Tag Archives: darrin hagen

Subscribe or Like – real people in the online world

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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.

A gay community and an era and two lives, through ten funerals

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Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik, as Younger Jack and Young Maurice, in 10 Funerals. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Occasionally I am watching some fictional characters on stage (or on screen, or in a novel), wondering what’s going to happen to them next. And suddenly I’m astonished to realize that these characters do not even exist outside of the scenes that I am seeing. That happened to me tonight, partway through the performance of 10 Funerals, Darrin Hagen’s new play directed by John Hudson for Shadow Theatre. I wondered about some things between the scenes, and about what was going to happen after the final scenes had played out, and I had totally forgotten that these characters were not real outside of this script – because they felt so real, so believable, so irritating and stubborn, so consistently themselves throughout the 35+ years spanned by the storyline. Which is particularly impressive, because each character is played by two actors alternating. Young Maurice is played by Josh Travnik and Older Maurice is Doug Mertz, and Jake Tkaczyk and Nathan Cuckow play younger and older Jack, respectively.

One fascinating thing about watching this production is working out which young character grows into being which older one, and learning about why. Some mannerisms continue, and some of the couple’s habits and rituals and petty arguments recur. I won’t point them out, because it’s more fun to notice them.

And at the same time we are watching this particular couple through the years of their life together and the various funerals they attend together, we’re seeing the personal effects of various aspects of gay men’s lives through the last 40 years. Not just the community funerals of the early years of the AIDS crisis, but the experiences of leaving small judgemental towns for cities with their own dangers, the various relationships with families-of-origin, the issue of not having a good word to describe what they are to each other, or the legal recognition of their relationship – and also the bars, hookups, drugs, drag queens, music, and style. Oh, the style! – costume designer Leona Brausen has done an amazing job of capturing the changing fashions in clothing, hair, and facial hair over the periods, and illustrating the differences between the characters, even in the understated situations of dressing for funerals.

Parts of this play are sad. Parts of it are horrifyingly illustrative of how the injustices of our lifetime have not all gone away, but we’ve become accustomed to them. But some of the dialogue and physicality is absolutely hilarious. 10 Funerals is playing at the Varscona Theatre until May 14th – including Pay what you can, Two for one, and Safe Sunday performances. Tickets here or at the door.

Sneak peeks at new work

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For most art, audiences don’t get to experience it until it’s “done”. Painters and sculptors don’t usually Instagram their rough sketches or let people wander around their studios. Composers don’t usually play and sing bits of their new works for lucky fans. Sometimes at a fan convention an author might read a chapter of a new book, or there might be a screening of a film trailer, but probably not an unedited reel. But theatre depends on how the text sounds when a group of actors is speaking it, and live theatre also depends on audiences responding to the text. So it’s common in play development to have a reading – maybe a private workshop with actors hired to sit around a table and read from a new script, and then maybe a reading on stage for an audience. No set and costume, no actions, no music and lights – just the voices of the characters, bringing a story to life.

The next chance to hear readings of new scripts in Edmonton is Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre’s Springboards Festival, which runs March 22-26th at the Gateway Theatre (you might remember it as the Roxy on Gateway or C103 or the hottest Fringe venue around…). Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre (as the name suggests) has a mandate of supporting new play development. The schedule of plays for this festival sounds exciting! Not only is there new work by established playwrights Conni Massing (The Aberhart Summer, The Invention of Love) and Stephen Massicotte (Mary’s Wedding), and award winner James Odin Wade, on Wednesday Mar 22 there are five ten-minute scripts selected from the EdmonTEN play competition, and on Sunday Mar 26th there’s a Cabaret-style sampling of work from eleven more writers, from emerging to acclaimed. Heather Inglis and Darrin Hagen are curators and dramaturges for the festival

Jake Tkaczyk, actor, performance creator, and graduate student, will be one of the performers for James Odin Wade’s new work Everyone Is Doing Fine on Thursday Mar 23rd. Jake’s experience with play readings includes working on Bright Burning, (later titled I Hope My Heart Burns First) which Colleen Murphy wrote for his graduating class, and participating in public reading events including Script Salon and Skirts Afire. I asked Jake a few questions about readings and new play development.

“As an actor, how do you benefit from participating in a private workshop reading?”

“If I know I’ll be doing a public performance, I love getting the chance to work on the script, ask the playwright to clarify their motivations, and spend more time than a normal rehearsal process. We get more chances to try things out. ”

“Why do you do staged readings for the public?”

“Play readings are a chance for the writer to really have their work understood. As an actor, I am there to service the playwright. A public reading gives the writer a chance to hear what’s landing, what does the audience find comedic or not find comedic – are there moments when the room goes still. The writer gets to hear it read and hear it heard. And without all the design elements contributing to the experience, the audience is just paying attention to the words. Does the text work in that order? Is the plot making sense? Is there anything that needs to be explained more … or less?”

As an emerging playwright myself, I’ve had the chance to experience what he describes. Earlier this month my short script Book Club 2021 was read as part of Walterdale Theatre’s From Cradle to Stage festival, along with twelve other new plays. Hearing actors read my script, and being surrounded by audience members responding to those actors, made me so grateful that theatre is a collaborative art. We need each other to share stories. _______________________________________________________________________________________

Springboards Festival runs Mar 22-26 at Gateway Theatre with performances at 7:30 every evening. Tickets for each evening are $15 in advance and pay-what-you-wish at the door.

Live in Calgary!

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Photo shows Chris Enright, Trevor Schmidt, and Jake Tkaczyk, in Flora and Fawna Have Beaver Fever (And So Does Fleurette!). Picture from Lunchbox Theatre Facebook, credit TBD.

J Kelly Nestruck, the theatre reviewer for The Globe and Mail, said in a recent column, “Is any theatre scene in Canada as hopping right now as the one in Calgary?“

I can’t judge that, but last week I viewed performances of two of the three productions he mentions. The creators of both shows have Edmonton connections.

Flora and Fawna have Beaver Fever (and so does Fleurette!) by Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt has three more shows as of this writing – two on Saturday afternoon and one Sunday Feb 5th at noon. In this Lunchbox Theatre production, Schmidt as 10-year-old Fawna is joined by Jake Tkaczyk and Chris Enright (Flora and Fleurette, respectively), in the roles played in the past by Hagen and by Brian Dooley.

This was my first time seeing a Lunchbox production. It had a full-enough-for-pandemic-comfort house for a show at noon on a weekday. The performers interact a bit with audience members in character before the show, reminiscent of a Fringe performance, and then the play starts with welcoming the audience as the new “junior probationary members” of the group started by these three awkward misfits and their mothers. There are rituals and activities and informational skits as earnest and clumsy as the girls themselves – the Naturelle Girls theme song is nearly as painful as an unfamiliar church congregation struggling through “He Who Would Valiant Be” – but interactions between the girls while they are running the meeting tell us more about the characters and their lives. I loved the running joke of saying that certain mean girls “shall not be named”, but watching Fawna take delight in actually telling on them. The version of history performed in their skits skewers both white capitalist colonialism and the ways it might be understood by 21st-century children. (“And then the Hudson’s Bay Company discovered Hudson’s Bay! What a coincidence!”)

One of the layers of entertainment in this show is that the actors deliver lots of doubles entendres, mostly about beaver(s), plus it’s just really funny to see adult men playing these 10yo girls in shapeless tunics and practical haircuts, Fawna playing with her dress, Flora slouching to be less of a target, and Fleurette eager to participate but usually cut off by her Anglophone friends.

There’s also a storyline with some suspense – what is Fawna trying to avoid talking about? – and some truly touching resolution and message, completely consistent with the character development.

Tickets for the remaining performances are available here. Lunchbox participates in the REP and takes the usual precautions.

Louise Casemore in Undressed. Photo by Erin Wallace.

Alberta Theatre Projects is also in downtown Calgary, in the Arts Commons building. It’s currently hosting a run of Louise Casemore’s Undressed, an original solo performance exploring the idea of auctioning off used wedding dresses. Casemore plays the auctioneer but also embodies several of the dress donors. The auctioneer talks about various kinds of single-use and extravagant artifacts used in weddings, and says that the event tries to find new homes for as many of them as possible. Finding another couple with the same names to use leftover personalized napkins amused me, and the callback gag about herding a flock of peacocks to its new owner was also droll. I was a little puzzled about how the proceeds of the auction were intended to benefit an organization called “Zero Waste Canada” (it seems to be a real thing), but in one part of the story a woman sells one wedding dress in order to buy another, more aspirational one, and I was distracted by wondering how that worked. I liked the shy lesbian who had never expected she’d get to have a wedding.

I have been to ATP before, for Waiting for the Parade and for Glory. This time, the main level of the Martha Cohen auditorium was arranged cabaret/coffeehouse style, with seating around tables, presumably with parties seated separately. Undressed runs until February 13th, with tickets available here.

Metronome: the lyric of memoir

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With our own 5@50 rehearsal cancelled due to bad weather and unsafe driving on Tuesday, I realized that I had an evening free for an excursion close to home, so I went to see the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre production of Darrin Hagen’s new solo piece Metronome at the Backstage Theatre.

Metronome is lovely, a polished and moving example of the kind of solo performance I seek out at the Fringe festival. As part of the WWPT season in a spacious configuration of the Backstage space at the Arts Barns, it also has an exciting set design, floor to ceiling, from Beyata Hackborn.

Hagen is an relaxed performer and an understated writer, telling stories of growing up musical in a family without much money. The details of the Royal Conservatory examinations, (List A, List B, sight reading, ear tests, checking out the other candidates in the waiting room, wanting the extra 2% for being off-book) all came back to me with the memories of my own waits outside examination cubicles. The underscoring and the re-creation of teenage scenes cruising Main Street with the windows down or auditioning for some stoner dudes (sound design Jason Kodie) were all songs I didn’t remember until I heard them and then could hardly stay in my seat for the joy and movement they evoked.

I also appreciated that the story acknowledged the isolation and hazards of growing up LGBTQ+ in a small town in the 1970s, but left those as matter-of-fact background, a poignant reminder for those of us who experienced those settings and a gentle context-setting for those who didn’t, just as Hagen set the context of being less well-off than his classmates.

Metronome sold out on Friday and Saturday, but I believe there are a few tickets available for the closing performance on the evening of Sunday November 21st.

Deaths and lives, a hundred years ago.

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On the Remembrance Day weekend, I saw Raes Calvert and Sean Harris Oliver’s First World War play Redpatch at the Citadel.  And tonight I saw Hannah Moskovitch’s What A Young Wife Ought To Know at Theatre Network.  Both of them showed me the human consequences of historical facts that I’d already known in a more abstract sense, and I left wondering more about the unspoken hardships in my own grandparents’ lives.

Redpatch is the story of a young First Nations man (Calvert) from the west coast who enlists and is sent to fight in France.  The rest of the ensemble (Jennifer Daigle, Taran Kootenhayoo, Joel D Montgrand, Chelsea Rose, Odessa Shuquaya) play his fellow soldiers, but also his grandmother, childhood best friend, a Raven, a killer whale, etc, as the story of their war is interrupted by the older story of two boys sneaking out of school to take a canoe out on the ocean.   One of my favourite bits is where the two boys talk while drifting in a canoe, swaying gently so that I almost felt like the canoe was actually on the water.  The violence of war is presented in a stylized way, with quarterstaves used as Ross rifles and bayonets, very little actual contact, and no blood, but lighting (Brad Trenaman) and sound (James Coomber) to convey the nightmare horror of trench warfare and No-Mans-Land night raids without being so overwhelming that the text was lost.  I found this very effective.

What a Young Wife Ought To Know, directed by Marianne Copithorne, previewed tonight at the Roxy on Gateway, and plays until December 2nd.  It is set in the 1920s, among working-class Irish immigrants of the Ottawa area.  I found it heartbreaking and sweet, embarrassing and upsetting and sexy and laugh-out-loud funny, by turns.  Merran Carr-Wiggin plays the young wife of the title, starting from a teenager with no understanding of sex getting some reluctant explanations from her bolder older sister Alma (Bobbi Goddard).  We see her awkward romance with hotel stablehand Jonny (Cole Humeny), their love and pride as new parents, and then their gradual realization that expressing their love for each other physically can’t be separated from risking her life and health in childbirth, and needing to raise more children in an already-impoverished situation.  There are no easy answers – Carr-Wiggin’s Sophie tells the audience about some of the unsatisfactory options and staged scenes show us some of the others.  The direction and performances felt very compassionate to me.  The young husband weeps with frustration, not just wanting to share intimacy with his wife but wishing for more children to love, not quite grasping how awful more pregnancies would be from her perspective.   I appreciated that the plot was more nuanced than a typical mid-century narrative showing unmarried women suffering deadly consequences for their own desire or being victimized by men – one can see some similar narrative in Alma’s arc, but Sophie’s and Jonny’s story is a more complicated one that I had not really thought about much before.   I was reminded a bit of Moskovitch’s The Kaufman Kabaret, part of the U of A Studio Theatre season in 2016, but this is a much smaller-scale examination of similar issues, and I preferred it.

The set and costume design, by Tessa Stamp, conveyed the modest circumstances of the characters.  The two-story backdrop might have represented both the hotel and the tenement apartment, and a sliding door hinted at stables behind.   I will be thinking about it for a while.

More performance genres at Fringe 2017

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Note:  I don’t know why the caption isn’t showing up on my photo.  That’s Bethany Hughes from Evil Dead talking to the audience members seated in the Splash Zone. 

 

Animal Farm Treatment – I have never studied, read, or seen any version of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, but as with Sartre’s No Exit, I had a general idea of the theme and I knew one line.  During Animal Farm Treatment, a solo show by creator/performer Alice Nelson from Calgary, I wondered how it would appear to an audience member who didn’t know the expected outcome from the original cynical parable.  The playbill said that she has a study guide to accompany her show for high school audiences.  The performer skilfully switched among several speaking characters, using different physicalities and speech patterns as well as clues of having the characters refer to each other by name, and she used a few simple props to move the story forwards.  I knew that the experiment in democracy would not end well, but I kept hoping it would.  Two more shows, Friday 2:45 and Saturday 11:30 pm.

Evil Dead – Amanda Neufeld directed this lively, funny, gory musical, which is playing at L’Unitheatre.  Bethany Hughes stage managed, and in the picture above is reassuring the audience members in the Splash Zone.  Music is a four-piece instrumental group under the direction of Daniel Belland (also seen in Mormonic at this festival).  The narrative moves quickly through the tropes of horror fiction, the college students each with his or her own incentives to vacation at a lonely cabin (Matthew Lindholm, Jaimi Reese, Nadine Veroba, Stephen Allred, Josh Travnik), the eerie woods with limited access, the intrepid explorer returning from Egypt to finish her father’s work (Neufeld), the source of local knowledge Reliable Jake (Travnik), and the demons (uncredited here because that would give away some plot).  It’s very funny, and the songs are great. The action moves quickly and it’s over in 90 minutes as advertised.  Some tickets are available for tonight’s late show.

Puck Bunnies – This is another cleverly-scripted and poignant drag comedy in the spirit of Flora and Fawna’s Field Trip with Fleurette, from Guys in Disguise.  Darrin Hagen, Trevor Schmidt, and Jason Hardwick play the girlfriends of junior/minor-league hockey hopefuls, sharing support, gossip, and relationship troubles while in the bleachers for an intra-squad scrimmage.   Tammy, Tanya, and Tina are more than silly caricatures (although I have to say that the costumes are spot-on perfect), each with her own struggles.  The dramatic-irony part (where the audience knows something a character doesn’t realize) is great.  The gentle insertion of a more feminist awareness into a culture of “support the boys at all costs”, by Hardwick’s Tina, is credible and satisfying.  I last paid attention to this culture in the mid-90s, I found it disturbing and necessary to be reminded that, despite the pussyhat, some things have not changed.   Shows Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons.

You Fucking Earned It – At last year’s inaugural Edmonton Clown Festival (now renamed Play the Fool, and running Sept 28-Oct 1 2017), in a panel discussion Deanna Fleischer (aka Butt Kapinski) pointed out that traditional bouffon was criticizing the king in front of the king, and she challenged performers using bouffon techniques to ask themselves “Is the king in the room?”  There are two key points in this.  One is to punch up – make fun of the powerful instead of the powerless.  The other is that if it’s good bouffon serving its purpose, nobody in the audience should feel comfortable and safe.  At the start of the performance of You Fucking Earned It (a Naked Empire Bouffon work featuring Cara McLendon and Sabrina Wenske, directed by Nathaniel Justiniano whom you might recall from You Killed Hamlet), I wondered whether the piece would succeed at the second point for an Edmonton audience, but it definitely did.  One more show, 2:45 today (Friday).

The show I’ve been working on, How I Lost One Pound, the Musical, also has one more show this festival, at 6:30 pm today in the Rutherford Room at the Varscona Hotel.  We are not sold out at the box office and I will have some tickets available at the door as well.  I’d love to show more people this quirky funny low-key narrative about a woman at mid-life.   Lesley Carlberg’s show will also be playing at Vancouver Fringe and at Guelph Fringe in October, if you miss it here.

 

Busy stages at the end of November

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What a busy couple of weeks it is for Edmonton stages!  If your weekend isn’t already full, there’s lots of theatre to watch, with these four shows all closing this weekend.

Fen, by Caryl Churchill, is playing at the Varscona Theatre until Sunday.  Amy De Felice’s Trunk Theatre production is fascinatingly atmospheric.  The trapped and oppressed lives of farm-workers in the cold drizzly fen country of England were portrayed with compelling credibility.  I looked at the women picking potatoes in ill-fitting gloves, on their knees on a cold day, and I remembered what it was like to be tying grapes in March, saying to myself that the money would get me out of here, the money would take me to university, I would never need to do this again.   Most of the people in the play don’t have any realistic hopes for escaping their lives, and their unrealistic hopes are heartbreaking.  Even the children in the story are joyless, trapped and powerless and sometimes abused (I found those scenes the most upsetting of the whole play, but not by a lot).  It is unusual to see a farm story about women’s lives not be a story of land-owning families.  But in this story, most of the women (Ellen Chorley, Monica Maddaford, Miranda Allen, Julie Golosky, Jennifer Spencer) are employed as day labourers or crew foremen, and the men (all played by Cody Porter) include a labourer and a landowner who sells his land to a corporation and becomes a tenant.    The story reminded me a lot of the subgenre of Canadian literature about homestead isolation and despair.

Another hard important story to watch is on stage at the Backstage theatre behind the Arts Barns.  Guys in Disguise / Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre is premiering a rewrite of Darrin Hagen’s Witchhunt at the Strand.  Set in Edmonton in 1942 or so, the story is based on primary source material about criminal trials for homosexual behaviour.  Jesse Gervais, Mat Hulshof, Doug Mertz, and Davina Stewart each play lawyers and police officers as well as the men caught up in the witchhunt and their friends and partners.  The scene where one of Hulshof’s young characters is on the stand being questioned in horribly intrusive detail about a sexual encounter was one of the most uncomfortable things I have witnessed in ages.  The main characters in the story were all involved in the Edmonton theatre scene, including Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, in whose honour the Sterling Awards are named.  Mrs Haynes is shown as what would nowadays be called an ally to the LGBT community.  I cannot imagine how the 1940s attitudes of privacy and discretion would have discouraged her choice to be a character witness for her theatrical colleague in a morals case, and I found the character as written very sympathetic.

Witchhunt at the Strand made me very grateful that I grew up mostly after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” and decriminalized same-sex sexual behaviours.  It also made me think about how I had been influenced as a child by the grownups around me who remembered the era of the play, not all of whom were straight.  And it made me cry.

Anxiety is a Theatre Yes co-production with several small theatre companies, brand new and unexpected and … and they asked the viewers not to post about it.  If that intrigues you, check whether they have any tickets left this weekend.

Twelfth Night is much funnier and easier to watch.  It’s playing until Saturday night at the Timms Centre.  Ashley Wright, an MFA directing candidate, directs a version with simple staging and a framework of watching a company of travelling players arrive at the theatre, warm up in their underthings, and get into costume.  Julien Arnold, Dave Clarke, Jaimi Reese, and Jake Tkaczyk play the broad-comedy roles of the script, with Reese as Olivia’s mischief-making gentlewoman companion, Arnold and Tkaczyk as the partying uncle Sir Toby Belch and his awkward trying-too-hard sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Clarke in a variety of clownish roles.  Clarke also created and performed interesting songs and underscoring for the production.  Contrast with the fun-loving quartet comes from Malvolio (Alex Dawkins), Olivia’s dour steward, whose pride makes him vulnerable to one of the most memorable practical jokes in the history of the stage.  Did he get what he deserved?  Or was it unfair that he was bullied and apparently driven mad, with the pranksters getting away with it?  I can’t decide.  Watching Malvolio try to smile and gesture as he expects his mistress wants is kind of painful, but it’s also very very funny.

Look-alike twins Viola and Sebastian are played by Chayla Day and Jordan Buhat.  Day’s physicality readily conveys a woman who is inexperienced at passing as a man.  Marc Ludwig is lovesick Orsino, courting Olivia (Emily Howard) who wants nothing to do with him, using her dead father and brother as an excuse until she is captivated by Orsino’s new pageboy Cesario (actually Viola).  Olivia’s reactions to Cesario are delightful, and her discovery that her crush is actually a woman is particularly so.

Fringe Day Two: five more shows

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Turns out that on a day I’m not volunteering and our show isn’t on, it’s easy to see five shows and still stop in at home for a snack and a shower partway through.

The first one I saw yesterday was Beware Beware, new work by David Walker, featuring Thomas Barnet and Sarah Feutl, all young local artists.  It was a fairly straightforward drama about two friends, each with some current trouble on his or her mind, meeting up for late-night drinks at a campfire site in the river valley.   Both characters were interesting to watch and credible troubled people.

Next was Flora and Fawna’s Field Trip at the Varscona, which was adorable.  Flora, Fawna, and their new friend Fleurette (Darrin Hagen, Trevor Schmidt, and Brian Dooley) play three little girls who have started a more inclusive alternative to Brownies and Guides.  The show is framed as the orientation meeting for the audience who are prospective members of the group, and the fun starts as the costumed cast members hand out materials to the audience in line outside the theatre.  There was a little bit of audience participation, and a lot of laughing and awww-ing.  The three cast members each plays a child with distinct quirks and awkwardnesses, and the interactions among the friends (“we don’t even exclude people for being too bossy” says Fawna (Trevor Schmidt) with a sidelong glance at her friend (Hagen)) were very funny.  Brian Dooley was particularly charming as a young Francophone glad to be included in her new neighbourhood even though she doesn’t quite understand what’s going on.  The uniforms of tunic, tights, beret, scarf, and badge sash were appropriately awkward.

Next up was Zanna, Don’t! by Three Form Theatre, a light musical by Tim Acito which played Off-Broadway about 10 years ago.  It’s full of pop culture references and uses all the familiar tropes of high school stories, in some kind of parallel alternate universe where same-sex relationships are the norm and heterophobia is a thing.  Music Director Mackenzie Reurink directed a small instrumental ensemble, and some of the singers were hard to hear or understand over the accompaniment.  Sarah Ormandy’s portrayal of bossy Candi was especially funny.  Mark Sinongco, who I last saw in Putnam County Spelling Bee, was the eponymous Zanna, and Adam Sanders (Full Monty) and Madeleine Knight were the scandalous opposite-sex couple.

Dogfight is another musical by a young local company, in this case Linette Smith’s Strathcona Alumni Theatre.  Chris Scott and Emmy Kate Whitehead play the leads. I’m going to see it again later in the week and I’ll have more to say about it then, but if you are interested in seeing it you should buy your tickets early, as the uncomfortable seating in Strathcona High School often sells out.

Last on my schedule for the day was Butt Kapinski, a solo show by Deanna Fleyscher from Los Angeles.  The performer takes the audience with her into creating a film-noir world, full of cliches played out in unexpected ways.  The performer, a hardboiled private eye, chooses audience members for the roles needed in the story, from murdered bodies to residents of various districts in the dark city, mostly cast cross-gender.   And now I guess I can finally say that I was on stage at the Fringe.  The show was cleverly crafted and satisfying, and I’d like to go back if I can find room in my schedule.