Heading into the last weekend of Fringe, on Friday I watched three fun shows.

Verbal Tapas is a collection of poems by longtime Fringe poet and storyteller Rob Gee. Instead of scripting a fixed order, the performer handed out “menus” on the way in, with various poem titles and descriptions that sounded like restaurant-food teasers. He invited people to shout out titles, after which he might tell an anecdote of context (the time he recited a poem to two police officers in the middle of the night who had stopped him from illicit postering, the creative-writing groups he’d run as part of his work in mental-health nursing, etc) and launch into a recitation. He kept having good lines which I’d try to remember and then they went out of my head with laughing. Acacia Hall is a good venue for this kind of solo with audience connections.

Canterbury Tales has been adapted from Chaucer’s much longer Middle English original by local theatre artist Donna Call. This version has six travellers acting out each other’s stories to entertain the company, and the role-shifting is amusing. Lee-Ann Semenya plays the innkeeper who sells them drinks, proposes the storytelling competition, keeps things moving, and then covers them up with blankets for the night. I don’t know the original very well – the character names were familiar (the confident and ambitious Wife of Bath played by Amanda Stout, the Miller played as a lout by Ryan Mattila), but I didn’t remember the content of any of the stories. Other performers were Martin Stout, Zack Siezmagraff Penner, Anne-Marie Smyth, and Karen Huntley.

Field Zoology 301: Myths and Monsters is part of a series, in a campground-lecture style. Performer Shawn O’Hara, as Doctor Bradley Q. Gooseberry, welcomes his students around a campfire to teach us about cryptozoology, or the study of legendary/folkloric animals. He makes imaginative use of sketches on an overhead projector to illustrate his tales, including most of the cryptids I’d heard of and a few that were unfamiliar to me, along with some very funny narrative of personal encounters. Afterwards, the performer removes Dr. Gooseberry’s extravagant mustache from his own, to thank his contributors, including people who helped him to navigate telling stories respectfully from Indigenous sources. I would definitely see other shows in this series. This was my first glimpse of Mile Zero Dance as a Fringe venue, and an opportunity to spend time in the Happy Beer Street area of West Ritchie, which was exciting. However, I found the seats uncomfortable, and the full room too hot in last night’s warm humid weather.