Tag Archives: theatre

snout – even weirder theatre

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My next experience with weird theatre was an Azimuth Theatre / Catch the Keys production called Snout, in the little playing space at the Arts Barns.  I believe it was written by Megan Dart and directed by Beth Dart, but that is from memory because there weren’t any paper programs.  As people entered the theatre, we saw a small tented space, draped with sheets and decorated with living room furniture, which also seemed to be where we should sit.  Atmospheric music was playing, and mysterious video images (Matt Schuurman’s work of course) were projected on the sheets.  An awkwardly-hunched character in bare feet and a burlap poncho (Ben Stevens) welcomed the theatregoers to his house and directed us to the couches, chairs, and cushions on the floor, while steering people away from a kitchen-table set at one end of the room.

We had lots of opportunity to study the space, especially those of us who were a little bit uncomfortable about engaging with the unpredictable character scuttling around.  The draped sheets made a football-shaped space, with openings at either end and at a few other places in the perimeter.  After a while I became aware of a looming bearded presence watching us from the various rents in the draping, but again I kind of averted my attention so as not to engage.  (As I’ve probably already said here, I love weird theatre – but I’m still awkward about being dragged in to participate.)

The main character turned out to be named Ori, and this was his home.  He also introduced us to a Wolf (Steve Pirot), as a friend that he played with and fought with.  The wolf stalked on his hands and feet, hair covering his face, and snarled convincingly enough that my neck got shivers.  The character felt dangerous in that form.  Later, he walked upright and delivered a monologue about possessions, theft, and exchanging valuables, while returning to people various objects of theirs that he had somehow pilfered earlier – in my case, a book about improv theatre that I’d borrowed from one of my teachers.  I was probably easy to steal from because of having tried so hard to ignore him!

The other two characters in the play were an ordinary couple, (Ainsley Hilliard and Mat Simpson), who had been together long enough to remember happier more romantic times, but unsure how and whether to try recapturing those feelings.

And the rest of the performance (I was going to say “story”, but that would suggest something more linear and less lyrical and cryptic) was just those characters interacting with each other and rebounding off each other and hurting each other.  I probably missed a lot – the box-office flyer suggested some resonance with an Isis and Osiris myth, for one thing – but I didn’t mind, because I liked it.

The Soul Collector: Eerie and elliptical

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On Friday night, I attended the Catalyst Theatre production The Soul Collector, written, directed, and composed by Jonathan Christenson.  Early on, I thought that it was never going to make sense to me, and I worried that I’d have to ask my theatregoing companions, both actors, to explain to me what had happened.  My first impressions were about chill and dark and gloom. The stage was set with upside-down bare white trees, a glistening black roadway or path down a hill with white markings, wind, eerie music, and periodic snowfalls.  At first, all the characters had costumes in shades of brown and grey, with bits of black and white.  It was hard to identify them as contemporary or from any specific other period, but the colours and hats and one character’s dark glasses evoked a somewhat steampunk aesthetic.

A story began to be built, with anecdotes from the past being told to an apparently-present-day character, Memory McQuade (Karyn Mott).  Many of the two-person stories involved a death.  Early on, people started warning of a Soul Collector.  At first I thought the Soul Collector referred to the mythical horned-man figure dressed in white shorts and disturbingly uneven clawed hands, but I was confused because they seemed to be warning of “She”.  The horned figure was the Winter Hart (Brett Dahl, seen recently in The Missionary Position at U of A), and the Soul Collector turned out to be female, an Ice Queen archetype just as scary as the White Witch of Narnia (Elinor Holt).  Memory McQuade’s guides to the world or near-underworld or whatever it was were the blind mortician Mortimer (Clinton Carew) and the boy Gideon Glumb (Benjamin Wardle).  My eye kept being drawn to the boy Gideon because of an awkwardly-contorted arm, which made his hands look abnormally large.  I noticed that in some scenes (dancing) he didn’t have a deformity, but in the present-day ones he did, and I kept looking for an acknowledgement or explanation.  One character offering a bit of comic relief was Popcorn Pete (Garett Ross).  The storytelling patterns and the not-quite-realistic setting began to remind me of Charles de Lint’s stories.

Some things became clear by the end.  Not everything.  And several of the odd things I recalled from early on ended up falling into place, not explained explicitly but easy enough to figure out that I felt satisfied by the narrative.  I was also astonished at the curtain call to realise that there had only been nine performers, since I hadn’t always gotten a good look at the characters in the dark and in their bundles of winter clothing, and I hadn’t realised that I’d been seeing the same actors over and over.  I remained somewhat frustrated that I had had trouble picking up the words of the sung bits over the projected music, but one of my companions pointed out that the words were almost superfluous to the point of the musical bits which were to communicate mood, and they certainly did that.

When I left the theatre, I decided it was the most elliptical and cryptic storytelling I’d encountered since Free-Man on the Land last January.  And it continued to hold that record for almost 24 hours.

Blown away by Let the Light of Day Through

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Last night I saw Collin Doyle’s play Let the Light of Day Through.

I have a huge backlog of performances I haven’t written about yet, but I couldn’t go to sleep last night until I wrote about this play, and none of my usual correspondents were on line or answering their text messages.

Let the Light of Day Through is a Theatre Network production, starring Lora Brovold and Jesse Gervais, and directed by Bradley Moss.  I didn’t read much about it ahead of time – just took a tip from a reliable friend – so I just had a vague idea that it was about a couple dealing with something sad or unmentionable in their past.

That wasn’t wrong.  And if you’d rather not know any more than the fact that I cried all the way home and am now telling you to go see it, stop here and go to the theatrenetwork website to buy tickets (it’s only playing until Sunday afternoon).

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But if you don’t mind spoilers, or if you have already seen it or you aren’t going to be able to anyway, I can go into more detail.  The show posters show a door opening from a dark hallway into a room flooded with eerie light.  The set visible before the show had a brick wall, a wooden door, and a purplish light escaping from behind it.

I was expecting to meet a couple who were angry with each other, distanced, or with some obvious psychiatric troubles.  Those are the obvious tropes for survivors of family traumas of the kind that is gradually revealed here.  I’ve been fortunate not to have relevant personal experience, but that’s how it usually is in books, movies, or theatre (Next to Normal, for example).  But the characters Rob and Chris in this play still like each other, still find joy in life and hope for their future, and are still very funny people who enjoy each other’s compatible playfulness with the shorthand of people who have known each other a long time.   These two people who have endured an awful senseless loss are the most in-tune with each other, the most respectful of any male-female couple I’ve seen in fiction in ages.  Their tolerance and mild irritation with each other’s quirks are so affectionate at base compared to many fictional couples who are supposed to be happy together but display an ongoing tension that makes me wince.  Maybe I’ve just been watching too much Mad About You on Netflix.

The common fictional trope is that a person or family who experiences unbearable trauma will somehow almost forget the whole thing or make it completely unmentionable.  But it becomes clear that Rob and Chris have done something different in order to get on with their lives.  They’ve made an agreement to pretend, and in fact when they discover that they’ve both forgotten a milestone date, they are at first horrified by the idea that they might ever forget.  This consensual pretending then turns out to be a big part of how they work through their traumatic past and how the audience gets to learn the story as they come to terms with it.  Rather than asking the audience to accept the usual convention of narrative flashback, in which the actors are suddenly playing different characters or playing the usual characters at a younger age, in this play the playwright uses the playful storytelling and reminiscing of the characters as they remain their contemporary selves but re-tell the story to each other.  “Remember that time?  Okay, I’ll be your mother in this one…”  This technique made me more fond of the characters, and it also made the story flow very easy to follow.  In a couple of places where it might have been ambiguous, the characters themselves made the clarification “Wait, is this now, or are we being seventeen?”

The funniest parts of the play were two sex scenes. One is in the contemporary story where they’re obviously both interested in each other and making fun of fantasy conventions but have slightly different expectations for how the scene will play out.  The other is a hilarious acting-out of an awkwardly acrobatic teenage encounter.

The play runs about two hours with no intermission.  This was a good choice because the trajectory of the story didn’t have a good breakpoint.  The set seemed simple but was important, and the lighting made the plain wall and door fit many different settings.   The actors were both very good, playing different people who were both likeable and sympathetic.  And Collin Doyle’s treatment of how these people cope with the events of their lives is just different enough, both in plot and in the way the story is told, that I was completely drawn in.  It didn’t feel melodramatic or emotionally manipulative at all.  Near the end of the play, the only sound I could hear from around me was an awful lot of sniffling. I definitely wasn’t the only one weeping.

One of the best performances I’ve seen since starting this blog.  Seriously.

Summertime at Red Deer College: confusing reality in a magical setting

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In the Ontario city where I used to live, a few of the downtown commercial blocks had internal courtyards that you could access through twisty brick passages, so that you’d end up in a magical place in the middle where you couldn’t see or hear any cars.  In the best of these, there was a restaurant patio or two, with lattice sunshades and white fairy lights wound around the sunshades and trees, so that you could have a drink or a dinner in a place that felt like a couple of twists away from reality.

Last night I walked into Studio A at the Red Deer College Arts Centre to find it transformed into such a magical courtyard, for the Theatre Performance and Creation program’s production of Charles Mee’s Summertime, as directed by Lynda Adams, an instructor in the program.  The risers for the audience were arranged on three sides, with white cloth draperies over each chair pinned with an artificial flower, like at a wedding reception.  Clear twinkling light illuminated white garden furniture and several trees; closer inspection showed the tree branches full of white teacups.  Three identically-dressed actors were already present on the stage, three young women going through stylised synchronised motions of reading, writing, sitting and standing while seeming completely unaware of each other.

Looking at the program revealed that the three, Jessie Muir, Constance Isaac and Taylor Pfeifer, were all cast as Tessa, and several other roles were also filled by two or three actors.   This was a choice made by director Adams in order to include all 21 members of the ensemble in the production, and it turned out to work surprisingly well with Mee’s source text, particularly the first bit which is cryptic, full of awkward pauses and what I think of as gnomic.  The duplicate or triplicate actors sometimes recited the line together, and sometimes alternated.  Their actions were sometimes identical and symmetrical, with each of the three Tessas looking at one James (JP Lord, Dustin Funk, Lucas Hackl) and one François (Tyler Johnston, Chase Condon, and Richard Leurer), and sometimes the three would be responding differently or all rushing to one corner of the stage.  It took surprisingly little time to get accustomed to this narrative convention.

As the story unfolds, the self-possessed young woman Tessa is rattled by two unexpected suitors, then overwhelmed by a crowd of family and friends arriving.  As the characters interact we can see why Tessa soon exclaims

“This is what I grew up with!
What chance did I have with a family like this?
And you want to fall in love with me?
How can anyone expect me to form any kind of relationship
with another human being?”

François, who at first seemed the more appropriate suitor for Tessa than the painfully awkward stranger James, seems to have previously been involved with not just the family friend Mimi (Victoria Day), but also with Tessa’s mother Maria (Julia VanDam, Megan Einarson and Brittany Martyshuk), glamorous, remote, and somehow European, with a flowered scarf in her hair or thrown around her neck.  Two staid slouching middle-aged men outfitted from an LL Bean catalogue for cottage weekends, with baggy khakis and brightly coloured sweaters, turn out to be Tessa’s father Frank (Jake Tkaczyk), and Edmund (Bret Jacobs), Frank’s friend, companion, and lover.  Other friends, connections, and a pizza delivery man (Sasha Sandmeier, Victoria Day, Wayne De Atley) react to each other showing that everything is more complicated than originally assumed, and that nobody is happy with the situations.  Barbara, who seems to be the housekeeper (Jennifer Suter and Collette Radau), interrupts with an over-the-top and very funny tirade about men.  Frank starts out as a sort of genial absentminded host and observer, but we soon find out that even the calm Edmund is full of resentments, in his case against Frank.  The first act ends with all this discontent stirred up into a wonderfully-chaotic choreographed piece by the whole cast stomping and whirling about the crowded space to percussion accompaniment, bouncing off each other and exclaiming their frustrations with love, while Frank periodically shouts “Excuse me!” You can tell this ensemble has some rigorous training in physical theatre and has been working together for many months.

In the second act, things are quieter and the dialogue a bit more conventional, but it seems unlikely that any of these people would be happy together.  Frank makes a speech which starts with the repeated motif of the play that love is complicated these days, and leads to a long thoughtful observation about life changing continuously and the past disappearing as it is lived.  Tessa seems to be considering both James and François as suitors.  Maria reconciles with Frank.  An odd challenge leads to all the male characters doffing their trousers to lie down in plaid boxer shorts and colour-co-ordinated socks.  A few neighbours, Gunther, Bertha, and Hilda (Wayne De Atley, Jessica Bordley, and Rebecca Lozinski), drop in and add to the complications, until a tilt towards resolution is hinted at by Hilda, who makes a delightful and impassioned speech in favour of pursuing love.  Eventually there are happy romantic resolutions for some of the couples, but things don’t work out as tidily as in Anything Goes, particularly for Frank, who slumps alone at the side of the stage as some of the happy couples dance tenderly and the lights dim.

I don’t know any words for the genre of this play.  Some of the marketing materials suggested a light drawing room comedy, but trying to read the script before I’d seen it was as much a struggle as trying to read Waiting for Godot or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  Maybe it was like Noel Coward done in the absurdist tradition?

The set design, colour choices for the costumes (both by Sheena Haug), and lighting (Heather Cornick) contributed effectively to the not-quite-real mood.  As someone who loves both bright colours and socks, I was immediately enchanted to see many of the characters wearing bright co-ordinated socks, Tessa in rainbow-stripes, James matching their turquoise shirts, and François in a bright purple that complemented their outfit.  Original music was written and performed by Jordan Galloway.

I enjoyed this performance very much, but I am still thinking about it.  Like all of Charles Mee’s work, the script is available on line.  It’s easier to read after seeing the play than it was beforehand.  I’m considering seeing it again before its run ends Sunday night, and if this sounds intriguing you should too.  Tickets are available through Black Knight Ticket Centre out of Red Deer, and at the door.  Red Deer College and its Arts Centre are easy to find right off Highway 2 in Red Deer.

When That I Was

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ride the Cyclone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The non-sparkly vampire swoops through Red Deer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Missionary Position is uncomfortable.

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

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The Missionary Position was uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Clown Double Bill

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I’m now caught up recording my theatregoing experiences of a busy week.  I’m going to Rapid Fire Theatre’s Date Night Fundraiser (facebook link) tonight, and to Die-Nasty on Monday, but otherwise I don’t have anything on the calendar until the Rapid Fire improv-workshop performance night that I’m performing in on Thursday 31 January.  (Suggestions, invitations, and temptations for shows not to miss next week and the week after are, of course, welcome!)

Two original clown shows, each about an hour long, make up A Clown Double Bill this weekend at Punctuate Theatre’s TACO Space.  Previously I’d only ever encountered this small warehouse blackbox space at the Fringe festival in August, so I was relieved to discover that the wintertime arrangement has a pleasant lobby and a downstairs bathroom and doesn’t involve having the audience sit in a performance space with an open garage door until it’s time to start.

Lost ‘N Lost Department, by PIE Factory Collective of Calgary, was a three-handed story performed by creators Elaine Weryshko, Jed Tomlinson, and Kristin Eveleigh.  It made good use of a charmingly-detailed set, and of the humour of physical repetitions.  The clowns spoke partly in gibberish with enough English and French to be understood.  You could see how engaged the audience had become in their reality by the number of horrified gasps when a cardboard box was damaged.  As in many clown realities, the characters seem to be adults, but they don’t seem to have relevant gender or sexuality. That’s not part of the story and it doesn’t matter.  The story would be appropriate for any children old enough to appreciate the absurdity and tolerate the occasional sad bit, and the program notes say it started as a piece for the Calgary International Children’s Festival.

Sofa So Good, by Small Matters Productions, involves the same characters as the 2012 Edmonton Fringe offering Fools For Love, played by Edmontonians Christine Lesiak (Sheshells) and Adam Keefe (Rocket) and created by them along with their director Jan Henderson, the well-known clowning instructor from University of Alberta.  As in the first-act show, the characters spoke a bit in a stylized fashion, but communicated mostly through actions and facial expressions.  They used a few simple props.  Both companies involved the audience a little bit, but not in embarrassing ways.  I loved the ways in which the characters’ gender expression was played but not overplayed – I could laugh at the ways a woman might be childish or ridiculous and the ways a man might be childlike or ridiculous without feeling as if these differences were insurmountable or the most important facets of the characters, or as if the portrayals were hostile or gender essentialist..  Several jokes came from a “Clownsmopolitan” magazine, which appeared to have images on both covers like a typical Cosmo cover girl and cosmetic ad, but with clown noses.  As in the Fringe show, the most enjoyable parts of this show were when the characters shifted seamlessly from two adults setting up housekeeping to two playful collaborators in delightful pretending games, clearly enjoying each other’s company in various fictional universes.  Part of the story was risqué enough that your 12-year-old would be mortified to be seeing it with chortling parents, but would then probably repeat the whole thing to his or her friends.  Not having family members with me, my inner 12-year-old was free to guffaw.

There are three more shows, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon, and Sunday night.  If you enjoy clown work in general or if you liked Fools for Love, you should definitely catch it. 

Legally Blonde – the musical

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Continuing in this opening week for a variety of different performance genres, Thursday’s ticket was for a Moxy B production of Legally Blonde the Musical, at the Westbury Theatre.  The director was Marion Brenner, a drama teacher at Ross Sheppard Senior High.

It’s a lightweight upbeat show with some very catchy songs – I still have “Omigod you guys!” stuck in my head a day later – some funny lines, and a satisfying happy ending.  The strongest singers and actors in the cast were Emily Smith particularly in the role as Paulette the Boston hairstylist who dreams of Ireland, Brooklyn Rowe (the main character Elle), Aaron Schaan as Emmet the law-school TA of working-class background, and Elise Dextrase (Brooke the accused in the murder trial, Pilar the sorority sister).  And Scott Boerefyn was hilarious in the small role of the UPS Guy.

The music was recorded, and sometimes distractingly loud.

There’s one more show, Saturday night.