REVIEWS: ACQUIESCE at FACTORY and CONSTELLATIONS at CANADIAN STAGE Contemplate This Life - and the Next

It's November.  Even on a sunny day in Toronto, there's not much light, at least not for very long. Brief and golden when it comes, grey and dismal on the overcast days: by 5:00 PM it's dark.

Maybe it was contemplating November,the month of Remembrance Day and Dia de los Meurtes that has encouraged so many of Toronto's theatres to open their seasons with meditations on death and its aftermath.

In ACQUIESCE, currently at the Factory, David Yee looks at the relationship between an estranged father and son in the aftermath of the father's death. The play begins when the son is tricked by a distant cousin into coming to Hong Kong to bury the father he avoided his entire adult life. Sin hated, still hates his father. He's also much more like him than he wants to admit.

What do we get from our parents? As we, and they, age, what do we owe them?  Duty, devotion, charity, compassion?  What do we understand about their lives, really?

Sin has run, no, fled his past, but he hasn't escaped it and it threatens to overwhelm him.

It's a familiar journey; the angry young artist rebel son making peace with the ghost of a controlling and demanding male parent. Thanks to sure the directorial hand of Nina Aquino, a lovely design (Robin Fisher, sets, Monica Lee - props) and gorgeous lighting by Michelle Ramsey, ACQUIESCE feels like a fresh look at a universal human story.  It's beautifully and inventively told.

Aquino fills suitcases with luminous images: the shimmering detritus of the inescapable past.  She also makes great use of the Factory's often difficult mainstage, using its depth to move the action forwards and backwards in time.

While the play is deeply affecting,  it also has moments of flat-out hilarity: a talking stuffie in the form of Paddington Bear, Kai's obsession with face cream.

The cast:  Yee as Sin Hwang, the author, John Ng as his old-school Chinese immigrant dad, Richard Lee as Kai, the Hong Kong cousin and the embodiment of filial piety and duty, and Rosie Simon as Sin's long-suffering girlfriend, Nine all do fine work here.

Yee initially wrote this play as a much younger man.  The first act could have easily lost 15-20 minutes and never missed them.  It's a minor fault with a moving, heartfelt story about fathers, sons and families. The Factory's 16-17 season is off to a very good start.

Love, loss and string theory are currently on the boards over at Canadian Stage where  CONSTELLATIONS, British playwright Nick Payne, gets a Toronto production.

Ostensibly, the play is a human exploration of a scientific theory. If there are other universes, could there be one in which someone who is dead here on earth, is alive somewhere else?

The conceit of the play is this:  a man, Roland  (Graham Cuthbertson) and a woman,(Cara Ricketts) come together and drift apart, through a series of repeated scenes, played for different emphasis and effect.  Their choices within the scenes determine the range of outcomes.

You can see why actors love this play. It's really an extended acting exercise.

I've seen other plays written using the same construction. Toronto playwright, Erin Thompson had a hit on the Fringe with MEET CUTE  two summers back, which I think worked a lot better dramatically than this beautiful to look at, but oddly chilly production.

As a theatrical examination of human relations and theoretical physics, CONSTELLATIONS can't hold a candle to say, COPENHAGEN or POSSIBLE WORLDS. In spite of a gorgeous stage production, CONSTELLATIONS is also not a particularly engaging love story.

Hinton and his design team create an exquisite visual allusion to our planet's place in the universe: a tilting platform floating adrift in the cold, beautiful heavens.  The opening stage picture  with its wash of clouds and the mirrored back wall suggesting infinity is utterly arresting. The live cello accompaniment by Jane Chan underlines the action with an aching loveliness. The staging is fantastic.

The couple at the heart of the piece, alas, don't have much chemistry onstage. In a measure that further distances the audience from the material, they eschew the British accents written into the dialogue and perform them in good old Canadian, a decision I always find distracting.

The conceit of CONSTELLATIONS is much better as theory than as theatrical practice, although it's worth checking out for Hinton's fine production of an OK play.

AQUIESCE continues at the FACTORY THEATRE until NOVEMBER 27th: For times and tickets go to:  https://www.factorytheatre.ca/what-s-on/

CONSTELLATION continues at the Bluma Appel Theatre, CANADIAN STAGE also until November 27th. For dates times and tickets:  https://www.canadianstage.com/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=constellations

REVIEW: Coal Mine' Theatre's BREATHING CORPSES is SPOOKY and SHARP

Last Wednesday on a chilly, dark autumn night, a few short days before Halloween, I went to see Coal Mine Theatre's season-opener, British playwright Laura Wade's BREATHING CORPSES.

It's a perfect late autumn entertainment: a dark elegiac meditation on mortality, and the effect one person's death can have on the people around them, even those who never knew them in life.

A group of seemingly unconnected characters are impacted by a series of violent deaths: a suicide and two murders.

Wade's play is elegantly constructed, smartly written, and filled in equal measure with difficult relationships and dark humour.  Here, doors are a potent and chilling metaphor. Do you really want to know what's on the other side?

Director David Ferry and his talented cast: Simon Bracken, Erin Humphry, Kim Nelson, Johnathan Sousa, Benjamin Sutherland, Severn Thompson and  Richard Sheridan-Willis skillfully enrich the inter-connected stories with their performances, bringing individuality, poignancy and charm to each  character and relationship.  I particularly enjoyed Erin Humphry's turn as a chambermaid in a semi-sketchy hotel. Is the sparkle in her eye the twinkle of charm, or the glint of pathology?

As always at Coal Mine, the show makes excellent use of the minimal space, in great measure due to the excellent set design by Steve Lucas.

In his notes in the program, Ferry muses on the difference between determinism and chance in the matter of death. Certainly none of us will live forever: that much is determined. The rest?  Wade's twist of an ending left me in shock:  horrified and laughing uncomfortably at the same time.

BREATHING CORPSES is a very entertaining night of theatre: especially if you like a walk on the scary side of the street. On a dark, wet November night, is there any other side?

BREATHING CORPSES continues until November 13th at the COAL MINE THEATRE,  1454 Danforth Avenue from Tuesday to Sunday at 7:30 PM with a matinee on Sunday at 2:00 PM. For tickets and further information go to:  www.coalminetheatre.com

Interview: WhyNot Theatre Presents the Beautiful and Innovative Like Mother/Like Daughter

Ravi Jain has got to be one of the busiest guys working in theatre these days.  He's remounting A BRIMFUL OF ASHA, his run-away hit about his relationship with his mother.  He and his mom open at Soulpepper later this week.

He's also helmed a fascinating piece of devised theatre ending its far-too short run at 918 Bathurst Street tonight, where mothers and daughters get together around a dining room table, and talk about their relationship, their histories both apart and together, and the impact of that relationship on their lives.

Full, rich, and fascinating, right?

Last Saturday afternoon, I spoke with two of the participants in the project, daughter, Ximena Huiza and mother, Isabel Iribarren about what drew them to the project, and about the process of creating the production.

Ximena is a theatre practitioner; an actor and creator.  Since graduating from the theatre program at Fanshawe five years ago she's worked in Toronto with Aluna Theatre. WhyNot posted on the TAPA blog, asking for mothers and daughters, where one half of the pair were born outside Canada.

You can tell Ximena and Isabel are related, not only from their features, but from their personalities and the way they use their bodies and hands when they talk. They're both lively, warm, sharp, engaged, passionate, smart: we talked for close to an hour and the time flew by.

Isabel and Ximena came from Venezula with their family, Isabel's second husband and younger son from her second marriage, Jesus, now 13.  Ximena started her theatre program when they got here.

When she graduated, she lived at home for 6 months. 'We can't live together!  We fight too much!"

Isabel went back to school also: a schoolteacher with a business degree, she went to George Brown here and got a degree in Early Childhood Education when she arrived in Canada.

As we spoke, I thought of the Chilean women I worked with at a formalwear rental shop in Winnipeg, while I was in university.  All of those women had been teachers in Chile:  in Winnipeg, they were doing laundry and steam-pressing suits in the back of the store. My own immigrant grandmother worked in a candy factory.  I'm glad Isabel is teaching.

I ask them how they are alike:  Ximena says, "Our personalities are so similar! We both want the last word."

How are they different?   At 27, Ximena is the oldest childless woman in her family in four generations.    Does she want children?  She looks at her mom.  They both laugh.  She sighs.  "Eventually, yes.  Not now!"

Her older sister is married with kids and living in the US.  So Isabel has those grandchildren moms seem to want. "Oh yes!  it's wonderful."

What is her best childhood memory?  "On Margarita Island, (off the coast of Venezula) where we used to go for summer vacations."

Their biggest worry? A pause.  We have a long conversation about both women's broken relationship with their biological fathers.  Neither sees or speaks to that man in their life.

We sit in silence.  I think of my own Dad and our mutual admiration society, how much we adored each other.  Last Saturday would have been his 81st birthday. Even though he's gone, I still know I have his love.  Not having that in life is an inconceivable suffering to me. The pain of it knocked all of us on our heels, reeling in the  silence of that void.

Ximena says, "Here, I am Canadian.  But I tell my friends, if you want to under stand ma vida loca, you have to meet my mother. They you'll know who I am."

We stop.  We hug.  They go back to Ravi and the other moms and daughters to continue to prepare the show.

I saw Like Mother/Like Daughter last night with a girlfriend.  I would love to have gone with my own mom, but she's in Winnipeg, and I'm not sure she could do the stairs these days.

It's beautiful:  delicate, generous, inspiring, warm, funny, and in moments, heart-rending.  Just like going home to mom.

After the show, we are invited to join the performers around a dinner table to share food and talk about the experience of being there, of being mothers and daughters.  Connection, community, catharsis:  these are some of the best things theatre can bring and this show offers all of them.

Please bring this back!

WhyNot Theatre in collaboration with Complicite Theatre presents Like Mother/Like Daughter until October 30th at 918 Bathurst Street: http://www.theatrewhynot.org/project/like-mother-like-daughter/

For Jem Rolls: On the End of the Fringe and the Coming Winter

Dear Jem,
Only you
Could have written
With such insight and passion
About summer '16 on the road.
The permutations and the combinations
and the machinations
the money making
and the money losing
the worry
and the bitching
and the magic
and the pleasure and
the beauty
and the magic
and the
art and the joy and
the fun, fun, fun
until September rolls away...

One old grey, gloomy certainty
hangs over us all:
winter is coming.

We have survived other winters, you and I
In Winnipeg,
For the love of freezing!
I cherish my memories of you
wandering the streets of Fort Rouge
Talking to yourself like a madman
As you prepared for the inevitable
change
of seasons, and your next show.
I was just shivering over to Safeway or the MLCC.
No poetry was coursing through me,
Just thoughts of my next dinner
Or the week ahead at work.

The quotidian is not your metier,
Poet.
All this fretting about ticket prices,
and board decisions
and un-lotteries,
and lousy, under-qualified reviewers
and whether or not
the clowns and the improvisors
and the re-mounters
Will inherit the circuit
Is just sound and fury
Signifying one sorry certainty:
The tour is over for another year.

Winter is coming: but spring will follow.

In eight months:
you'll be back,
a return as inevitable as robins
tender leaves and a warmer sun.

We're writers:
Nothing is going to shut us up,
 although we may
Spend the next few months indoors
in the zone of rumination and creation.
We need to really:
that new show won't write itself.
There will be another stage
and another audience
and more nights of
donning the motley
and going here and there:
So fret not:
There's only one Jem Rolls
and you must do
what you must do: write more poems.

Face it;
there's no point in worrying about money,
as my old dad often pointed out:
you're born owing the hospital
and you die owing the undertaker.

Sure five stars, a 300 seater and a sold-out run
in every town on the circuit
might make for a better winter someplace warm,
but you didn't think being a poet
was any way to get rich,
did you?

No one is getting rich out there:
We all know it.

We've done what we loved
with people we loved being with.
And on a good night, we put on a good show
and
people who spend their time off with us
enjoy themselves and give us $10 apiece.

I feel richer every time I get to do it.
For now I'll keep daily grinding
my way out of (tour) debt and treasure
my horde of memories
of time well wasted
with you sorry lot
on the road.

Sometimes the stars align
(and no, not the ones in the papers
on top of the reviews)
and you go home in September
ahead and not behind
with the bank and the backers.

Sometimes not.

Forget about money.

This was never about money.
It's a lottery.

Can you win a lottery?
Sure. We've both won CAFF.
And sometimes, you get that hit and the hold-over:
the dosh and the glory and the touch of envy.

The Fringe is about art and ideas and pleasure.
It is about intellectual freedom and being a free spirit
in a room full of free spirits being spirited together.

Uplift me

in the beer tent

and tell me of your travels

when next we meet.

The stars will align:
There will be more poetry,
More passion,
More pleasures
More warm, lovely summer nights.

xoC

REVIEW: COME WHAT MAYHEM: SPARKLING SOCIAL SATIRE LIGHTS UP THE SECOND CITY MAINSTAGE

Theatre has a long and worthy tradition of droll, subversive social satire. From Moliere to Michael Healey there have been many excellent playwrights whose work takes gleeful delight in tipping sacred cows: politicians, fads, fallacies, and social conventions.

I love political and social satire, but sadly, I don't see much of it on the stages of regular theatres.  Of late, productions on offer dealing with the current state of the world tend to be both very very serious, and  bum-numbingly tedious.

When comedies are mounted, they veer to the fluffy, unchallenging sort: long on laughs, and short on substance. Every summer, old-school farces and Norm Foster plays crop up like dandelions on stock stages and rep houses across the country.

It was, therefore, delightfully refreshing to visit Second City last Tuesday night for the opening of the  intelligent, shrewdly observed, and very funny COME WHAT MAYHEM. The impressively talented team of Roger Bainbridge, Kyle Dooley, Lindsay Mullan, Ann Pornel, Brandon Hackett and Becky Johnson have collectively created a two-act sketch show that adroitly takes on everything from shape-wear to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The breadth of topics and the cleverness and invention with which the myriad subjects are handled is a marvel. One of my favourite moments is a game show (with some audience involvement) that explores the contestants' knowledge of current events. It seems most of us know a lot more about entertainment news than we do about world affairs. Are we willfully ignoring the relentless assault of bad news from around the globe, or are we just plain dumb? MAYHEM offers a drawer full of similarly sharp knives, tossed with precision and flair.

The company has wonderful stage chemistry. They took amazing risks with each other, and with the up-to-the-minute material they have so brilliantly devised. Director Carly Heffernan  has ensured the show is both fast-paced and well-shaped.

Since 1959, Second City has presented and produced some of the finest comedy writers and performers of that generation. The current crew is certainly a bumper crop.

Go check out COME WHAT MAYHEM. Not only will you experience a laugh filled, thrilling night of high-stakes sketch comedy; you'll be able to say you saw these terrific, young performers live, up close, and personal as they ascended to comedy stardom.

COME WHAT MAYHEM continues at the Second City Mainstage in Toronto at 51 Mercer Street from Tuesday to Sunday. For further information or to reserve tickets:  http://www.secondcity.com or call (416) 343-0011

REVIEW: DUSK DANCES Offers Up Another Delicious Summer Smorgasboard of Dance

Toronto is a wonderful city in so many ways.  One of the things I enjoy the most about living here is the veritable feast of free and pay-what-you-can outdoor performances all over the city during the summer months.

This week, one of my favourite pay-what-you-can public performances, DUSK DANCES is on in Withrow Park, in Toronto's Danforth area.

 For the past 22 years, Sylvie Bouchard and company have presented a well-curated program of contemporary dance in the park.  This year, the mixed program of work features artists from both Quebec and Ontario, with plenty for both dance-newbies and seasoned dance-goers to appreciate and enjoy.

Dance in a broad range of styles is presented in an approachable and family-friendly manner.  Hostess Allegra Charleston (the clown alter-ego of choreographer and dancer, Susie Burpee) is the mistress of ceremonies for this year's program of five works at five different sites within the park.  Audiences are aided by volunteers in decamping, and moving from stage to stage to take in the work.  The choreographers in turn,  have made inventive uses of  their respective playing areas.

We arrived just as the pre-show Nia class given by Martha Randall was winding up.  With live accompaniment by the band DOUBLE-TOOTH , the movement session energized the crowd, as did the delightfully silly antics of  the enthusiastic hostess.

The first piece of the night had the audience seated at the base of a small hillock for HEYKLORO, an urban dance created by Gadfly choreographers, Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho, and vigorously performed by the impressive crew of Raoul Wilke, Lauren Lyn, Daniel Gomez, and Celine Richard-Robichon. The sharp, angular movements and confident, pulsing physicality of the dancing was driven by a street music mix by Dr Draw and Sinbadinho. The black costumes and dark googles were in perfect keeping with the edgy street vibe.

Next up was La Otra Orilla, with a duet both choreographed and performed by Myriam Allard and Hedi Graja.The piece was a flamenco-buffoon mash-up, danced on a long, narrow, wooden platform: a perfect surface for the elegant percussive footwork. Here, the bata de cola, the traditional ruched flamenco skirt was massive and sculptural: long enough to form a ruffled cocoon over a entire dancer's body.  This wearable sculpture had strong visual impact and became a  third character in the piece.

Next, was Susie Burpee's utterly wonderful duet  THIS IS HOW WE LOVE.  Audience members were invited to reply to the question, "What does love feel like?"  The shouted-out responses covered a gamut of human emotions, which two self-appointed "love experts", also from the audience, wrote onto the backs of  cards.   The performers then created the dance by randomly selecting cards from baskets, and  and interpreting the recorded emotions to a score by Satie. As in life, the two performers were seldom feeling anything like the same thing at the same time. Brendan Wyatt and Sylvie Bouchard were lovely in this: silly, tender, beautiful and brave.  It was performed in front of a flower garden beneath a giant tree: a perfect idyll for a summer romance.

Michael Caldwell's WAVES was beautifully danced by Mairead Filgate, Molly Johnson, and Meredith Thompson.  Kyle Brender's saxophone followed the dancers as they executed an elaborate interplay of forms, shapes, sounds, and colour. Caldwell's notes state that the work was influenced by radical movements in film-making and visual art. It was the most cerebral offering on the program, but there was much to enjoy in its fluidity and  restraint.

The last piece of the night took place on a concrete ball hockey pad, inside, on top of, and around a car. AUTO-FICTION by Montreal-based Human Playground is a half-hour series of visceral, propulsive, and athletic duets and trios exploring extremes in human relations and emotions. The stadium lighting and aggressive score by David Drury underlined the intensity of the physical work. David Albert-Toth, Jessica Serli and Simon-Xavier Lefebvre were outstanding. 

The dance deserved a kind of concentrated attention it was difficult to offer in this environment, at least from my vantage point.  I was standing near the back, on one side, and while my sight-line was good, I was constantly being jostled by restless little ones running in, out of, and through the crowd, and being shushed and admonished by their parents. Try get a spot where you can give AUTO FICTION the focus it merits. It's as rewarding as it is demanding.

If you can, do treat yourself to this eclectic and highly entertaining program of contemporary dance. DUSK DANCES always gives warm summer memories to cherish long after the show is over.

DUSK DANCES continues at Withrow Park (Pape subway Station) in Toronto this weekend until Sunday August 7th at 7:00 PM, with a 2:00 PM matinee on the 7th. Bring your own chairs, cushions, or blankets to sit on. The company relies on pay-what-you-can-donations, which can be made on-site, to volunteers, or by texting 3033, then DDTO10 or DDTO20 to make a donation.

 

REVIEW: BAD ROMANCES: ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL & TAMING of THE SHREW are DARK, FUNNY and VERY PROBLEMATIC

Summer:  a grove, a warm, clear night, a Shakespearean love story.  Sounds romantic, right?  In the case of two productions currently playing in Toronto, not so much.

Both Canadian Stage and Driftwood Theatre have their annual outdoor summer productions onstage here this weekend.  Both productions are sharp and stylish, but take a decidedly darker look at love than you might expect from a mid-summer frolic in the park.

Canadian Stage's ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is an assured, droll, and unsettling production of one of Shakespeare's more difficult romances.  Ted Witzel is a clever and imaginative director and there's much to admire in his production. His battle scenes are particularly compelling.  He makes great use of contemporary music in the transitions. The set by Teresa Przybylski is dynamic.  I particularly liked the mismatched chairs as a metaphor for all of the mismatched couples. The relationships are clear, the character work by the actors is skillful.  It's a production with a lot of style and lot of soul, but sadly, very little heart.

Helen lives under the protection of the Countess Rossillion, mother of Bertram, and proprietress of a spa in the south of France. As the Countess, Nicky Guadagni is confident and capable: the best actor onstage with the delivery of the text.

As Helen, Mina James fares far less well. She seems adequately besotted with Bertram, but plays  Helen as a one-note "nice girl" driven solely by desperation, without a shred of malice or cunning, which hardly seems in keeping with the course of action she takes to close the deal with him. She's also not very nuanced in her delivery of the text.

Helen pursues Bertram to France where the King of France (a funny and well-spoken Marvin L. Ishmael) bestows the hand of her heart's desire, and a sizable dowry in exchange for curing a fistula. The butt-plug on a drill she deployed made me think her old man was a scholar of South Park, not medicine. The torture device turns up later in the show in a more sinister context.

Betram, who seems to be having an affair on the down low with his clearly love-struck friend Parolles, and, is wilding with girls on the side, wants nothing to do with Helen, who he considers beneath contempt. He marries her, but refuses to consummate the relationship, choosing instead to flee to a battlefield in Florence, leaving Helen with a list of near-impossible contractual conditions to meet before the marriage is valid.

Kaleb Alexander plays Bertram as a good-looking, privileged douche-bag. It's certainly a valid take on the character, but it leaves the audience with no possibility of rooting for him and Helen as a couple.  I kept hoping he'd get a fatal case of clap or die in a road-side explosion.

As it is, when it turns out Diana has deceived him, and he has, indeed, bedded and impregnated his legal wife, he seems inexplicably chuffed by the turn of events.

The director has made the centre of the production Betram's friend, the bad apple, Parolles.  Here, Parolles is a gay man who is being punished for who he is.  Quasim Khan give a wonderfully complex performance, garnering our sympathies, while clearly exhibiting the character's less attractive qualities. The scene where Parolle's fellow soldiers give him a comeuppance for bragging and lying, is, here, an ugly gay bashing. It's the most powerful moment in the production.

The other star turn is Rachel Jones as the clown Lavatch, in cow prints and a Dolly Parton wig, delivering a series of beat poems by Witzel. Like Parolles, Lavatch is castigated for owning her sexuality.  You can't take your eyes off Jones when she's onstage.  She does a great job with Witzel's monologues, though I would have preferred Witzel had concentrated on ensuring all his actors delivered the poetry in the text of Shakespeare's play, rather than supplementing the Bard's writing with his own.

As stylish, clever and well-observed as the production is, you can only feel sorry, rather than hopeful for the couple at the heart of the play. It's entertaining as social satire: but it's not much of either a comedy or a romance.

Then, over in Withrow Park, Driftwood Theatre has set the even more problematic TAMING OF THE SHREW in 1989, turning it into a pop musical.  The '80s love duets as sub-text can't wall-paper over the fact that Kate (a suitably fierce Siobhan Richardson) is handed by her mother over to Petruchio, who, with his eye on her dowry, starves her, hits her and gas-lights her into submission.

D. Jeremy Smith has directed a fast-paced and engaging production, heavily focused on music and on a secondary gay rights theme.  Lucentio (a lovely Fiona Smith) is gender fluid, giving her secret courtship of Bianca (a very sweet Tahirih Vedani) a plausible contemporary context.  These are the lovers we find ourselves rooting for. Paulo Santalucia is also delightful as Tranio.

Geoffrey Armour has the thankless task of playing Petruchio.  He comes off as a guy who believes he is in love with Kate, and that he's doing the right thing: in short, he plays him as a textbook nice guy abuser.  I don't think I've ever seen a production of the play where the dynamic between Kate and Petruchio was as disturbing.

The premise of the production is ostensibly that Kate and Petruchio are in a consensual D/s relationship. I can see how this concept held appeal, but the text of the play doesn't really support it. It's a fun production and it's worth seeing, but nothing that happens here changes the dark heart of the story. This SHREW is a portrait of an abusive relationship in a fancy black leather music box.

ALLS WELL THAT ENDS WELL continues in High Park until September 4th, with performances Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday at 8:00 PM. www.canadianstage.com TAMING OF THE SHREW continues in Toronto in Withrow Park until July 24th with performances at 7:30 PM  and then in various Ontario destinations: www.driftwoodtheatre.com