist or haze, rough wooden benches and table, and large exposed beams suspended overhead.  The scene opens with Kate (Pharaoh Amnesty), the ” ‘tiring girl” for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company, starting to clear up the room while a performance is going on.  Shakespeare (Evan Macleod) and Burbage (Richie Jackson), friends and collaborators, then enter and discuss past and future productions, the politics of the day, the troubles of dealing with actors and patrons, and so on.  Will Kemp (Nate Rehman), the clown of the company who had been known for playing Falstaff, bounces in, pesters Shakespeare to write Falstaff into more scenes, and taunts him that audiences would rather see his jigging and foolishness than a story with a plot.  The parts that I knew about seemed consistent with canon, and this part introduced some of the main characters, but I felt like it dragged a little and was sometimes hard to hear or to follow.

The rest of the company tumbles backstage at the end of their performance, stripping off tabards for Kate and the company apprentice Rice (Robyn Jeffrey) to collect and fold, and calling for everyone to join them at a tavern.  But while Kemp and Shakespeare stay at the theatre, the tavern excursion encounters some zombies and comes back infected.  Other characters attempt to shelter in the theatre, unaware of the contamination, most notably Queen Elizabeth I (Emily Cupples) with a small retinue.  Cupples, in large starched ruff, was splendidly regal.

The production is a wonderful showcase of zombie makeup, because those bitten early in the show show more decay with their every entrance, while those who manage to survive until near the end appear nearly undamaged.  As I don’t have my program for this production at my fingertips I can’t tell you who to credit for this design and application.

Dark humour and a celebration of love: Jeffrey

Leave a reply

Earlier this week I was fortunate to being able to attend a preview show for Walterdale Theatre Associates’ new production of Jeffrey, the 1992 comedy by Paul Rudnick about a young single gay man in New York City, frustrated by the precautions and disclosures and negotiations around sex in the era of AIDS.  It was directed by Kyle Thulien and Sarah Van Tassel.   Jeffrey (Sean Richard MacKinnon) decides that he’s just going to stop having sex.  This works out about as well as you might expect, starting with him going to the gym for distraction and encountering handsome Steve (Logan Boon).   Thus follows a whirlwind of glimpses of Jeffrey’s life as a catering waiter and aspiring actor, with his close friends Sterling (Gerald Mason), an interior designer and his younger boyfriend Darius (Simon Müller), a chorus performer in the musical Cats!  Jeffrey works at fundraisers and funerals, takes his laundry to the cleaner on Pride Parade day, sits with Sterling in the hospital where Darius is dying, and explores a church, a kind of sex club, and a game-show panel in some of the less narrative-reality-based scenes.   The rest of the ensemble (Trevor Talbott, Mark Kelly, Catherine Wenschlag, and Morgan D. D. Refschauge) play various characters in all these settings.  I particularly enjoyed the scene in which Jeffrey imagines his conservative kind Wisconsinite parents (Wenschlag and Talbott) giving him homey but disturbingly explicit advice about sex, and Wenschlag as an overbearingly-enthusiastic mother on Pride day, reminiscent of Sharon Gless’s character Debbie on Queer As Folk (the Toronto/Pittsburgh version).

We learn that Steve is HIV-positive and we watch Sterling and Jeffrey cope with Darius’s illness and death, and Jeffrey’s reaction goes from seeming funny and overly squeamish to grippingly understandable.  Jeffrey’s determination to avoid the complications of sex looks very much like anyone’s determination to avoid the risk of heartbreak by not falling in love – and by the end we are all cheering for him and Steve to get together.

This story is set several years after the events portrayed in The Normal Heart and in Angels in America Part I.  It was set in the same city and about the same year as the most recent Walterdale show, Six Degrees of Separation, which gives perspective to the society matron’s question in that show “Are you infected? do you have AIDS?” as quite a reasonable worry.  The dark humour of this script around finding new cultural norms for sexual behaviour must have been very powerful when it was first produced, with audiences who remembered the time before safer sex and were themselves learning how their lives would change.    As I was volunteering at a student preview show, I was privileged to attend a cast/crew talkback session, in which participants in the show provided some of their perspectives and some context to the young audience.  I think it is still funny for modern audiences, and its message celebrating the joy in committed love is universal.

Jeffrey is playing at the Walterdale Theatre until Saturday February 14th (another option for your Valentines’ Day date!) with tickets at Tix on the Square.

 

Birdie on the Wrong Bus!

Leave a reply

The other night I went to a performance of Promise Productions’ Birdie on the Wrong Bus, a delightful and satisfying story written by Ellen Chorley and directed by Andrew Ritchie.  I wish I’d been able to share the show with my 9 year old nephew, because I think he would have loved it and learned a lot that would have enhanced a visit to Edmonton.  Maybe I can lobby for a remount when my nephew is visiting?

I also liked it a lot myself.  For me there is something deeply satisfying about seeing or reading a story for young people that has elements I didn’t get enough of as a kid.  A young female protagonist who is bright, stubborn, and not overly cute.  An adventurous kid who isn’t punished by the plotline.   An odd kid who isn’t shown as being bullied.  Celebration of women in sports (I just about squeed myself out of my seat and elbowed the stranger beside me in delight when the Edmonton Grads came into the story.) Siblings who are impatient with each other but not mean.  Local mentions, places I know.  And an overall message of the rewards of discovering the city for yourself and acquiring a personal story of “Why I love Edmonton”.

The premise of the story cleverly set up the situation of a kid stuck on a wrong bus, with an explanation that fearful kids and worried parents alike could buy into without worrying that a similar thing could happen by accident.  Being on the wrong bus alone is intimidating, scary, and/or embarrassing for anyone, but that shouldn’t deter people from supporting kids to ride public transit.  Birdie, the earnest and anxious protagonist, was played convincingly by Mari Chartier.  She first jumps onto the wrong bus to defy her older sister, as the usual routine has the Grade 4 and Grade 6 siblings expected to travel home together on nights a parent can’t meet them, and the bus departs before she can get off again.

Other roles – teacher, sister, bus drivers and passengers – were all covered by Lana Michelle Hughes and Ben Stevens, with some impressively quick backstage costume changes.  Within the environment of a moving bus, Birdie encounters several people she first misjudges and then learns from – a Goth teen with big headphones is not actually a scary vampire, a homeless person collecting drink containers for the deposit money is interesting and friendly, everyone is passionate about some locations in the city because of personal meaning and memories.

Since I was young I have also loved realism in stage set elements, too.  The simple portrayal of seats on a bus, with a hint of the proper window shape and the signal cord, gets increased authenticity with a real ETS bus-stop sign, advertising placards, and farebox.

Happy Toes

Leave a reply

Teatro la Quindicina is presenting a remount of Stewart Lemoine’s Happy Toes at the Varscona Theatre until October 18th (next Saturday).  This is the last play in their season, and their last before the Varscona renovations start.  With a cast of Julien Arnold, Jeff Haslam, Ron Pederson, Cathy Derkach, and Davina Stewart, I knew it would be funny and clever.  And it was.  What I didn’t expect was that it would be quiet, gentle, and thoughtful.  Jeff Haslam was particularly subtle as Tony, independently-wealthy single friend to Julien Arnold’s Alex.  All of the characters were people who didn’t rush into big changes and who didn’t talk about feelings easily.  Tony, Alex, and Edgar (Pederson) were longtime friends in the habit of meeting for coffee.  Edgar, a music teacher, and Tony are concerned when Alex shares some trouble in his marriage, but they are unsure how to support him.  Davina Stewart plays Alex’s restless wife Janine, and Cathy Derkach a new acquaintance who meets the group through Edgar, a customer at the bank where she works.

There is a predictable miscommunication confusion about the estranged spouses showing up at the same event and misinterpreting, but it’s played in the same understated style that the characters have developed.  And there is an ending which turns out happy but not trite.  Tix on the Square has the tickets as usual.

The Violet Hour starts U of A Studio Theatre season

Leave a reply

Last week I saw the preview performance of the first show in the six-show U of A Studio Theatre season, Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour, directed by MFA Directing candidate Lucy Callingwood. I didn’t write about it immediately because I wasn’t sure what I thought of it.  I’m still not sure.  I remember feeling similar confusion last year when I saw pool (no water), which I came to appreciate more later.

As an audience member I like the Studio Theatre a lot, with the steeply-raked high-back seats and good acoustics making it easy for me to lose myself in the mood on stage without getting distracted by other audience members or by uncomfortable seats.  Like most Studio Theatre productions, this one had interesting design choices contributing to the world of the play, and used the deep stage effectively.   All the action was set in a dingy office room in a New York City building in 1919, with a colour palette leaning towards the golds and browns of worn leather, period incandescent lights, and painted wooden walls and furniture.  The sky visible outside the windows and uneven horizontal blinds changed colour as the day progressed, towards the violet of dusk alluded to in the title.

The narrative starts with a scene of two men working in this office and shouting at each other.  At first I assumed that the older one, Gidger (Julien Arnold, a BFA program grad some time ago, often making me laugh on local stages from the Varscona to the Shoctor, and memorable as the jailer in Die Fledermaus), was in charge. I was especially amused by the bit where Gidger is acting out his dog’s behaviour.

In a later exchange the younger one, John Pace Seavering (Oscar Derkx, BFA 2014), refers to Gidger as his employee, but I had been so convinced of my earlier assumption that I thought that was a slip of the tongue.  Without seeing it again, I can’t tell what reinforced my wrong assumption.  But Pace (Derkx) was a recent Princeton graduate, probably bankrolled by his father, trying to choose what manuscript to select as a first publication.  He gets the choice narrowed down to two, one submitted by his college friend (Neil Kuefler, BFA 2014) and the other submitted by his lover (Nimet Kanji of Vancouver).  The stakes for this choice are high for both Kuefler’s character and Kanji’s character.  Pace cares about both and wants to please both, but I wasn’t convinced that his own stakes were high, and I found the eventual resolution to this difficulty a bit unsatisfying.  A more interesting aspect to his character is some mention of a struggle to reconcile not being an artistic creator himself.

The script had some science-fictional or magic-realist aspects to it.  Probably more magical, because I didn’t catch any real explanation about either the messages from the future or an apparent timeline-reset. This complicates Pace’s decision-making with some snippets of information about what happens to the characters in the future.  The messages from the future (in the format of printed excerpts of written documentation) also give opportunities for the playwright to poke some pointed fun at academic and quasi-academic disciplines of the present day that use modern jargon and draw conclusions from very little documented evidence.  Julien Arnold’s comic talents were a delight throughout the show but were particularly evident in sharing the messages from future writers.  The characters of almost a hundred years ago also had fun with terminology shifts they discover, “gay” especially but also words like “existential” and “co-opted”. “By the end of this century,” Gidger explains at one point, “being offended will be the noblest thing a person can aspire to.” Ouch.

Pace’s lover Jessie (Kanji), a jazz singer, is presented as African-American, or as various synonyms of the terminology of the day of various levels of appropriateness and inappropriateness.   Some of the ways Gidger introduces her verged on gratuitous and made me uncomfortable.  He also uses various ethnic slurs to introduce Kuefler’s character Denis/Denny, who is of Irish descent.   Jessie is probably also significantly older than Pace, and although neither character is married their relationship is clearly on the down-low (not to be commonly known), probably due to the racial difference more than the age difference.  “I’ll be your secret, but I won’t be your lie” she declares at one point.  Some fascinating concepts in the social construction of race in that environment are hinted at.

The fifth character in the play, Rosamund Plinth, is played with brittle flirtatiousness by Lianna Makuch, a 2013 BFA grad.  Her character seemed like a familiar type among the Bright Young Thing wealthy young women escorted by the “lost-generation” young men after the First World War.  I was struck by the common trope that the young woman is in fragile mental health and needs to be protected and catered to, while Denny is probably more messed up but is not treated with much sympathy except by his friend Pace who doesn’t really know how to help him.

There are many references to truth and lies in the script, most of them not to be taken at face value.  This script is convoluted enough that I probably would have benefited from a second viewing, but I didn’t have time.

The next Studio Theatre offering, Moira Buffini’s Loveplay, features some of the BFA Acting class of 2015 in the first show of their Studio Theatre season.  It previews Wednesday October 29th and runs until Saturday November 8th, with tickets at Tix on the Square.

Fun-raising, friend-raising, and fundraising events

Leave a reply

“Friend-raising” is what a friend who worked with university Advancement used to call the university’s efforts to make and maintain positive connections with community members, recognizing that building connections and building community pays off in the long run in lots more ways than immediate financial donations.

So even though it sometimes seems odd to me to get people to come to a special event where they do something fun together, as a way of raising money for a cause they can agree on, I know that it works.  It works especially well when the fun can be had without a lot of extra paid work or paid-for refreshments and entertainment.  And it works by generating enthusiasm and connections, rekindling friendships, and reminding people of what the organization does and how to be more involved.  This worked well for Northern Light Theatre’s event last weekend, and I bet it’s also going to work for Opera Nuova’s event later this month.

I went to a fun fundraising event last weekend, Northern Light Theatre’s Battle for the Limelight.  In this event, teams from local theatre companies and organizations had the chance to raise money for their own organization through pledges, and also earned money for Northern Light Theatre through entry fees and other ways of generating cash.  And it was also a great opportunity for people involved in theatre to have a fun day together in one of the rare times of year when not much is happening on stage.  Teams from Northern Light, Rapid Fire, Nextfest, Promise Productions, Teatro Quindicina, Grindstone, Theatre Alberta, Theatre Network, Freewill Shakespeare, FAVA, and Workshop West competed in an Amazing-Race-style sequence of stunts and searches all over Old Strathcona on a beautiful early-September day.  Local businesses and artists helped by posing, hosting, and judging various challenges, from reproducing an original painting and decorating cupcakes to eating thousand-year-old eggs.   I was volunteering at the “Busking” challenge.  At this station, two talented drummers from taiko group “The Booming Tree” taught a drumming song to one of the participants, and then he or she would have to perform while the teammates attempted to drum up (see what I did there) spare change from passers-by.

After the groups completed their challenges, everyone gathered back at the Queen Alexandra Community League to tell stories, eat delicious refreshments, and compare notes on their summers.  I had to leave for another event before the winners were announced, but blogger Finster Finds reported that the first place (Golden Handjob) went to Team AIEEEEE! (Teatro la Quindicina) , with the Silver and Bronze going to teams from Nextfest and Theatre Alberta.

I also want to mention another fun event coming up on September 27th, Opera Nuova’s Singalong Phantom of the Opera.  For $44 ($40 student/senior), you can have the fun of singing along with the hits of the Broadway show, led by experienced soloists and helped out by lyrics projected above the stage.  The event takes place at River Community Church, 11520 Ellerslie Road SW, at 7:30 pm.  Tickets are available at Tix on the Square.  It sounds like a lot of fun!

Also on the playbill for this week (have I mentioned yet how handy it is to have my own copy of the Theatre Alberta playbill stuck to my refrigerator where I can look at it every morning?) are previews/openings for The Violet Hour (U of A Studio Theatre), Fatboy (Roxy Theatre), and Kim’s Convenience (Citadel), as well as more Rapid Fire shows Friday and Saturday and a clown showcase by the final-year BFA students.

Two new Alberta works: En anglais, sil vous plaît, and Fugly.

Leave a reply

I only watched two shows yesterday, with a long beer-tent volunteer shift and some other Fringe hanging out in between.  I enjoyed the cooler weather.  Not so much this morning’s rain, but it’s not supposed to last.

En Anglais, s’il vous plaît, at the Strathcona Library, is a new play written by local actor Vincent Forcier, starring Kristi Hansen, Steve Jodoin, and Ian Leung.  It’s performed partly in French and partly in English, with all the French being translated in supertitles projected above the stage.  I like to think that I didn’t need the supertitles at all, but I can reassure you that they were easy to see without being distracted from the story. 

Because I haven’t lived in Alberta very long, and because my study of French and exposure to francophone community was mostly in Ontario and eastern Canada, I didn’t know much at all about the history and politics of francophone Alberta.  I found this play fascinating.  It interwove the familiar story of a typical young Alberta couple, Amour (Steve Jodoin), raised by francophone parents and attending French schools, and Douce (Kristi Hansen), of Ukrainian background and grown up in an English milieu, with the political narrative of Leo Paquette, the first Alberta MLA to speak in the legislature in French.  Ian Leung played Leo Paquette and also played Amour’s father.  As the narrator addressing the audience at the start, he speaks clearly and slowly in French and in code-switched French and English, engaging the cautious audience and reassuring us that we’d be able to follow.  As M. Paquette, his formal speeches in the legislature are equally clear.  And when he shifts to playing Amour’s father, resentful of his Anglophone daughter-in-law, his speech is much faster and more idiomatic.  I had to work to understand him and it was easy to put myself in Douce’s place, feeling unwelcome and unappreciated for the effort I’d been making.

There were clear parallels between M. Paquette’s political initiatives and his determination not to apologize for exercising his rights in order not to set a precedent diminishing those rights, and Amour’s ongoing efforts at home to get his wife to speak enough French to expose their future child to the language.  “I’m pissed off that it’s easier for you!”, she exclaims, illustrating some common misconceptions of language-majority privilege.  I was surprised that the political story took place as recently as 1986.  One of my favourite parts of the play was the scene where Leo Paquette is in the legislature, addressing the Speaker of the House (played by Kristi Hansen) and Steve Jodoin is playing all the other MLAs addressing the house, each with his or her own facial expressions, accents, and voices.

At the end of the night, I went to C103 to see Fugly.   Their show programs are attached to wooden sticks so that you can use them as fans more easily, which is clever in warm weather in C103.  Returning the fan/program meant that I can’t tell you for sure who was playing which character, but the Fringe program has Joleen Ceraldi, Heather Falk, and Helen Knight, in a company from Calgary called The Janes.  The elliptical storytelling in a fantasy setting seemed to be conveying the story of a woman who is searching for her mind, while caught up in various encounters with body image and conformist expectations.  The sharp lines and clear colours of the design helped to build the not-quite-real world full of mirrors.  The rhymed couplets at the start of the performance cued me immediately that this was going to be some kind of allegory or poetic impression rather than a more natural dialogue in which I should understand everything immediately.  This made me more comfortable with just watching.

Tonight is Sonder‘s turn for a late-night performance (11:30 pm at King Edward School).   The Edmonton Journal gave us 3.5 stars, with “Kudos to the high-energy cast who deal with some pretty intense material, using mime, movement and minimal props”.  We have two more shows after tonight: Thursday at 4 pm and Saturday at 6:45pm.