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Mad Forest

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Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill (1990), University of Alberta Abbedam Productions, Timms Centre for the Arts Second Playing Space, last performance Sunday Nov 18th 7:30 pm.  $12 adults.

This play was set around the time of the revolution in Romania in late 1989.   There are extensive program notes about the events of the revolution and about Nicolae Ceauşescu, but I still spent most of the intermission reading Wikipedia on my phone, because somehow this chapter of history didn’t really get into my long-term memory the way Tiananmen Square and the removal of the Berlin Wall did that year.

The play had three parts (three acts?).  In the first and third acts, small segmented scenes told the stories of two families in a time just before the revolution and shortly afterwards.  Many of the scenes were introduced by a performer walking across the stage pronouncing a language-study sentence in Romanian (I assume) and in English.  The sentences sounded innocuous and typical of a language-study book “We are buying meat”.”We visit our grandparents on a sunny day.” “The dog is hungry” but they all described the subsequent scenes.
It wasn’t clear to me whether the characters from the first-third act narrative were in the second act, which was quite different in style.  A large number of performers were recounting the events of the week of the revolution, in a documentary-like manner.  Unlike the dialogue of the other narrative, in this act many of the speeches were delivered in idiomatic and accented English, which added to the impression that the playwright was reproducing stories told to her on her research trip to Romania right after the revolution.

The intermission happened right after the narrative of the revolution, so I was curious about what was still to come.  What came next, apparently, was that things got more complicated.  We found out more about the characters in Act 1, and about how the revolution and their involvements changed things for them.  We became aware of resentments and prejudices about Hungarians, about gypsies, about people who might have been Party members or informers before the revolution, working class or professionals, orphans in orphanages and families who adopted them.  We saw festive young people acting out the final moments of the dictator Ceauşescu and his wife.  We heard a lot of speculation and gnawing persistence about the events of the critical few days, particularly what it meant that the power to the TV station had not been cut off, and it was my impression that none of those questions was answered.

There was also an odd interleaved scene between a vampire (come out of the mountains because of the blood of revolution) and an abandoned dog.  I couldn’t decide whether it was funny, spooky, or poignant.

After seeing various conversations and interactions among the characters feeling their ways into life after the revolution, all the characters were on stage for a wedding-reception scene at the end, but this didn’t mean that their animosities had been resolved.  There were fights, disclosure of secrets, and insults, until the mother of the bride called for dancing and everyone danced.

This was a student-run production with a large cast and crew, directed by Elana Bizovie.  The Second Playing Space is a plain room (a black-box performance space), set up for this show with seats on risers on four sides.   Most scenes were played either on a large central platform or near one of the corner entrances, with the Revolution narrative all in the centre with people running in and out and around.

For once I’ve managed to write up a show before the end of the run, so if this sounds interesting you can catch it Sunday night.

Next to Normal

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I knew I wanted to see Next to Normal as soon as a friend in California recommended it last year.  So when I saw that it was part of the Citadel Theatre’s 2012-13 season I bought a pair of tickets right away, thinking that for this show I’d probably want company.  Unfortunately a cascade of complications overcame all my would-be companions, and I ended up going by myself to the last show of the run.  I thought it was great.  I’d been listening to the Broadway recording for a few months, before the show.  When it looked like I wasn’t going to have company, I decided to protect my emotions by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia.  I don’t know whether I regret that choice.

My general impression of the set was shiny.  Shiny, and the opposite of cozy.  The play was set in Seattle, so sometimes there were shimmery metallic representations of rainfall seen out the windows.  Most of the scenes were in and around a two-story house designed by an architect, and the rest were in medical settings, so it made sense that the framework was all shiny metal trusses (probably they were polished aluminum and lit to look like chromium) and the furniture was all glass, chrome, and black leather.  When I noticed the lighting, it was on the blue side.  There was a shock-therapy scene emphasised by flashing lights which didn’t seem at all out of place in the rest of the set and lighting.   What we saw before the play started was magical – it appeared to be a lighted house far away in a field of stars, and then somehow it looked like that faraway house became the stage set.

I was prepared for the story to be powerful and disturbing.  But it was also much funnier than I expected.  The protagonist Diana, played by Kathryn Akin, was witty, angry, and very likeable.  The actor’s timing and body language showed the character in a wide range of mental, biochemical, and emotional states.  Her daughter Natalie was also easy to identify with, while the Henry character was mostly a humorous contrast and distraction.  I found the husband more self-serving than sympathetic, which certainly made the story more interesting than if he had fitted that stereotype of patient spouse.

The narrative moved quickly, with very short songs and lots of echoes and reprises, and not much dialogue between them.  The voices and orchestra were good and well-balanced.

The performance at the Citadel Theatre was a co-production with Theatre Calgary, directed by Ron Jenkins.

Spring Awakening: two local productions

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This year I’ve seen two local productions of  Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater Broadway musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 stage play.  I know there was a Citadel Young Company production last year, but I didn’t see that. I haven’t seen or read the original play, but I’m going to get the script from our library and read it.  I saw the Strathcona Alumni Company production at the Fringe festival, and then the Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts production in early November directed by Jim Guedo.

It’s interesting, seeing two productions so close together and comparing them.  The sets, staging, and dance moves were very similar.  One thing that’s bothered me since encountering the play for the first time at the Fringe was how much the story seemed focused on the two main male characters, Melchior and Moritz, rather than the main female character, Wendla.  But after seeing the MacEwan production, I had a more balanced impression.  I don’t know if it was because the actor playing Wendla in the MacEwan production, Kayla Nickel, was stronger, or whether there were some directorial choices involved, but I was more comfortable with that aspect of the MacEwan production.

When I first saw the Fringe production, not knowing the story ahead of time, I felt like parts of it dragged a bit.  This second viewing was at an advantage for me, then, because this time around it felt like a stark compelling series of events rushing to some awful conclusions.  And I was better able to take in some nuances, because I wasn’t quite as busy being shocked.  For example, in the scene about disclosure of child abuse I hadn’t noticed before that the abuse-victim and the abuse-survivor finish the song together in a way that feels like support and solidarity, the only possible way to make that bit at least somewhat hopeful.

I didn’t find the Moritz character quite as likeable in the MacEwan production as I did in the Strathcona Alumni one, but I don’t know why.

Bloodless

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On a business trip to Toronto, I read the tourist magazines looking for some kind of theatre event that would fit in my schedule and my budget.  I considered The Normal Heart at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, but it was sold out at the only times I was free.  I ended up choosing “Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare”, a new Canadian Theatre 20  musical about the serial murderers in 19th century Edinburgh who sold their victims’ bodies to a medical school.  It was at one of the big Mirvish theatres, the Panasonic Theatre, which is a modern functional space on Yonge Street with a tiny lobby and the bathrooms in the basement, rather than one of the ornate refurbished theatres like the Elgin or Royal Alex.  I picked this show because it seemed less predictable or tourist-oriented than most of them. People who go to a matinee of a musical on a weekday seem to be mostly old people or school groups.

Reviewers didn’t like it much, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was neat that it got its start as a Winnipeg Fringe show three years ago.  There were about 14 people in the cast, with the ensemble smoothly filling various minor roles and moving scenery between scenes.  I liked the way that it started out with a sort of likeable-scoundrels tone but gradually darkened as it drew us in, showing conflicts between the conspirators as they attempt to define and redefine what’s not okay, and showing the disturbing class-based double standards, depending on who the victim was and also contrasting the doctor who purchased the bodies and the hand-to-mouth labourers who provided them.

The sets were simple and not distracting.  The period costumes were fun to look at.  The production is new enough that it doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia or a cast recording on iTunes, and there wasn’t any souvenir merchandise for sale in the lobby either.

A Few Good Men

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Last weekend I saw Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men at the Citadel Theatre. Maybe I should have bought a season subscription, but I was more excited about some of the offerings than others, and I couldn’t buy a subscription on line or see the prices by the time I thought about it. So I got one really fabulous seat for the first performance, instead. (Row C, centre).

I never saw the movie, so I didn’t know more than the basics of the story beforehand. I thought it was really good. The thing that impressed me the most was that although everyone was in uniform with the bearing of military personnel and the expressionless faces of enlisted Marines, the actors managed to convey a lot of information about the characters just in small changes in stance or facial movement. And because we knew that they weren’t going to make those things obvious, the audience (or at least me) was working hard at paying attention.

The set was not elaborate but it set the mood and it made it easy to tell which scenes happened in which location. It made use of a rotating thing in the middle of the stage to bring different bits to the front.

The story had a satisfying resolution, but it also brought up a bunch of more complicated questions about right and wrong. And I liked it that the one female character (Lora Brovold), her story didn’t turn into a romance.

Since then, I’ve also watched the 1992 movie, which is full of famous actors. It was good, and very similar, but I actually preferred watching the play. Because instead of letting me find out from scratch who the characters were, it felt like the Jack Nicholson character was just loudly Jack Nicholson, and so on. Again, I was hugely relieved that although the Demi Moore and Tom Cruise characters come to respect each other, they didn’t end up romantically engaged.

Fringe holdovers

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Reluctant to let go of having fun at the Fringe festival and get on with the next things, I remembered that every year they pick a few shows to hold over in the bigger venues the weekend after the festival ends. Always before I’d been ready to move on to other pursuits, but this year I went through the lists of holdovers and bought four tickets.

Fiorello! –  reviewed in the next post.

LOON – this non-speaking mask show had been well spoken of by reviewers and by my actor friend, and it played to a near-full house Thursday night at Westbury, the big auditorium in the Arts Barn. It’s still not my preferred genre but it was fun to watch. The program notes said that the company had benefited from a Kickstarter, so that was neat.

The Minor Keys – I hadn’t really been inclined to see it during the Fringe, and I just added it to my list of holdover shows in a sort of what-the-heck thought of filling up my Friday night. It was playing in the downstairs arts space of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the neighbourhood just east of the railway tracks. I didn’t like it much. It was … it was the kind of show that’s like a staple of summer-theatre, just a set of not-too-nuanced funny characters revolving around each other. The setting was a run-down jazz club in the late 1960s. There wasn’t very much music in it. The actor playing the professor, Tom Edwards, sounded and looked really familiar but I don’t think I’ve seen any of the shows mentioned on his resume in the program. The actor playing the young accountant was Kendra Connor, whom I’d seen a few nights earlier as Marie in Fiorello! David Belke wrote it. With an intermission it was almost 2 hours long, which was draggy after the faster-paced shows of the Fringe.

Reefer Madness – also reviewed in the next post.

Holdover shows cost more – $18 with the Fringe capital fee. And in some ways it’s not as much fun, just showing up for one or two shows in an evening without a surrounding carnival; it’s more like an ordinary theatregoing experience. There are three shows playing tonight, for the last night of holdovers, but they’re all shows I’ve already seen. So I guess that’s it for me for Fringe 2012 – 31 performances during the festival and 4 afterwards, for a total of 35.

Last day of the Fringe

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I remember feeling wistful after Folkfest this year too, that writing up the end of the weekend was like saying that now it was over and I needed to get to work.

Anyway, on the last day of Folkfest my plan to rendezvous with a perfomer to get another copy of last year’s CD turned into seeing four shows and being there right til the end. This meant that I’ve seen 31 performances.

The weather was good, shortsleeves weather but not too hot. I went to the main festival site to pick up my tickets, then back to Wunderbar to see Joel’s show again. But I was actually super early so I sat outside the A&W in the shade, talking to a family member on the phone and eating mini doughnuts. Then I got inside and had another great conversation with Craig the bartender (owner?) about ales. He says I need to check out Keg and Cork. I also talked to the merch guy (whom I’d met at some other shows) about intellectual property etc.

Divide – I actually liked Joel’s show even better the second time through, understanding the pacing and looking for how it flowed together.

Improv-a-palooza – this was another improv show at the Varscona Hotel. Jim Libby whom I’d seen in another show, Wes Borg from the Three Dead Trolls, and some other local improv guys built up an improbable ridiculous story involving Freud, a mother kidnapped in Mexico, a long-lost brother, a father who was an unsuccessful salesman, and some spontaneous musical numbers, by playing a board game to get premises for their story.

However, because of the unpredictable nature of improv combined with trying to finish the game, I got out of there 6 minutes late, giving me only 9 minutes to get by bike from the Varscona to Phabric (which is on 80 Avenue at about 101 St (down from the A&W.) I rode on Whyte Avenue and ran a turning light and boy when I read about the cyclist fatality this afternoon it hit even closer to home than usual. Anyway, I made it in time.

Apocalypse: a Period Piece – a charming original two-man show, both funny and poignant, with Chris Craddock and another guy being little boys in the cold-war era but also being various characters that the little boys pretended to be: their dad, Elvis, JFK, etc. It is held over and I recommend it and might be convinced to see it again.

Then I had a bit of time to spare before my last show. I paid one last visit to the beer tent, watched the festival grounds empty out some, watched artists give one last handbill-pitch, and ate a taco in a bag (taco makings added to a bag of Doritos).

A Wake – the venue of this show was the Southside Memorial Chapel, the funeral home just across the street from the gazebo park. The show itself was okay to well done, musings on death, grief, death ritual, and life, in dance and music and poetic fragments and a few dialogues. But the use of the space and the participation of the funeral home’s owners were just fabulous. I have written to the owners to thank them. I have not lived in Edmonton long enough to attend any funerals or visitations yet, but if it were up to me someday I would definitely do business with these people. After the scripted performance, they invited the audience to see an installation in one of the visitation rooms, and/or to come have refreshments in their reception room and talk to the performers and the owners, and having that kind of grounding and aftercare was probably valuable for a lot of the audience.

It was still daylight. My bike was still there. The vendors were taking down their booths. I rode my bike home and spent the rest of the evening chatting on line about the experience.

Sharing my Fringe

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Yesterday a couple of friends from Calgary were in town, so we made a plan to meet for lunch and then figure out what to see at the Fringe. We had early lunch at Maki Maki (I convinced them that for the authentic try-anything Edmonton experience they needed an erotic roll). Then we got out the program and the Fest Finder app and the ticket-buying website, and I suddenly realised (and said) that trying to find one play to show people how cool Edmonton Fringe was, was harder than trying to pick a movie together on a date with someone you didn’t know very well yet. Fortunately, they didn’t have to rush right back to the family they were visiting, so we did the Fringe my way. That is, we wandered Whyte Avenue, comparison-tasted cupcakes from fuss and from the Fringe vendor (I still think fuss is the best, although the Fringe vendor had some creative icing flavours such as brightly coloured bubble gum), watched a juggler, organized our routes to use the nice indoor bathrooms in the Arts Barn at every opportunity, ate frozen chocolate bananas, and went to five plays.

After that, I wanted to stay around to go to the midnight cabaret show, and we had a couple of hours in between, so we had supper and nice decaf coffee at Famoso. So we said goodbye just before midnight and I got in line for the cabaret show where I was supposed to meet one of the performers to pick up a CD he was burning for me, but unfortunately the show was very very sold out. The first time I’d tried to buy a ticket at the door and it didn’t work! Ah well. While I was hanging around outside seeing whether tweeting the piano player would pull any strings (it didn’t), I also had a nice conversation with the artist of Charlie: a hockey story and told him my family’s version of some of the stories.

So I collected my bike where I had stashed it in the morning, and went home. I am not sure if I’ll go to any performances today, or whether I’ll get on with recovery and life.

Also, at one of the plays we met up with my actor friend (by design) and saved seats for him and his friends and he and I caught up a bit more on what we’d each seen since we last saw each other. So that was fun too.

The five plays:

The Lesson – the Ionesco play. Classic Theatre of the Absurd works well at the Fringe.

Scratch: The Revengeance – this two-person, many-character original comedy by local artists was hilarious. I’ve never seen any sketch-type comedy where things didn’t drag at all between jokes; it just zipped right along being funny on funny, and incidentally occasionally obscene.

Cockwhisperer – a one-woman show, mostly telling various stories related to her sexual history. It was interesting that she grew up in Hamilton and was about my age. And some of it was funny or moving. But the whole thing was a bit disappointing to me because it could have been a lot more sex-positive, especially given the title and writeup.

Fatboy – this was funny in a very weird way. All the characters were in whiteface makeup and were sort of exaggerated archetypes. We were trying to figure out what genre it reminded us of, and I thought it was like the pantomime, what with the judge and the yelling couple and so on. One of my companions said, only with a lot more bad language and violence. We then looked up the description and it said that it was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show and of Ubu Roi, “an 1896 precursor of theatre of the absurd”. Random, and I mostly liked it.

Rocket Sugar Factory Improv – We went to an improv show because I hadn’t been to one yet this year. This one mostly went on a theme of “today in history”, they’d get people to call out a year, then they’d look up what events happened on that day’s date that year and act it out. The events included Galileo Galilei demonstrating his telescope, the first version of Linux, and Pulcheria becoming empress of the Byzantine Empire.

The festival ends today. I don’t know if I’ll go … but I still want to meet up with Joel to get that cd, so hmm.

Fringe and nothing else

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I continue to do nothing but go to plays at the Fringe. The cold or whatever it is takes away more of my stamina, so I spent a couple of days doing pretty much nothing but sleep. And still, I think I’m up to 22 performances so far. I haven’t had enough discount beers to cover the cost of the cup, but I’m okay with that.

Anyway, here are some more shows I’ve seen.

Sexed – or maybe SexEd? My adjectives are all like adorable, wholesome, earnest, but I’m pretty sure the creators/performers thought they were being radical and on the edge. I said in a tweet that I thought they should go perform it on campuses, because it’s the kind of play that is well received in orientation week or sexual-awareness week or whatever. Anyway, they covered all the sexual issues contemporary young women are likely to encounter, and I didn’t disagree with any of their facts, and I laughed.

Cages – This was a solo storytelling show by an interesting man probably in his early 60s. His topics ranged from having been a member of the Vermont legislature to having supported his nonagenarian mother as she committed suicide with help of the Final Exit Network.

A Bronte Burlesque – I’d never been to a burlesque show before, and I’m not sure this quite counted because it had a plot, rather than being a vaudeville/variety type show. As you might imagine, there was a lot of artistic unhappiness while scampering around in frilly undies. And Branwell kept his pants on. One side benefit of the Fringe is that it gives me an excuse to look around inside various local establishments which get used as venues, and this one was in New City Legion, which turns out to be a poorly-lit basement bar underneath Hudson’s or maybe under the yarn store, I lost track.

Big in Germany – Apparently they’re heading back to Toronto to have a run at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. It should do well there because although it’s light, it’s full of jokes about growing up in Downsview in the 1980s. It’s about a couple of guys trying to be rockstars, but it doesn’t really have much music in it.

Vernus Says SURPRISE – This was another recommendation by the aspiring actor I met in line last weekend. There was one actor, playing a cheerful frail confused old man, playing against a soundscape of perfect sound effects and occasional conversation. The audience was so caught up in his difficulties that people kept sighing and gasping and saying awwww and o no! The performer’s speech to the audience afterwards was just as charming as the play.

Dead Wrong – This was a total change of mood. It was a solo-artist recounting of a fictionalised situation where an assault victim’s memory and a less-than-ideal suspect identification process led to a wrongful conviction. Compelling.

Spring Awakening: the musical – reviewed in a later post

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson – also reviewed in a later post

Grey Matter – My actor friend recommended it, and then a woman in the beer tent offered me a ticket she couldn’t use, so I went. Flashback, flashforward, flashlights, electrical crackles and hisses, all probably a metaphor for dementia.

Excessive Fringe

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I didn’t do much else this weekend except hang around at the Fringe Festival going to shows. And sleep. I think I’m getting a cold.  Anyway, here are more shows that I’ve seen. I probably should have bought two frequent-fringer passes (20 shows) instead of the one 10-show pass.

Sexual Perversity in Chicago – This was a sold-out opening show. I had never seen this David Mamet play before, although I had seen the movie “about last night” long ago. Some of the language and attitudes seemed too outdated to be credible, although unfortunately not enough of them. The actors were all good, Jamie Cavanagh, Sereana Malani, Richard Lam, and the fourth whose name I need to look up (edit:  Patricia Cerra). In the lineup beforehand and before the play started, I enjoyed talking to an interesting young theatre student from a small town.

Pushed – I picked this one on the spot because it fit my schedule between the two other shows I already had tickets for. It was both funnier and much much darker than I expected.

Middleton a folk musical – Notes on this one are in a later post with other musicals.

7 Ways to Die: a Love Story – on a recommendation from a friend, I got completely caught up in this wordless masked story. It was like the darker version of Fools for Love – again two characters in different apartments in the same building interact, but in this one it seems that one of them keeps trying to kill herself and the other one keeps trying to stop her.  Alexander Forsyth and Keltie Brown were the creators/performers.

Divide – I was looking forward to this because I liked the song cycle that the artist (Joel Crichton) had written for last year’s festival, and besides because I like having interesting beer at Wunderbar. This was a performance piece that was a mix of storytelling, invoking his dead heroes Jack Layton and Vaclav Havel, imagining dystopic futures with his granddaughter and son in them, looping and beatbox and hiphop, and singing. It worked surprisingly well.

Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hansom Cab Killer – Three actors played an awful lot of characters. I giggled frequently. It was full of doubles ententres but I think that for kids who know Sherlock Holmes and who don’t mind not getting some of the jokes or parents who don’t mind that they do get them, kids would like it too. I liked one of the main plot premises but I won’t mention it and spoil a friend who’s planning to see it later in the week.

Essay – this play about gender politics in an academic setting was written by young Canadian playwright Hannah Moskovitch. I sort of squirmed uncomfortably all the way through it because the characters were so familiar. The venue was the upstairs of the Wee Book Inn.

Significant Me – a one-woman show with props and occasional audience participation, the sequel to last year’s ONEymoon, by Christel Bartelse, with a manic pace and a lot of amusing asides and stage business. I’m not sure the plot hung together quite as well as last year’s; more of it just seemed like excuses to stick in other funny parts, but I didn’t mind.