Amor de Cosmos, and Puck Bunnies

Leave a reply

It’s a little harder to find a connecting theme for these two – Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is a fantastical recounting of the biography of a not-very-famous figure from Canadian history. Puck Bunnies is a play about contemporary young women who are hangers-on of a local minorleague hockey team. One’s a new work written by Richard Kemick with music and lyrics by local singer-songwriter-actor Lindsay Walker, and the other is a remount from local playwrighting team Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt.

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is not in the printed Fringe programs because it was a late addition off the waitlist. And it’s a little hard to describe, but it’s quirky and charming. Cody Porter, who directed the show for its Toronto-Fringe run, stepped into the performing role for Edmonton, which is a treat for his fans here. I loved the way he changed characters as Walker (accompanying on keyboard and narrating some parts from newspaper headlines) flipped him different hats, with physicality, dialect, and eye-twinkles to match. The elliptical/heightened text recitation reminded me a bit of Jonathan Christenson’s work, and was delivered with such clarity that I didn’t realize until afterwards that a lot of it was iambic pentameter. The main character was born into a mining family in New Brunswick, made his way to California as a photographer, and ended up in BC as a newspaper publisher and then politician. I was fascinated by the way the writers included acknowledgements of where this character stood or would have stood on various issues of the day that now we see as injustices (e.g. Indian Act, Immigration Act) and was cracked up by a throwaway anachronism about the right of homosexuals to give blood. Stage 8: Kick Point OSPAC, in the schedule slots showing as Ruby Rocket in the printed program.

The Guys in Disguise play Puck Bunnies debuted at the Fringe in 2017, and the playwrights won Outstanding New Work Fringe at the Sterling awards that season. In this remount, Jake Tkaczyk is playing Tammy, the new mother bringing her baby to the game as a visible reminder of her claim to the team captain Cliff. Tanya, played by Trevor Schmidt, seems to be the one making the rules for the group calling themselves the Puck Bunnies – providing hair/fashion consultation, relationship advice, and decreeing who can sit where. Newcomer Tina, played with adorable well-intentioned bewilderment by Jason Hardwick, used to sit with the “loser girls” but has been invited into the clique as a replacement for someone they’re shunning. As they watch the intersquad game from the stands (the bleachers are facing the audience) we learn more about their lives and their relationships and a lot of it is troubling. As I probably wrote when I saw the original production in 2017, I knew people like this when I was growing up in hockey rinks in the 1970s, so it’s troubling to see the same “put the boys first” mentality in a setting contemporary enough to have Google and selfies and pussy hats. Like other recent scripts by this writing team or by Schmidt, there’s a layer of poking gentle fun at the characters, but underneath there are some pointed messages about society and glimpses of hope. Even for these young women with their limited outlook and unsupportive environment, by the end we see hints of how things can change for them and for the people around them. Stage 11, Varscona Theatre.

Today I’m excited about catching Lesbihonest, Lady Porn, and Agent Thunder. How about you?

Charcoal sketch of a person's back torso. They have shadows showing overlapping flesh at their shoulder and waist level.

Hot ticket Tuesday: five strong shows

Leave a reply

On Tuesday i carry your heart with me was dark (that’s Michelle Martin’s intimate and musical story of family and resilience). It’s back on tomorrow at Sugar Swing Ballroom Upstairs at 7:45 pm.

So I had the chance to fit in five shows that have been getting good buzz, and I was not disappointed in any of them.

Tiger Lady. This play by Dead Rabbits Theatre out of the UK drew the audience in immediately to its setting of a travelling circus in the 1930s in the USA, with ensemble members in trenchcoats with musical instruments engaging with the entering audience members. Their accents were appropriate to the characters and era – occasionally a little hard for me to understand but adding to the atmosphere. I was reminded of the Edmonton instance of the musical Hadestown, with its workers’ chorus and storytelling musicians, and I was reminded several times of kristine nutting’s Devour Content Here: Of Love and Wheat. A young woman escapes her Presbyterian aunties to follow the circus, discovering a vocation as tiger tamer and a human love with another circus worker. The characters are a bit archetypical, but not stereotypical – the dancer has agency and supports Mabel, the animal handler Louis confides “I’d want to marry you, if I swung that way”. Some beautiful and impressive acrobatics, puppetry, and excellent use of the large Westbury stage and lighting instruments. Stage 1, Westbury Theatre.

Breaking Bard. Another talented ensemble, this one seven young improvisers from Vancouver creating a Shakespearean tragedy complete with iambic pentameter which sometimes even rhymed, from a couple of audience suggestions (“arrogant” and “mountains”). Right from the land acknowledgement’s nod to improvised Shakespeare being the most colonial of choices, to the spoken prologue delivered in rhyming couplets by alternating pairs of performers, I was delighted. As another playgoer and I discussed afterwards, they touched on all kinds of Shakespearean tropes and plot devices that we hadn’t even realized were classic. The main characters (the arrogant Lord Peckington and his betrothed Olivia) each had a best friend/supporter, who also end up pairing up. There were shepherds who gave us some backstory about life around the mountain lord’s domain, mountain elves playing tricks like the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Mountain Men miners trying to protect their territory and livelihood. Partway through I remembered that they had promised us a tragedy and wondered if they would follow through, but oh they sure did. Clever and entertaining. Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre.

muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing. Someone I met in another lineup told me that for her it was a calming experience in a rushed day. Two other people told me I would like it, though one of them is a trained visual artist. I am not. But I showed up where the assistants were handing out charcoal and sketching pads, and the performer Cameryn Moore told us to leave the chairs where they were so everyone could have elbow room. Then she disrobed (literally – she had a great satin robe!) and performed a series of poses as she would do when modelling for a life-drawing class. Once she was holding longer poses, she told some of her story of how she got into modelling for art classes and how it affected her, and the Fringe audience asked questions as we drew. Apparently artists and life-drawing classes are excited about drawing diverse bodies such as Cameryn’s plus-sized middle-aged one. At the end, there was an optional “gallery” with our work on the floor to show each other and our muse. This was a surprisingly profound experience for me. I do not know which was more empowering, the reminder that it is okay for me to draw, or the reminder that it is okay for me to enjoy my own body the way it is. I loved that the other audience members were un-self-conscious enough, or at least quiet enough, that I didn’t hear other people’s self-deprecation or embarrassment about being bad at drawing. (Like in exercise classes – some of them have a culture of commenting on one’s own inadequacy, and some really don’t, and the latter is refreshing.) Stage 5, Acacia Hall.

Charcoal sketch of a person's back torso. They have shadows showing overlapping flesh at their shoulder and waist level.
Drawing of Cameryn Moore, muse, by Louise Mallory, posted by permission of both.

Old God. Alex Jones-Trujillo prances onto the stage in an ornate jesterish outfit and pantomime whiteface, poking gentle fun at audience members and giving a character backstory so vague that it sets them up to do anything. Which the character then pretty much does. Some of it is crude, some of it is thought-provoking, some of it is delightful physical theatre, and all of it is funny. The performer steps out of character. Literally – they had explained earlier that the decorative floor lighting bounds the “stage” for “theatre”, so when he steps out of it and takes off his headcovering, he becomes Alex the performer speaking to the audience rather than Old God the character. Both of them are great – creators of discomfort in the best bouffon traditions, but including the audience in the laughter and agreement. Stage 20, The Sewing Machine Factory. (This is a Fringe Shuttle stop, if you’re en route to or from La Cite. )

Sweet Jesus (the gospel according to felt). I did not know before this that filmmaker, director, and actor Randy Brososky was also a puppeteer – but he’s a good one! His Jesus was in the Muppet tradition, with one hand manipulating his head/mouth and the other embodying one of his arms. It was easy to watch the puppet instead of the puppeteer, and interact with him – because there are a lot of conversations with audience members. He even shook my hand! I was completely engaged with this narrative and I didn’t disagree with any of the things he said. His version of Jesus was in the tradition of angrily overturning the ripoff merchants’ tables – he swore a lot, but it seemed to me he was swearing about the right things. The present-day parables were great, including the subtle detail that all the characters in them had non-Anglo names or (for the ones represented by Barbie dolls) were non-white. Stage 29. Lorne Cardinal Theatre at The Roxy.

Music and laughter: Scoobie Doosical and Die Nasty

Leave a reply

On Monday at the Fringe both shows I caught were comedies. Comedies with lovely original music and clever lyrics and amusing choreography and movement. There are a lot of funny people around this festival.

Scoobie Doosical is an original musical by Rebecca Merkley, a tribute to the well-known 1970s cartoon television about the ghost-debunking gang and their Great Dane. Merkley’s company Dammitammy Productions did something similar a few years ago with River City: The Musical, parodying the Archie comic-book characters.

Live accompaniment (Yvonne Boon and Robyn Slack) enhances the lyrics both goofy and touching, and the impressive singing voices of cast Cameron Chapman, Bella King, Natalie Czar, and Andrew Cormier. Cormier plays the villain Professor Gigglepuffs (“Riggleruffs” in Scoobie’s dialect) with a flair evocative of Frank N. Furter in Rocky Horror (Picture) Show – and also plays Velma. Czar plays the villain’s sidekick/cat and also plays Daphne. (Imagine some wig-quick-changes). Chapman and King play the Shaggy and Scoobie characters, building on the source-material expectations to create lovable caricatures. The plot was also reminiscent of the source material, confusing at first but all falling into place with happy and fair resolutions. Stage 4 Walterdale Theatre, selling quickly.

Die Nasty is “an Edmonton comedy institution for 30 years” according to their program blurb. At the Fringe, the long-form improvised soap opera has an episode every night that takes place at the Fringe, with some familiar characters and some archetypical ones. The night I saw it, it was directed by Peter Brown with live music by Paul Morgan Donald, and there were 16 performers on stage, including guests Joel Taras and Jake Tkaczyk as well as Stephanie Wolfe, Jacob Banigan, Kirsten Throndson and other ensemble members. Characters I remember from previous years included Kristi Hansen’s version of Liz Nicholls, this time skating off across the grounds with Jesse Gervais’ Robin Fairweather, the tin-whistle-playing Edmonton institution. I particularly appreciated the acknowledgement of this character’s mixed reputation, and I think other audience members did too. Mark Meer’s Hunter S Thompson-esque podcaster wasn’t in the episode I saw, but his gum-chewing colleague Kalyn Miles was. The Mormon elder missionary (Jason Hardwick) was successful in converting hot dog vendor Fat Frank (Gordie Lucius), and for some reason this involved switching the missionary’s white dress shirt and nametag with the hot dog vendor’s apron. Murray Utas made an appearance (as portrayed memorably by Jake Tkaczyk). When given the directorial challenge by Brown to speak about his secret wishes, we find out (in an original musical solo then enhanced by a dancing ensemble) that Murray would really like to leave paperwork behind and perform his own Fringe autobiographical solo piece, complete with embodying three characters, the young Murray, the woman who coaches him, and … I’ve actually forgotten who the third one was, because I was laughing so hard at this point.) Die Nasty continues every night at 10 pm at Varscona Theatre, Venue 11. You do not need to have seen previous episodes to enjoy it.

After the accident: Sea Wall and Flicker

Leave a reply

Yesterday’s plays both explored the aftermath of awful accidents, in very different styles.

Sea Wall is a solo play written by Simon Stephens and directed by Belinda Cornish. Jamie Cavanagh’s character slowly enters his kitchen, turns off the room’s air conditioning, puts on the kettle, and begins telling the audience about the events of his life that left a hole through his stomach, as he puts it. There were no lighting shifts or sound effects that I noticed, no props except for the tea makings. And we were silent and on the edge of our seats for the whole 45 minutes. In a few lines each, the character describes three significant family members and his relationships with all of them. The shift to telling about a particular event is subtle. And none of it – his joy, his pain, his questions about God and the universe – is any louder or more external than it needs to be. Brilliant. Venue 34, Roots on Whyte building, elevator access.

Flicker, a new script by Shawn Marshall, shows what happens to a young hockey prospect (Ike Williams) after a car accident. The story is not linear, the ensemble players (Riley Smith, Michaela Demeo, Carys Jones, Angie Bustos) all seem to be playing James’ memories and parts of his psyche, and it uses the symbol of a buzzing flickering lightbulb to jump from memory to memory. One of them reminded me disturbingly of Cylon Six in Battlestar Galactica, the Tricia Helfer character. The direction makes good use of the whole wide stage at Sugar Swing Ballroom Upstairs. My favourite bit was the father-son fishing trip with an awkward sex-talk agenda. Venue 27, Sugar Swing Ballroom Upstairs. Air conditioning, bar, no elevator but advance access for anyone needing extra time on the stairs.

Forest of Truth and Bathsheba …

Leave a reply

Putting all the show titles in the post title makes weird mashups. Especially these two, which some from very different shared mythology cultural referents.

Forest of Truth involves the same people who brought the inspired weirdness of i’m lovin it to Fringe a few years ago, Theatre Gumbo of Japan. It’s set in a fairytale milieu with some familiar tropes, and references to characters like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. There’s a problem to solve – the Queen of the forest needs some True Love Extract to preserve/extend her beauty – and an adorable sidekick. But the unfolding action includes some parts that are very much not for children! I loved it that the plot did not stick with the Man being the romantic pursuer and the Woman wanting marriage for other reasons – the Woman was also checking out (climbing on?) several audience members as potential partners, with clearly physical intent. As in i’m lovin it, there were some visually-delightful bits with props, and a diarrhea joke. Forest of Truth would also have been funny if it were slightly less heteronormative. Venue 28, Roxy Theatre on 124 Street.

Bathsheba and the Books is a straightforwardly ridiculous comedy. I was familiar enough with the source material to find extra humour in the details, but even without, I think Aimée Beaudoin’s sex symbol of the ancient world, as costumed by Trevor Schmidt with exactly the right kind of gown to seem credibly period and suitable enhancement for the character’s … endowments … was just so fun to watch and listen to. She’s obviously in control of her world, a scholar who manages the men of the household after the death of her husband King David. Chris Fassbender and Jeff Halaby are her collaborators and servants, and Jake Tkaczyk is equally larger-than-life as her son, a young King Solomon. Directed by Davina Stewart, the pacing is good, the laughs are frequent, and the canon-consistency is left at “it coulda been”. Lots of dramatic-irony asides which are funny if you have some ideas how the Bible is treated in 21st century cultures and religions. I have to admit that I was a tiny bit distracted by the costume practicalities of how they got sparkly gold Birkenstock-type footwear. Venue 1, Westbury.

Fringe Day 2: Anatomica, rain, Late Night Cabaret

Leave a reply

Maybe the rain should come first. It was definitely the start of a lot of conversations – where were you when the hail hit last night? what all did they shut down? how are they managing the flooding and cleanup? Friday there were no outdoor performances, on stage or in busking pitches. There was no KidsFringe, no North Beer Tent, no Wine Tent. There was a very busy and competent Squeegee Crew – I am sure they have another official name, but I always saw them with squeegees. And it kept raining.

Anatomica is Amica Hunter’s solo show. I think they said it was their first solo? I remember them from the two-handed A Little Bit Off physical theatre performances of previous Fringes, Beau and Aero, and A Grave Mistake. Anatomica was different in some ways – it was all a conversation with the audience – but it employed similar absurdities, exploring odd ways of moving and expressing the performer’s body and discussing the idea of having different kinds of bodies. The performer represents a lobster or crab at one point, and a worm at one point, both in weirdly-credible ways. There’s enough narrative thread to feel satisfying, some honest reflections on the performer’s life through the first pandemic years, and some very funny prop business that worked. (Sometimes I wonder about physical-theatre creators and their process. Do they walk through Home Depot with a shopping list but get distracted by picking up things and saying “this would make a great megaphone! this would make great nipples for a meatsuit! if I put these things together could I build a toilet-paper shooting cannon?”). I think that people who like Very Weird Theatre would like this, but also, people who don’t like Very Weird Theatre but just like stories, people who want to hear various bodily frailties represented on stage, and people who liked watching Amica and their performance partner in the earlier shows. Venue 22: Holy Trinity basement, whatever that is called.

Last night was the first Late Night Cabaret of this year’s Fringe. Joleen Ballandine and Sydney Campbell were hosting, and Zee Wee Punterz were the house band. Lots of the usual traditions, from Writers Row jokes to Free Shit giveaways, cameo glimpses of several shows in the festival all of which I want to see now, and a happy crowd coming back together. I don’t actually know the premise of Shakespeare’s Sirens so I’m not entirely sure who the characters were supposed to be who were having a gladiator-style single combat complete with dueling pasty-twirling … and I don’t know the etiquette of mentioning performer names when I’m not sure of their burlesque stage names … but let me say, that was memorable and probably unique. And I have a ticket to see it again tonight. Stage 2: Backstage Theatre.

I’m also hoping to catch Forest of Truth at the Roxy (by Theatre Gumbo, the Japanese troupe who did I’m Lovin It at King Edward School a few years ago), and Bathsheba and the Books (Journal 4-stars) at the Westbury.

FIJI and Sad Girl Songs: A Comedy

Leave a reply

Sad Girl Songs: A Comedy Show, by/starring Gwen Coburn, has a little bit of everything. Staged as a standup act with digressions, it includes some very funny original songs about sex and dating, and hints of the performer having PTSD after a sexual assault … with entertaining analogies to some incidents in Greek mythology. Paced like good standup, there was no unbearable lingering, just enough discomfort to land. I had quite a few belly laughs and I could hear that other audience members did too. Sugar Swing Upstairs.

Fiji A lot of the characters I’ve seen Chris Cook portray on stage are earnest, uneducated, uncouth people I end up rooting for and feeling sorry for. His character Sam in Fiji fits mostly into that category – although well-spoken and apparently thoughtful, he’s painfully eager to make a good impression on his host Nic (Vance Avery). The horrific nature of their planned encounter unfolds slowly, in a “is it really? maybe not. oh my god yes” sort of way. Jumps to a series of quiz questions were indicated by a weird loud buzzing noise – at first I thought this might be something more like changes to a different reality, but no, the weekend locked in the apartment progressed relentlessly towards … yeah. I was thinking at the end that if I saw director Lora Brovold or producers Gavin Dyer and Michelle Robb in the lobby afterwards I would say, that is one F-ed up story, but I didn’t. Lively audience with many familiar artist faces for midnight show. I gather that the script was an Edinburgh Fringe find – a few lines were changed to local references (Save-On Foods, Remedy Cafe). Gateway Theatre. Oh! Which was pleasantly cool, with the new air-conditioning system.

Not sure what I’ll see today – I start the afternoon with a shift serving drinks in one of the Fringe’s beer tents, and the show I’m stage managing, i carry your heart with me, doesn’t play until 10:30 pm. It’s raining, but I don’t think that will continue all day.

Fringe is the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Leave a reply

It’s the Eve of Fringe! The ordinary blocks of Old Strathcona where people usually go to the library and the farmers’ market, the restaurants and pubs, the little park where people protest and hang out … is being transformed into the site of one of Edmonton’s best and biggest festivals. Beer tents are up but not stocked. Clean white hoardings have been covered with show posters. A few roads are closed, but there are no crowds around buskers yet, or long queues for green onion cakes and mini doughnuts. Theatre people can be spotted at a higher frequency than in Ordinary Time, as they rush to rehearsals, tech times, and volunteer training sessions. Today while I was carrying posters for i carry your heart with me around to local businesses, I spotted Jamie Cavanagh and Belinda Cornish (performer and director, respectively, for the Bright Young Things production Sea Wall.

The Box Office is open, in the Arts Barns and online. Artist Services is open. And a little under 24 hours from now, the first plays will start.

I’m stage managing i carry your heart with me, Michelle Martin’s solo about her mother, a fiery, funny, French-Canadian. It’s at Sugar Swing Ballroom Upstairs (air conditioned, liquor-licensed, and a short walk from the main grounds). I’m also doing a few shifts in the Beer Tents as usual.

And I haven’t booked any tickets yet, but I’m drafting out my schedule to fit in as much exciting theatre as I can. Some of the productions on my wish list are the following.

  • Sad Girl Songs: A Comedy
  • Tiger Lady
  • Puck Bunnies
  • Scooby Doosical
  • Flicker
  • Forest of Truth
  • Fiji
  • Lady Porn
  • muse: an experiment in life drawing
  • Lesbihonest
  • Amor di Cosmos
  • Bathsheba and the Books
  • Sweet Jesus:
  • Old God
  • Anatomica
  • Rat Academy
  • Method Prix
  • Tree
  • Talk about Your Death
  • Lia and Dor
  • Breaking Bard
  • Late Night Cabaret

Or maybe I’ll add some more that people are talking about. So, talk!

And rest up, it’s a busy 11 days!

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

Leave a reply

First, you have three more chances to see Flop! before it closes Sunday evening May 28th. If you haven’t yet been to a show at Rapid Fire Theatre’s permanent home, Rapid Fire Exchange on 83rd Avenue, this is a great reason to check out the venue. Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting bring an inspired variation on the musical-theatre-improv genre which uses the framing of two performers unexpectedly being stuck without script, lyrics, set, or costumes, just a musician (Erik Mortimer), so they call for audience suggestions and build a musical on the fly. Like skilled stage magicians, they increase the entertainment value of what they’re doing by making it look hard, sometimes stepping out of character between scenes to work out what to do next. I’m accustomed to improv troupes who appear to do impossible things easily – Rapid Fire’s own Off Book: The Musical, Gordon’s Big Bald Head – and I loved the extra layer of entertainment in seeing Pederson and Botting acting being terrible at something they are actually brilliant at. I hadn’t seen Ashley Botting on stage before – except in her recent guest appearance in Die-Nasty’s current improv drama Doctors – and she is delightful. Tickets for Flop! and future Rapid Fire shows are available here.

Boy Trouble, the new two-performer version of Mac Brock’s script, has two more performances in the Studio space at the Fringe Arts Barns, this afternoon at 2 pm, and this evening (which is showing as sold out on line.) I haven’t been able to see this one yet but I loved the solo version of it which inspired this retelling, at NextFest 2019 and then again at Fringe 2019.

Prison Dancer at the Citadel closes tomorrow afternoon. The performance this afternoon (Saturday May 27 at 1:30 pm) is the last audience-masks-required performance of the Citadel season. Tickets are available here.

Several years ago I attended a staged reading at the APN Script Salon of a new play called Anahita’s Republic, about women’s lives in contemporary Iran. Even in a music-stands reading in a plain meeting room, the script grabbed my attention and shook up some of my assumptions, so I was excited to see it fully staged. The company AuTash Productions, and playwriting team Hengameh E. Rice, have had two full productions – a recent one at Toronto’s Factory Theatre directed by Brenley Charkow, and this one directed by Brian Dooley, with a completely different cast and creative team. Roya Yazdanmehr is compelling as the eponymous Anahita, a woman who runs the family business and weathy household according to her own rules. From the first scene, when she strides in after a swim, applying lotion to bare legs, and then responds to her brother/business-partner (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri as Cyrus) who is pleading for money for his children’s activities, she did not fit my assumptions about how women live in that particular regime. But their history, and its effect on them, unfolds more slowly, making it more shocking to imagine this woman as a militant 16yo beside her late mother in a crowd of protesters. The next character who enters is a woman in a chador, Omid (Jennie George), but once again, my first assumptions about her life were wrong. Michael Peng plays Omid’s father, business associate of Cyrus and Anahita. Late in the play, when they are all in a situation with no good solutions, Anahita talks about different kinds of freedom and about how nobody is really free. Their situation has a resolution, but it’s not ideal. The play made me want to see more complex stories like this, coming out of a context I don’t know well but not limited by it. Program notes and vocabulary are provided through a QR code, and a large display timeline about event’s relevant to women in Iran on the lobby wall – including both mandatory “unveiling”, with enforcement, and mandatory “veiling”, also with brutal enforcement.

Tickets to Anahita’s Republic, playing until June 4th at the Fringe Backstage, are available here.

In a complete change of mood, last night I attended the opening performance of Elyne Quan’s Listen, Listen! as part of the Teatro Live! season. I giggled so much that another audience member commented to me and my companion about it at intermission.

Farron Timoteo plays a mall bookstore worker passionate about selecting background music, Nadien Chu plays a customer who objects to the music, and Nikki Hulowski and Alex Ariate play a hilarious collection of ensemble characters in the bookstore workplace. The play is set in 1986, which means that the sound designers (director Belinda Cornish and stage manager Frances Bundy) got to use all the catchy tunes of that era, costume designer Leona Brausen, fresh from designing for 10 Funerals, with half its scenes in that era, got to evoke memories of women’s soft-tie business blouses, asymmetrical hairstyles for young people, and leather ties, and the playwright got to stick in lots of dramatic-irony jokes about how people in 1986 expected the future to go.

Like many of Stuart Lemoine’s works performed by Teatro, this play was an affectionate portrayal of quirky characters, plot-driven but with lots of scope for entertaining character business. It was a lot of fun. Tickets are here.

Other theatre events coming up – I may not make it to all of them, but I’m noting them here for you –

Helen, the Euripedes comedy about Helen of Troy directed by Amy de Felice outdoors at the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium, runs to June 4th.

CHUMP, by Sue Goberdhan, is “about growing, grieving, and being Guyanese”. It is being workshopped and will have one public performance at the Fringe Studio June 11.

Nextfest, the annual festival of and for emerging artists, runs June 1-11.

The Sterling Awards nominations will be announced at 5 pm on June 5th at the Arts Barns, and winners will be celebrated at a more affordable event than the pre-pandemic Mayfield galas, also at the Arts Barns on Monday June 26th.

Walterdale Theatre’s 2023-2024 season launch event will also be held June 5th – doors at 7 pm, event at 8 pm.

And … in August it will be Fringe! Fringe 42: The Answer. (Do you know where your towel is?)

Subscribe or Like – real people in the online world

Leave a reply

Set for Subscribe or Like, design Stephanie Bahniuk.

The last event in Workshop West’s season is the world premiere production of Liam Salmon’s Subscribe or Like, directed by Kate Ryan.

On entering the Gateway Theatre’s auditorium, the audience sees a simple box set presenting a room in a small basement apartment. But it’s set on an angle, and there is no drapery backing it or surrounding it. One can’t forget that this room is on a stage – and when the lights dimmed and the play was about to start, we could see each actor entering the backstage space from the lobby, before entering the apartment’s front door as the characters. This cannot be an accident (Stephanie Bahniuk, set and costume design).

The characters living in this apartment were a young couple, Rachel (Gabby Bernard) and Miles (Geoffrey Simon Brown). He’s unemployed, trying to find work commensurate with his marketing degree instead of joining her at the coffee shop where she’s a part-time barista, and he has a toothache. Their socioeconomic situation is tacitly illustrated by the fact that the dialogue never considers taking the toothache to a dentist – he treats it with a salt-water rinse and she doesn’t comment. Miles likes to make and share “prank” videos, often involving scaring or surprising his girlfriend. She doesn’t seem to enjoy this. It’s clear that both are unhappy with their lives – it’s less clear whether they are still happy with each other.

Miles continues posting his videos on a YouTube channel, and talks about reaching enough subscribers to make money with it. Rachel co-operates – they talk about whether the stunts work better when scripted or when she is truly surprised – and then she starts adding some of her own content to the channel. They start adding viewers, likes, subscribers. They seem – if not happier, then at least more engaged – and they focus more on how to attract and keep the viewers, making some more extreme choices (including one or two that I could hardly bear to watch).

Another feature of the show’s design was the extensive use of video (Ian Jackson, multimedia design) to show or evoke online content. I think there were nine large LCD screens suspended outside the room, and sometimes the content was also projected across the walls and floor of the apartment. So “the set” is clearly not just the room in their apartment, but also … the internet? The video isn’t just clips from their YouTube channel, but some of the comments.

And this is important, because the comments affect the characters. In one disturbing but credible exchange, Miles explains to Rachel that the trope of misogynistic commenting generating more interest in the channel is a common phenomenon and a good thing for the channel.

When they talk about whether stopping the posts might be a good next step for them as people and as a couple, Miles protests that the channel matters to the viewers. “But they’re not real!“, protests Rachel.

It is very odd to be writing a blog post about this play, wondering if people will read it, and wondering if reading this post will influence them to go see the play. (See it! It’s good! It’s entertaining, it’s horrifying, and it made us stand in the parking lot for ages talking about the issues raised.) While YouTube is not my medium, I know that online communities are real. This … I was going to say corner of the blogosphere, but spheres shouldn’t have corners? … isn’t particularly interactive, but I know it’s still contributing to community. And just as I notice how many people viewed my blog post or Instagram story, liked my Facebook post, or clicked Agree on my Ravelry forum comment, I know that a playwright is a content creator too. Other artistic contributors like actors and designers are also engaged in presenting the work to the audiences in the auditorium. Part of why I blog is that I want the theatre artists to know they have moved me and made me think. And the Subscribe or Like playwright and team did.

Subscribe or Like is playing at the Gateway Theatre (formerly Roxy on Gateway, formerly C103) until June 11th. Tickets are available here.