Tag Archives: u of a drama

Merchant of Venice

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As I mentioned in a recent post, Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare play I encountered in its entirety, in Grade 9 English. I think I saw a Stratford production a year or two later.  I don’t think I’ve read it, seen it or thought about it much since.    But when I heard that the 3rd year BFA students were going to be doing it this winter, I immediately recalled the first lines “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.  It wearies me; you say it wearies you” and the last “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing, so sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring”.  I didn’t have them quite word perfect, but surprisingly close.  Maybe that was because one of the Grade 9 assignments had me producing a radio play (cassette tape recording) of life in the 17th century, and I put in the start and end of a monotone performance of Merchant of Venice.

Studying the program before the performance started, I saw that some minor characters had been cut (Old Gobbo, assorted friends of Antonio, servants), to cover the rest with the ensemble of ten actors.  I also picked up that a couple of characters had been gender-switched, with Bobbi Goddard cast as Antonia and Morgan Yamada (in the performance I saw) cast as the Duchess of Venice.  Bobbi Goddard also played Shylock’s friend Tubal as male, with sidecurls and beard.

Having a female Antonia worked really well.  Bassanio’s affection for his old friend was obvious in his gestures and glances, and although she was in some ways less effusive about him, the text has her prepared to pledge her life to get him the money, so it feels credible.   The subtext about how it must feel to be the old friend when Bassanio is prepared to abandon everything for his new love, oblivious about how this shifts the friendship, is particularly obvious with a female Antonia, and I thought Ms. Goddard did this part very well, in an understated way that she doesn’t expect Bassanio to pick up on.  (I am always on Team Éponine.)

I didn’t know what to call the period of the costumes and stage-business, especially the part with the impressive cocktail mixing by Nerissa (Nicole Hulowski), until I saw Mary Poppins the next night and recognised that they were about the same.  So, approximately Edwardian.  Most of the men in business suits of generous cut, Shylock (Joseph Perry in the performance I saw) with a large black kippah and visible fringes of a tallit, businesswomen (Antonia and the Duchess) in fitted jackets/bodices and skirts like Mary Poppins and the other young women (Portia, Nerissa, Jessica) in high-necked gowns like Mrs Banks.   That was an interesting choice, making it modern enough that the female Antonia could be credible, but long enough ago that the treatment of Jews by the Venetian society was both easier to believe and easier to accept than in a modern setting.  It was still disturbing, though.  The audience around me was gasping or sighing most in the parts where people casually insult or tease Jessica (Natalie Davidson) about her religion/ethnicity, but I think I was even more bothered about the happy-ending resolution to the court case having Shylock forced to turn Christian.   In a powerful statement from stage design, after Shylock leaves the court (is hauled away?  I can’t remember) abandoning his well-worn Torah on the floor, lighting covers it in a cross shape.  I felt sorry for Shylock, even in the speech when he finds out that his daughter’s taken off with his money.   I was also thinking about how the way he dominates his daughter is characteristic of how we often expect to see patriarchs in ethnic minorities, whether or not it is a fair portrayal.

I did not feel sorry for him in the courtroom scene though.  And the part about preparing Antonia to lose a pound of flesh from her bosom was much more horrifying and effective for me with Antonia being female.   I thought it was convenient but not quite believable that the Duchess was prepared to accept the judgement of the unknown doctor of laws (Kabriel Lilly as Portia) on the basis of a letter of introduction, but the Duchess in this story was very similar to the Duke of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors, being required to follow the law but wishing for excuses to be merciful.  Also, it reminded me that in the most recent production of Comedy of Errors that I’d seen, the ruler of Ephesus was played as a woman but referred to as Duke (by Julia Van Dam at Red Deer College) and that worked just as well as making Venice ruled by a Duchess.

Bassanio, Portia’s successful suitor, was played by Maxwell Lebeuf.  His decision-making speech “Tell me where is fancy bred” was done well as an unaccompanied song.  His impulsive irrepressible sidekick Gratiano is Hunter Cardinal, with Cheshire-cat grin.  I enjoyed watching the contrast between the two couples, the reserved Portia and cautious Bassanio compared to Gratiano and Nerissa’s more immediate joyful connection.  Lorenzo (Dylan Parsons) is a bit more of a puzzle, because Gratiano makes fun of him as being serious like Bassanio, but he also seemed somehow younger.   The scene with Lorenzo and Jessica canoodling on a riverbank while house-sitting was sweet.

The scenes with the unsuccessful suitors were also amusing, Hunter Cardinal as the Prince of Morocco with fez-like hat using his scimitar for a phallic reference (flashback to Lysistrata on that), and Dylan Parsons as the Prince of Arragon, in leather pants and Castilian lisp, reminding me of the Spaniard Don Armando in the recent Studio Theatre production of Love’s Labours Lost (Oscar Derkx).  I particularly enjoyed Nerissa’s grimaces behind their backs while Portia’s good manners prevented her from showing what she was thinking.   Launcelet Gobbo was the typical silly errand-runner character used in a lot of Shakespeare.  In the performance I saw he was played by Zvonimir Rac.

The Shakespearean language was managed coherently and dramatically by the whole ensemble (who were coached by Shannon Boyle).  I love when you don’t notice that you’ve been listening to unrhymed iambic pentameter until one character suddenly speaks in prose or in a rhyming couplet, and this production did that well.  I caught one small line fumble but it wasn’t distracting.

The last performance of this production was tonight.  You can look forward to seeing the BFA Class of 2015 in next year’s Studio Theatre season.   And if they’re doing anything before that, well, I hope someone sends me a Facebook invitation.

Love’s Labours Lost, at the Studio Theatre

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One thing all the U of Alberta Studio Theatre series productions have in common is interesting set and costume design with satisfying attention to detail.  Earlier this season I enjoyed the stark spareness setting the mood for pool (no water), and then the period costumes of Pains of Youth and Bloody Poetry.

The designs for Love’s Labours Lost were playful and full of joy, with bright colours and silliness conveying the frivolous not-quite-real background for this comedy, set by the text in the Kingdom of Navarre.  Apparently there was a real place by this name, located on the French border of Spain.   Visitors to the kingdom included a “fantastical” Spaniard, Don Armando (Oscar Derkx), with exaggerated and very funny Hispano-Quixotic gestures and accent,  and the daughter of the King of France (Mariann Kirby) and some members of her court (Merran Carr-Wiggin, Zoe Glassman, Cristina Patalastc, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Sarah Ormandy).   Georgia Irwin plays the clown Costard with a consistent Scottish burr, for no explainable reason other than to make her character distinct from the local noblemen – but it’s funny.

The premise of the main plot is that the young King of France (Adam Klassen) convinces his male courtiers to join him for three years of studying, following a near-monastic rule with restrictions on food and sleep and a proscription on contact with women.  Berowne (Neil Kuefler) is particularly reluctant to sign on to this plan, although he eventually agrees along with the characters played by Kristian Stec and Graham Mothersill.  But almost immediately after they agree, they find out that the Princess of France and her attendants are on their way for a visit.  So they decide to keep the letter of the agreement by meeting the visitors in a park rather than in the palace.   And of course as soon as they meet, the men of Navarre are immediately struck with admiration for the women of France, conveniently aligned in non-conflicting pairs.

Meanwhile, bits of broader comedy (i.e. wacky hijinks) keep intervening, with the random cocky Spaniard and his saxophone-playing page (Andrea Rankin),  a country girl (Braydon Dowler-Coltman), the aforementioned clown Costard carrying messages and mixing them up, a constable (Brandon Nearey), a schoolmaster (Merran Carr-Wiggin), and a curate (Mark Vetsch).

The play runs almost two and a half hours (not counting the intermission) but I found that the time just flew by.

The story suits modern sensibilities and recent trends in popular culture by showing the Princess as competent with an air of authority, speaking mostly in prose, and in one scene hunting a deer with a bow and arrows.  I was most intrigued by the characters of the Princess and of Berowne, the courtier most willing to dispute with the King and then to declare his affection to Rosaline.  Berowne is also a leader in some affectionate trash-talking competition.

Love’s Labours Lost is directed by Kevin Sutley.  It is playing at the Timms Centre until Saturday, including a 2-for-1 ticket deal Monday (tomorrow).   If you click here on the Department of Drama website within the next few weeks, you can see a gallery of photos from the production showing the colourful costumes (the academic gowns and hoods are University of Alberta doctoral/faculty style).   And I’ll also offer you one more related link to click, the indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to help the young performers of this BFA Acting class take a modest audition tour together after they graduate in the spring.

Lysistrata

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Unlike the eponymous Three Sisters of Chekov’s play, the women in Lysistrata band together and take some control over the circumstances of their lives.  After watching The Three Sisters last night, I watched the U of A Drama production of Lyistrata this afternoon and found the contrast satisfying.

It is also ridiculously funny and outrageously crude.

The adaptation from Aristophanes’ original was by Robert Brustein.  Jeff Page (recently of RDC, where he directed Comedy of Errors this fall) directed.  The cast members were from the BFA Acting class of 2015, and the play was performed on the Corner Stage of the U of A Fine Arts Building, an interesting intimate space with steep carpeted risers and higher-level performance areas around the outside of the room.  I was particularly amused by the characterisations of Lampito the Spartan woman (Nikki Hulowski), Penelope wife of Odysseus (Morgan Yamada), and by the comic timing and stage business of Kinesias (Hunter Cardinal).  The title role of Lysistrata was played with contrasting gravitas by Natalie Davidson, and I am particularly looking forward to seeing her act in more serious material in future.

The Facebook invitation to the event promised “free”, “fun, laughs, and phalluses”, and the play lived up to its billing.  When the audience entered the room, most of the cast was dancing around the room with glee and abandon to electronic dance music, wearing costumes of ancient Greece.  They then gathered on stage and dedicated the auditorium to Dionysus “with its original name, the Thrust Stage”.   The ending of the play was somewhat surprising to me, but I was still chuckling when I left.

Pains of Youth

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in the director’s notes for the U of Alberta Studio Theatre production Pains of Youth last month, Kim McCaw commented that he found troubling parallels between the world of the young students in the play and the uncertain future for present-day students, who find that “holding on to hope and optimism is increasingly difficult”.  I cannot confirm this first-hand, being neither pessimistic nor exactly a youth, but I found the world of the 1920s German medical students easy to slip into.   Ferdinand Bruckner wrote the play in German in about 1929.

The play is set in the lodgings of graduating medical student Marie (Andrea Rankin).   The other students and young people in the play live in the same lodging house or nearby, and Lucy (Mariann Kirby) is an eighteen-year-old housemaid.  We don’t meet the landlady.  The detailed set created an appealing cozy environment for Marie, surrounded with books, desks, suitcases, anatomy posters, and even a bowl of knitting.  I was distracted by trying to figure out what house layout would be compatible with the bits we saw and were told.  The door backstage left opened to Desiree’s room but they talked as if there was another door to the hallway from Desiree’s room.  The door stage right opened to a hallway of the lodging house, and people visiting Marie always entered and left by that door.   Between the two doors there was a window over Marie’s bed, which was illuminated as if it were open to the outside.  I guess one way this could work would be if the hallway proceeded past Marie’s room in the imaginary space where the audience was sitting, but as this didn’t occur to me until afterwards I was stuck trying to think whether their set design was inconsistent.

At intermission I was thinking that Marie was the only likeable character in the whole menagerie.  We saw her helping Desiree prepare for an exam and walking her to the exam hall for luck, buying Petrell a writing desk, showing kindness and humanity towards Lucy the chambermaid, and preparing a party to celebrate her graduation with all her friends.  We also learn that she’s from humble origins and has been funding her studies (and possibly her friends’) through dressmaking.  I identified with her immediately.

But of course things got more complicated.  Marie’s friends include Petrell (Neil Kuefler) a poet and former student she’s been romantically involved with but also been nurturing, Alt (Kristian Stec) a doctor who lost his license to practice due to the kind of ethical/legal issue that would still be controversial today, and medical students Freder (Graham Mothersill), Desiree (Georgia Irwin), and Irene (Cristina Patalas).  By intermission it seemed to me that all of them were kind of messed up, and Graham Mothersill’s Freder was so awful that labels like “sociopath” or “evil” were crossing my mind.

Desiree, the more junior student who lives in a room adjoining Marie’s, is obviously her intimate.  Her clinginess and admiration for Marie made it hard for me to tell, at first, whether she saw Marie as a platonic friend or sister, or whether there was some romantic or sexual component to her affections.  She expressed that ambiguous needy affection in ways that made me uncomfortable, because she talked about wanting to cuddle in a bed with Marie like she and her little sister had as children, and at first I thought that her advances made Marie uncomfortable too.  But later in the story, after Petrell has taken up with Irene, Marie seems to be sexually involved with Desiree and the other characters all take this in stride.

The next play in the 2013-2014 U of A Studio Theatre mainstage series is Bloody Poetry, currently playing.

Bloody Poetry – an “atheist haunted by the spirit world”

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With Bloody Poetry, The U of A Studio Theatre series continues to be provocative, in the senses of thought-provoking and disturbing.  I felt a little sorry for the person sitting next to me who said to her companion on arrival that she had no idea what it was going to be about and didn’t have time to read the program, and what were they going to see tomorrow, it sounded like something Greek maybe with naked women in it.   Oddly, the not-naked theme continued in a conversation I overheard at intermission between different patrons, one of whom explained while eating red licorice that the program said it was actually about naturism.  “NATurism??”  “No, THATcherism.  Like Margaret Thatcher.”  “Oh.”

The play, written in 1984 by Howard Brenton, is the story of the Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oscar Derkx, who played Jesus in the Studio Theatre production of Last Days of Judas Iscariot) and Lord Byron (Adam Klassen)  and some of the women in their lives, Mary Godwin Shelley the writer of Frankenstein (Merran Carr-Wiggin), her stepsister Claire Claremont (Zoe Glassman), and Harriet Westbrook, Bysshe’s first wife (Kelsey Visscher).   The other character on stage is Dr. William Polidori (Braydon Dowler-Coltman), Byron’s biographer and physician.  The production is directed by Glenda Stirling, the Calgary-based director, teacher, and artistic director of Lunchbox Theatre.

Throughout the play characters pay lip service to the ideals of free love, but they don’t seem to have the same understandings of the concepts of power-balance, autonomy, feminism, and informed consent in relationships that one might expect today.  Byron is overtly exploitive and self-centred.  Shelley, who is a younger less successful poet, starts out trying to make a good impression on the more famous man, smiling sycophantically and awkwardly agreeing with him.  Byron continues to make fun of him about being a teetotaller and a competent sailor, and flirts with him sexually throughout the play.  Shelley tries to ignore both the jokes and the advances.  It’s easy for the audience to share Shelley’s discomfort at some of Byron’s cruder comments, such as the ones about the venereal diseases he’s experienced.

In some ways Shelley is a more honourable person than Byron:  he welcomes Claire and her child into his household, and he pursues Byron to Venice in an attempt to get the child back.  But the interactions with his first wife and her ghost show that he basically abandoned her for Mary, and then while he is with Mary he doesn’t seem to care whether she consents to his affairs with various other women.  Mary certainly believes that the peripatetic lifestyle that he insists on is a cause for at least one child’s death.   Mary’s (Carr-Wiggin’s) facial expression and body language while Shelley made a speech about bourgeois morality showed clearly that she didn’t agree with him and intended to challenge him, and her subsequent challenge had me silently cheering, while he tried to manipulate her by calling her cold and callous.  As portrayed in the play, Mary is a stronger and more interesting character than her older step-sister Claire.  There are fascinating glimpses of Mary’s own creative process and inner life working on Frankenstein.   Claire is just heartbreaking, from her introduction as a naive young woman wanting attention and affection from both Byron and Shelley, her conviction that Byron will marry her, and then her needy clinging to whoever will comfort her.

One of the best bits of staging is the bit where the group acts out the thought-experiment of Plato’s cave, tying up Dr. Polidori in front of a screen and then making shadow plays.    The set and blocking made good use of the deep stage space of the Studio Theatre, with lighting and set pieces breaking up the space to create the illusion of people strolling on beaches far away.   Costuming was period-appropriate, with women in Empire-waist drapery and men in white hose, breeches, wide-sleeve blouses, and neckcloths.  Having worn a dress of that period myself, I was impressed at how the performers experienced the freedom of movement possible in that style of dressing, while never tripping over their full skirts even when dancing recklessly or leaping onto piers.

I tended to focus on the personal side of their convictions and actions, but they also all made speeches about their political and theological disagreements with conventional English society, and about the exigencies of dealing with publishers and funding.  They seemed to use the word “libertarian” in senses where I might have used “libertine”, which made me think that to them it was the same thing – and this may express not just the ways in which Shelley’s life hurt the women around him, but many stories of the personal lives of activists in more recent eras.

I’m fascinated by watching this year’s Studio Theatre series build up.  The offerings are all challenging for the viewer, presenting different sets of complicated characters in settings I’m not personally familiar with.  Bloody Poetry continues until Saturday 7 December with tickets at Tix on the Square and in the New Year there are three more plays in the season.

Shakespeare’s Richard III – pared down to brutal basics

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I love the exercise of finding similarities and contrasts in two different productions that I see in rapid succession, whether something like Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead performed in repertory, or two movies or plays just coincidentally easy to see together.  But yesterday’s theatregoing adventures exploring the nature and powers of royalty were so different that I’m still kind of disoriented today.

See, yesterday I followed up a viewing of the Red Deer College musical adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass with a University of Alberta student production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed and adapted by Lucy Collingwood.

This may have been a mistake.  But both shows opened this weekend for short runs (Richard III had just two more performances this afternoon and tonight).  My schedule got compressed by being snowed in Thursday night, and it hadn’t occurred to me to use the snowed-in time to research Richard III at all, either the Shakespeare version or the historical canon.  I arrived at the FAB Media Room for Richard III still catching my breath from the drive, and entered a dark space with a set piece looming high in one corner of the room, smoke swirling high around the harsh lighting, and two sets of risers arranged at sharp angles bounding a long pointed flat space in front of the steep staircases.

I was confused at the start and had trouble figuring out who was who in the story.  Richard, played by Matthew Kloster, stood out immediately, of course, with an awkward gait and twisted shoulder.  The casting in the program listed one role for each actor “and others”.  The roles were mostly listed as the noble title only, without given names or modifiers such as “brother to Queen Margaret”, and since English nobility seemed to have a very limited pool of given names, there seemed to be several Edwards, Henrys, etc in the story.  At intermission I discovered a short historical note on the display board, but I was still wishing for more of a lineage chart to help me keep the characters straight.

The narrative arc I’m familiar with in tragedies such as the Scottish play has someone committing a first murder for a specific purpose, and then getting swept along a path of committing more crimes in order to protect the gains acquired by the first crime, with the character gradually losing his or her conscience along the way.  But Shakespeare’s Richard III was not portrayed like that.  He seemed to be villainous from the start, and if he didn’t have the whole thing planned out before he started, he sure thought quickly and didn’t seem to have any second thoughts.  And a lot of his plans worked … until they didn’t.  The night before his death in battle, his dreams tormented him with the spectres of various people he’d killed, and while this makes sense as a conventional plot element presaging his doom, it’s actually a little surprising for someone who didn’t seem to have any guilt at all before that.  I found Matthew Kloster’s Richard so frightening that during the character’s periodic addresses to the audience I noticed myself stilling, shrinking into my seat, and looking away so that I wouldn’t catch his eye.  Other particularly strong portrayals included Queen Margaret (Alyson Dicey, last seen in Chris Craddock’s Velveteen Rabbit), widow of King Henry VI of Lancaster, with her curses, and Richard’s brother the Duke of Clarence (Colin Matty, improviser and spoken-word poet).

An ensemble of ten played too many characters to count.  One effective choice in making this work was to have all the actors both male and female play various male roles such as soldiers, lords, and assassins.  After the first disorienting few minutes, I was never confused as to the gender of a character because the female actors’ body language and voices always shifted to signal that their characters were male.  By the climactic battle scene near the end, when Richard’s and Richmond’s (Jimmy Hodges’) supporters were fighting with staves and in hand-to-hand combat, I’d almost stopped noticing that almost all the strong acrobatic fighters I was watching were female.

The designers for this production (Cheyenne Sykes for costumes, Alison Yanota for lighting, Josee Chartrand for set design), chose an almost colourless palette, with consistently harsh blue-tinged smoky light.  Richard dressed in white, but all the other characters were clothed in grey and two specific tones of taupe and mauve, usually barefoot.  Assassins wore black gloves, widows wore veils, soldiers wore polished boots and hair pulled back, but otherwise the costumes seemed plain, unremarkable and uniform, with identical hairstyles and similar black-ringed eyes.

Richard’s power was occasionally demonstrated symbolically in this production by having him make gestures characteristic of the way hypnotism or mind control are commonly represented, with the other characters respond silently as mesmerised or compelled.  As this was not so different than the results of his usual demeanour, it served to underline his control of the situations.  One specific such scene had me recalling a mirror-image representation in the production of Alice Through the Looking Glass I’d seen earlier that day.  In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice crosses the brook to the eighth square and is transformed from pawn to queen in the chess game, this is represented by the White King plucking a golden crown out of the air while he stands behind her and setting it on her head.  In Richard III, Richard has been talking to his brother, King Edward IV (Jimmy Hodges), who seems to be dying, and his wife Queen Elizabeth (Elissa Weinzimmer), when he freezes them all with a gesture, removes the circlet of rank from Elizabeth’s head, and replaces it gently with a black veil, before gesturing them all off stage.  It isn’t clear to me whether he’s hastened his brother’s death or not, but the symbolic actions demonstrate that it’s all part of his twisted plan.

It was a long intense show.  Richard’s death at the end comes as a relief, and we’re left with some hope that those left alive might begin to rebuild a more sane humane kingdom under Richmond.  I also left with the resolution to read at least a synopsis beforehand the next time I go to watch a Shakespeare history play.

Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches: from almost 30 years later

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Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Part 1:  Millennium Approaches is set around 1985, and was written (along with Part 2:  Perestroika) in 1993.  The University of Alberta student-led performance group Abbedam chose this play as their 2013 production, and it opened last night at the Timms Centre Second Playing Space.  The director is Nick Eaton, director and co-creator of the Fringe 2013 show Into Oblivion. 

I had never seen or read the play before.  Unlike the majority of the opening-night attendees, I remember 1985, although I wasn’t particularly paying attention to American politics then, I wasn’t yet part of queer community, and I was just starting to be aware of AIDS.  Also, I’d never encountered any Mormons and had met very few Jewish people.  So the play has been making me think about changes in those issues and in my life in the last 30 years.  But if I waited ‘til I could say something articulate, I’d miss posting before the end of the run.  And I want to post, because it’s a good show and I think lots of people should go see it.

Knowing a little bit about the milieu of gay men in New York City in 1985 and about Mormon and Jewish attitudes to family and to ethical decision-making helped me appreciate the context of the story.  But I would also have benefited from knowing more about the McCarthy era in American politics, in particular about the lawyer Roy Cohn, who was a character in the play (played by Cristian Badiu, a PhD student).

I found this character one of the most intriguing and complex in the play, although definitely not the most likeable.  Cristian Badiu didn’t attempt one of the stereotypical New York City accents, but his mannerisms and way of speaking certainly pegged him right away as an arrogant NYC lawyer.  I was particularly fascinated by the speech in which he explains to his doctor that the label “homosexual” does not fit him, because although he has sex with men, his power and prestige define him in a way that’s not compatible with being considered homosexual.  His doctor eventually gives up or accepts what he’s saying, and suggests that he can use his White House connections to get into the experimental trials of the new drug AZT for the “liver cancer” that he insists he has rather than AIDS.  I was also fascinated by Cohn’s relationship with Joe Pitt (Roland Meseck) the young law clerk he tries to mentor and manipulate.  His speeches to Joe about choosing father figures were intriguing, as neither character acknowledges a facet of sexuality in their relationship.  It remains unclear to me whether Cohn was just drawn to young men like Joe in a platonic nurturing sense, whether he’s attracted to him and not expressing that openly, or what extent of his interactions with Joe are directed at getting Joe to do favours for him in Washington.

Joe’s wife Harper Pitt (Emily Howard) was charming.  She apparently copes with her emotional troubles by taking a lot of Valium, but she is present enough to be funny and to wish for better things, and brave enough to eventually get her husband to acknowledge that he is “a homo”.

The other two main characters (a cast of 15 played about 20 characters) were Prior Walter (Gabe Richardson) and Louis Ironson (Joshua Edison), a 30ish couple who have been together several years, who are both witty and affectionate and very likeable.  In their first scene, we see Prior supporting Louis at his grandmother’s funeral, teasing him gently about acting butch around his family, but the balance shifts quickly as Prior then rolls up a shirtsleeve to show Louis what looks like a bruise, but in that context is undeniably a Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesion.  Throughout the rest of the play, the two of them go through the range of responses of a dying man and of someone who loves a dying man, together and separately, in compelling convincing anguish.

One of my favourite minor characters was Belize (Matt Ayache) a nurse of colour and sometime drag queen.  Without exaggerating the flamboyant stereotypes, he contrasts with the other characters’ gender presentation and also speaks the most directly about racism, changes in queer culture, and treatment of the dying.  Lauren Derman was also impressive in understated portrayals of a calm accepting hospital caregiver (I wasn’t clear whether she was a nurse or a doctor) and of the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg.

The action took place in a simple set on a revolve.  Actors and additional crew shifted furniture quickly between the many short scenes, and sometimes two scenes would be alternating on different sides of the stage.  There were some eerie and/or amusing special effects, supernatural adventures, and dream sequences, of which my favourite was Harper’s dream of Prior in a sheer négligée and wig cap doing makeup for drag.

The original play was written as a continuous narrative running about 7 hours.  This production of Part 1 ran about 2.5 hours, and ended in a slightly disorienting way.  Wikipedia does not have a very good plot summary (it would be great if someone reading this who has access to the play text could improve it).  At least it could satisfy some of my curiosity about what would happen to these characters in Part 2.  But I wish I could see these actors finish the story.

The production continues until November 17th, Sunday night.  Ticket information is on the show’s Facebook page. 

pool (no water) at the U of A Studio Theatre

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The U of A Drama Studio Theatre season started in September with Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water).  This disturbing story of unspoken resentments within a longtime group of artistic collaborators featured Ainsley Hilliard, Vince Forcier, Brett Dahl, Kristi Hansen, and Gianna Vacirca, who I believe are all recent BFA grads of the department.

Much of the story is told by the five unnamed group members in overlapping monologues, interspersed with scenes where they interact as they re-enact the events they’re recounting.  They tell a story about their dealings with a sixth person, speaking of her as She and often having one of them play Her role in their re-enactments.  It seems that She was originally another participant in their group, but she became more distant as she got more conventionally successful.  They mimic her and make fun of her, talking about her boasts about her commissions and swimming pool, but when she invites them to her poolside home for a visit they all accept.  None of the locations are identified in the not-quite-real storytelling – I was picturing their home as the “bohemian quarter” of some big city, maybe New York or London or even Toronto or Vancouver, and the place where they visit their old friend as some island warm and full of wealthy expats, maybe in the Caribbean or somewhere like Mallorca or the Canary Islands if they’d travelled from London.  The visitors comment on the large beautiful house with several servants, and then describe how they immediately plunge into partying, which leads naturally into all of them getting naked (on stage this was represented with various white undergarments) and preparing to dive into the pool in the dark.

Here I should describe the stage.  It was mostly bare, with a cool blue light and some chrome furniture and gallery displays around the sides.  But projecting out from the apparent front of the stage were five diving boards, with the space between them and under them and out into the audience being the pool.  It was lit with that eerie blue swimming-pool-at-night colour, but when She plunges in, she lands on hard empty concrete and is badly injured.  It was one of those shocks that’s almost a relief, since it was clear from the storytelling that something horrible was going to happen.

As She lies unconscious in hospital, the group still resents her, but overlaid on that is a mix of guilt, of relief that it wasn’t them, of enjoying her beach house without her around, and of a fascination with the whole concept of being comatose, which they express freely in front of each other.  And they start taking pictures of Her when the hospital staff aren’t looking.

Eventually, she begins to recover, and when she finds out about the photos, she plans an exhibition, assuming ownership of the art.  As you can imagine, this makes the group of friends even more resentful.  The whole story is really about undercurrents of resentment in nominal friendships, and the heartless reactions and behaviours were entirely too credible for my comfort.  It was thought-provoking, disturbing in a good way, and occasionally quite funny.  Also, as one could expect from seeing Vince Forcier’s and Ainsley Hillyard’s names in the program, there was some very powerful expressive movement.  It was a good start to the Studio Theatre season that left me wondering what would come next.

Shows I forgot to tell you about!

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Last spring I missed writing up several theatre excursions.  The programs were piling up on my table making me feel guilty, but the backlog didn’t stop me from going to more shows.

Since I’m going to count the Edmonton Fringe as the start of a new year of stage entertainment, I’m going to get caught up here, with a brief list of all the shows I didn’t tell you about earlier, and then I can start over.

  • The Penelopiad – Citadel Theatre – This show was done with an all-female cast.  I was particularly impressed by the performer who was playing Odysseus as well as her other roles, because her body language and voice transformed her instantly into a convincingly arrogant man.
  • Spamalot – Citadel Theatre – this musical was just fun, as a mix of the Monty Python source material and a send-up of Broadway-musical tropes.
  • Escape from Happiness – Citadel Theatre Young Acting Company – I remember being fascinated by how much darker this kind of story is nowadays than a generation ago.
  • Winter’s Tale Project – Citadel Theatre Young Musical Company
  • Strike! A Musical – This was a full production with a large company, including nine junior-high-age performers.  Apparently it’s going to be a movie soon.  A few of the songs are still occasionally stuck in my head a few months later.
  • An Accident – this Northern Light Theatre show with Michael Peng and Melissa Thingelstad, directed by Trevor Schmidt, was provocative and interesting.  Something about it didn’t quite work for me, but I didn’t figure out why.
  • The Last Days of Judas Iscariot – this was a U of A Department of Drama show.  I enjoyed it.  It was a great mix of original and canon-consistent.

According to my datebook, starting with Fringe 2012 I saw

  • One orchestra performance
  • One band concert
  • One rock-band show (I used to see a lot of live rock music, but this year I’ve been focusing on theatre and I only have so much time and money, unfortunately)
  • One opera
  • Lots of music at Edmonton Folkfest 2013
  • One night of circus acrobatics
  • One open-mic night and one variety show at camp
  • At least five first-run movies, mostly with superheroes
  • Two story slams (but I was in one of them)
  • 35 Fringe shows counting holdovers and one show that I saw twice
  • 24 nights of improv with Rapid Fire Theatre, most of them as a volunteer and many of them with two shows in the evening
  • 40 non-Fringe theatrical performances, in Edmonton, Red Deer, Toronto, and Vancouver.

So I guess missing out on reviewing seven plays is not so bad.  I’d hoped to do a Sterling-awards post with my picks and the winners, but it’s almost time for the Fringe to start and I’m in an excited mood rather than a retrospective one.  The best play I saw all year was Collin Doyle’s Let the Light of Day Through.  The show I went to the biggest expense and effort to see was Book of Mormon in Toronto, and it was worth it.  It was all worth it.  And I can’t wait to see what’s coming in the next year of live entertainment in Edmonton and elsewhere!

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.