THE PENELOPIAD: classically great theatre

"Now that I'm dead, I know everything." So begins Penelope, the narrator and protagonist of the PENELOPIAD,  as she floats out of the mists of Hades in the theatrical adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel, currently on at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto. 

The production is a remount of last year's Dora-award winning production.  It is that rare show that is great on every count: acting, direction, choreography, script and production.

Distance allows a dispassionate view and a wiser if broken Penelope ( a sharp, understated performance by Megan Follows) has come back from the underworld to explain how she ended up married to a serial killer.

Atwood is arguably my favourite writer of fiction.  Here the great author offers a blackly humorous, deeply empathic, wickedly smart and inky dark feminist retelling of the classic tale of Odysseus and the Trojan war.

The battle of Troy and the voyages of Odysseus are shared, not by the male hero but by his wife, the long suffering Penelope and her gaggle of lovely, murdered maids who died at the hands of Penelope and Odysseus' only child and heir.

The wily and much admired Odysseus (the brilliant Kelli Fox) marries the 15 year old Penelope and carts her off to Ithaca where he seduces her, knocks her up with a trophy son and then abandons her.

For the next twenty years, she waits for him to come home:  on a pile of rocks with a bunch of goats, his overbearing nursemaid, her spoiled and resentful son, a senile father-in-law, a toxic mother-in-law and twelve loyal, clever beautiful, female servants who help her keep her wits and her virtue. Meanwhile Odysseus  is off in Troy to fight a war in honour of her hotter and - totally self-absorbed cousin, Helen, (a luscious and droll Pamela Sinha).

Odysseus doesn't bother to write and Penelope doesn't know if he's alive or dead, but she's a good woman, and her husband has told her he'll kill her if she sleeps with someone else, so she waits.

In Atwood's version of events, Helen runs off with the hot Paris because her father has married her off to a rich, disgusting idiot and she wants to get banged by a guy she actually wants to sleep with.  Odysseus heads off to war, well, because he can, oh yeah and because he likes to screw around.  Apparently sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the gander. Nice guy.

The long-suffering Penelope enlists her maids to fend off and contain a stable of boorish opportunists, who are trying for her husband's kingdom and her fine form while she tries to deal and remain faithful to a totally unfaithful man who is in no hurry to come home.

Atwood shows the audience the dark side of being a hero's handmaiden:  the largely unappreciated and overworked stick propping up the entitlements of a glamorous, self-important and heartless narcissist. 

Kelly Thornton and her fine cast unfold the drama with all its power, beauty, absurdity and awfulness. With a few effects, great lighting, effective movement and unadorned embrace of a powerful story the cast and director bring the author's vision to majestic life.

It's not that narcissists don't care about anything.  They care, as Odysseus cares, about ideas, principles and battles.  They care about opportunities for self aggrandisement:  a hot wife, land, winning, a son.   More than anything, they cares about appearances, especially how they appear to the world.  What they never care about is other people.  They just never care about you. Not even the gods can protect you from their entitlements and the wrath of their wounded egos and morally vacant souls.  Penelope learns this lesson the hard way.   Atwood gives voice to a woman who never managed to get a word in edgewise.

It's a great play.  Go, just go.

SKYFALL: Bond in Autumn

I have a confession to make:  I am not a Bond junkie.  I've never particularly been a Bond fan.  I think that might just have changed.

Last week was a rough one and I needed a distraction .  Sometimes there's nothing quite like a big screen movie to take you away from your troubles, especially one that just churns out plot, jumps around from one exotic location to another and features an impossibly handsome, contained and somewhat troubled cipher at its core.  Off I went to see SKYFALL, the most recent installment in the seemingly tireless Bond franchise,  in a packed theatre at the Varsity.

After half an hour of trailers and commercials (seriously?) the film finally started. It was completely worth the wait.  It's a very well-crafted script that draws on the history of the series of films but is at the same time, a very contemporary story about a man coming to terms with his place in the world and his relationship with his own past as he enters the autumn of his life.

The title sequence was gorgeous and scary, drawing the audience deeper and deeper into a world where death and dark forces are constantly present.

It is the 50th anniversary of  the Bond franchise and this feels very much like Bond in autumn: confronting the frailties of a body that is beginning to fail him, ghosts he has avoided seeing and feelings and fears he has avoided facing.

The film proper begins with an electrifying chase though a famous bazaar in Turkey that leads, if not exactly to the death of Bond, at least to a moment where he comes in perilously close contact to his own mortality.  Afterward, he takes a time out on a beach, but duty calls in the form of a terrorist incident in his hometown of London.  He puts down the bottle and returns to face a series of demons from his own  past and from the pasts of other friends and colleagues.

Daniel Craig is a great Bond, bringing depth and resonance to a character that could, in the hands of a lesser actor, descend to parody.  Javier Bardem makes a terrific nemesis, carefully walking a razor's edge of menace, humour and pathos. He is a devil for who we can actually muster some sympathy.  The stellar cast includes Judi Dench as "M", Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney.  Dame Judi outdoes herself as a lady who is not for turning.

There are two "Bond girls" but they feel more like colleagues than arm candy and the film is pretty tame in that regard. People were there with quite young children, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it.  The story is too complex and the film is frankly too violent for a child under 11 or 12.

If you only go for the exotic travel locales, you'll still have fun.   I particularly enjoyed Macau.

It is when the film journeys to the bleak and austere beauty of a Scottish highland, however that the picture truly comes home, literally and metaphorically. This is not just a battleground where old scores need to be settled or where good must defeat evil, but one where certain ghosts from the past must  finally be laid to rest.

I don't want to say more, for fear of spoiling the plot.  If you need a good distraction for a few hours, as I did last weekend, this is time well wasted.  The trailer assures us Bond will be back for more and so will I.

The MASTER : false gods and feral idols

Last Sunday afternoon, I had one of those experiences in a cinema  that sometimes happens when a famous and well-regarded director makes a big film about a tough subject.  My friend and I arrived with high expectations and saw a film that is  gorgeous, thought-provoking, wonderfully acted and ultimately disappointing.

In THE MASTER, director Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) takes on the American fascination with and devotion to quasi-religious cults. What creates the mental and spiritual void in some of the most privileged people on Earth that allows them to became sucked in by charismatic charlatans time and time again?  What kind of narcissistic swindler manipulates the emptiness and longings of his fellow humans for his own sexual and monetary gain by setting himself up as a demi-god with answers to unanswerable questions?

Joaquin Phoenix  plays  Freddie Quell, a drunken sailor home from the war with mental health issues, advanced alcoholism, frustrated sexual desires and a hairpin temper. Phoenix gives an achingly brilliant portrayal of a man who is in turns both affecting and terrifying.  He's at sea: drowning in a toxic soup of rage, sexual frustration and existential loneliness he seems powerless to escape.

After being fired from one job as a department store photographer and fleeing another after murdering a man with bad homemade alcohol, Quell stows away on a pleasure boat where he meets  Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of the finest performances in his stellar career) who offers him a father figure in an ersatz family of souls adrift.  Drawn into his quasi-religious cult that offers people a chance to redeem both their present and their past lives through a system of brain-washing called "processing" Freddie becomes both a defender of the faith and a fish caught in a net he neither understands or is able to escape.

Dodds  is as full of  rage and repressed desire as his protege, Freddie.  In the end the Master is as much a slave to denial and carnality as any of his followers.

Men wrestling with each other occurs over and over in the film.  It is his repressed homosexuality Dodds is really trying to come to grips with as he swindles women so he can hang out with men. His wife (a terrific Amy Adams) gets who is but desires the facade of the 50s marriage and status it confers too much to accept the truth about her husband in any real way.

There is a beautiful  recurring image in the film of wake churning up behind the boat. It evokes all kinds of things:  floating hearts, Rosarch blots, the nebulous dreams and desires that churn up in the wake of consciousness. The film is lovely to look.  The quality of the performances give it moments of great emotional resonance.

The  problem with THE MASTER isn't the subject matter, which is intriguing especially given Hollywood's love of Scientology, The Work, twelve-step meetings and all manner of quasi-spiritual psychic cure alls. It isn't the acting, which is stellar or the cinematography or the compelling score.  It's not that Anderson has nothing to say, he does: about the effect of the war on men who came home from it lost and psychically damaged, about alcoholism, about fantasy and longing and desire and repression, about the emptiness of the lives of people who want for nothing material and live in a spiritual and emotional vacuum.

Like his antagonist Dodds, I felt that Anderson was making it up as he went along with no clear picture of where he wanted to end up. He too has a position to maintain as a great commentator on American mores. This time however, like the cult followers he's trying to portray, he has foundered and lost his way.

I can't agree with the critics who have said Anderson offers no easy answers or fails to spoon-feed the audience and tell them what to think. He clearly understood the interior lives of his characters and the environment that created them but he hadn't figured out the story he wanted to tell with them. The problem  with THE MASTER is Anderson doesn't know what he thinks.
 
In the end, THE MASTER  is as frustrating and slippery as the leader of the cult it is ostensibly about.Go for the acting but don't expect to be compelled by the story.

Between The Sheets: new play on a hot topic opens Nightwood's fall season

First off, I want to apologize for my absence these past few weeks.  My holiday this summer did not, as it often does, include a sojourn at one of the major theatre festivals.   I saw stars and mountains and butterflies and Montreal cafes.  I saw my sisters and few dear old friends and had long, in-depth, catch-up conversations. I went midnight skinny-dipping in a bath-tub warm pool.  I ate a lot of great dinners and saw some beautiful Quebec countryside but I saw no films and no theatre.

Then I came back here to a few fairly grueling but extremely productive weeks at work.

While I was in the midst of that, the film festival flew past and the fall theatre season began in Toronto. I needed a fix. Today I zipped off to the Tarragon to catch Nightwood Theatre's season opener at the Backspace, a two hander called "Between The Sheets" by first-time playwright and recent National Theatre School graduate Jordi Mand.

Spoiler alert:  below there are some plot details, though nothing about the great twist of an ending.

Two women, a high-powered parent in her late 40s, and a pretty, organized and almost stupidly confident grade three teacher in her late 20s have an unscheduled meeting in a classroom after-hours on parent-teacher interview night.

This mom isn't there to interview the teacher about her son's progress in school: at least, not only to interview the teacher about her relationship with her son. She is there to confront  her son's teacher with evidence she has unearthed suggesting that the teacher's relationship with her husband, the student's father, is more than professional.

It's a brilliant premise that just churns out conflict. Sex, power, money, home-wrecking, kids and how to raise them are all on the table in this one hour drama.  While the script is better in some places than it is in others, there are two great actresses onstage to make a meal of a high-stakes confrontation loaded with controversy and they do.

Susan Coyne is quite possibly my favourite actress in the country. I'd watch her read a phone book.  Her intelligence and the depth of her skill and craft shine in everything I have ever seen her do. In this she is four steps past fabulous as Marion, the high-powered executive and harried parent of a difficult child, struggling to hang onto her long marriage to a depressed slacker of a husband.   Sporting slick black boots and a steely power suit, she's like a lioness with a kill in that cage of a classroom as she paces and grills her adversary.

Christine Horne does a fine job of making Teresa,  an idealistic and self-righteous prig of a school-teacher into a compelling and sympathetic character.  It's to her credit that the twist ending holds the resonance it does.

The play is well-directed and the realistic setting works well with the story. In this school, everyone learns a lesson.

I didn't love the musical underscore at the beginning of the action.  Under the blackout, it might have been a mood-setting device but placed where it was I felt as if the director was trying to tell me how to feel off the hop, never a good thing.  The script sags in a few places and strains credulity in a few others, but on the whole it's a very fine first effort:  thought-provoking and mostly well-constructed.

Whether you're in the 20-something camp or with the middle-aged women living with or divorced from Mister mid-life crisis, you'll certainly have plenty to discuss in the bar after the show. It is probably not your best bet for a first date.

This is absolutely worth seeing for the script's spirited look at a tough subject and two terrific performances.

Next week:  CLEOPATRA and hopefully, Michael Healey's new and controversial play, PROUD.

HUFF at Summerworks: Tragedy and Hope from one to watch

I saw a workshop of Cliff Cardinal's story of a dysfunctional and profoundly damaged family on the Rez back last fall. I was excited by the funny writing, the realistic and well-voiced characters, the great story-telling and by Cardinal as a performer.

HUFF arrived at SUMMERWORKS off good press from Winnipeg where it was part of the Fringe.
I wanted to see how Cardinal had managed to distill all that story and all of those characters (around 20, including a skunk and a dog) into a one-person show. With a tight story driven by a central character, excellent direction, a wonderful, atmospheric set and an astonishingly grounded and assured performance: that's how.  HUFF is bleak and blackly droll, sharply observed and excruciating to watch.

Huff is a euphemism for sniffing gasoline and other solvents.  It causes hallucinations which the show brings vividly to life. It also cause irreversible brain damage.

Cardinal the writer unrolls the story with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Substance abuse and all of the ills that attend it, is rampant on Shit Creek reserve.  You can't grow up in Manitoba and not know a place like Shit Creek, you can't live in Winnipeg and not see the consequences of growing up the way Huff is growing up on Shit Creek.

Cardinal shows the legacy of inter-generational substance abuse and the awful despair and destruction that attends it as the Trickster's reign of folly. In less skilled hands, this would be another exercise in hand-wringing. Cardinal simply shows the audience what is and lets his characters have their own voices, their own power, their own tragedies and sorrows, their own dreams, their own hope.

There are places where things could use a little space between character shifts, a slight slackening of the pace:  just a little more room to breathe.  Cardinal's ease and confidence on a stage and his committed presence in the moment more than made up for any minor technical issues.

"The Creator gives everyone a gift".  Mr Cardinal has clearly been given a few gifts. He's still quite young. If this is any indication of what he's capable of at this tender age, I can't wait to see what he does next.

It was a fine night of theatre.  I hope it gets a remount and a tour across the country.

I Won't Hatch! and the mad road to Edmonton

On Wednesday night, I went to a fundraising preview of I WON'T HATCH! at the Alumnae Theatre here in Toronto.  A cast of 10 game young people is taking this comedy about fear, phobia and catastrophe to the Edmonton Fringe for a run in the festival.

It was a big hit here in 2009 and I could see why.

I had a great time the other night.  They are still in previews and it is fresh, tight, funny and well-observed.  The ensemble work, the staging, the design and the use of music are all terrific.

They are also taking a mad gamble. 10 people in a Fringe show on tour is financial suicide.

The reality of taking 10 people to Edmonton is this:  the performers pay $700 to be in the festival, they pay to get from Toronto to Edmonton, which cost me $400 last year so multiply that x10, they pay for posters, they pay for fliers and a set and costumes and a sound and lighting design (usually not much and often on spec) and they pay for ten people to eat in Edmonton. They have rehearsed for months for free.

The HATCH crew raised about $1600 plus the bar on Wednesday before expenses by my head count in the house.  I have no idea what they paid to rent the venue that night or if they got that as a donation.  That amount will fly 4 people to Edmonton and back, max. Even if they sell out their 300 seat theatre for their entire run, at about $10 a ticket, they will be lucky to break even.

"I hate one person shows" I hear from people who have never made one or done one, to which I want to say, "Really, you don't like Daniel McIvor? How about Elaine Stritch?  Or Ronnie Burkett?"

I generally restrain myself.  I generally say "Well, like every other show it depends on the acting, the writing and the direction" which is true.

I desperately want to tour a larger show with a cast of three. We would also need a stage manager.  I have talked to some great actresses and a good director and they are nervous but game.  I have a script I feel pretty happy about.  All I need is money. Right now, I think that money is 2 years away. I also know, and so do they, that we will be damn lucky to break even.

Here's the thing:  even when it's just you and the wonderful stage manager you pick up in whatever town you play in, you can still lose your shirt on tour. If there is just you and you have a hit, at least there's a chance you will come back with enough money to front your Fringe fees in October for next year and be able to live somewhere for the winter while you make your next show.

So for those of you complaining about solo shows on tour:  just try this, just once:  then complain. And by the way, a lot of them are pretty damn good.

As to the I WON'T HATCH  crew who got it together to take 10 people on tour: my hat is off to you.  You are brave and talented and maybe just a little bit crazy.

A few weeks ago I had someone say to me, "You're crazy! Talented but crazy! You need to be less crazy!"

I am not the kind of crazy he meant.  I don't need meds, I have a job, I pay my bills, I live somewhere and my psyche and soma are mostly in good balance.

I am of course, a kind of crazy. I need to be crazy to turn myself into another person in front of a room full of people who are crazy enough to spend a night watching me put my head and my heart and whatever skill I have on the line in order to share a story,

I need to be crazy or I'd take my next grant and march into a secretarial course and go get a proper job. Wait, I have a proper job.  I manage a store for people who are crazy enough to run a dance company.  They let me leave work to take gigs and write. I'm not too crazy for them or  for my many friends and family who support me in my mad choice to make theatre and film.

You have to be just a little bit crazy to try and do this for a living.  Sane people get business degrees and go to law school and then take their hard-earned money to watch us fools make them merry, make them sad, make them feel, make them think, make us be fully human and alive together in the communion of a theatre. We are the ghost conjurers, the shape shifters, the truth tellers, the dream weavers, the makers of magic.  It is our job to channel divine madness and share it with the people crazy enough to give us their hard-earned money.

So here's a toast to all the other crazy fools on the road this season from a fool who wishes with all her heart she was there with you.  May you be kissed by divine madness and may the Fringe Gods be with you! As soon as I've got the cash, I'm back out there right beside you.

If you are in Edmonton go see I WON'T HATCH!  The show is both divine and mad and they need your ten bucks.

MAGIC MIKE and the Tantulus of easy money

The record-breaking temperatures in Toronto this summer have made movie theatres a welcome refuge.

Last Saturday night, my friend and I decided to go see MAGIC MIKE.  Channing Tatum, who stars in this picture, co-wrote the script based on his personal experiences as a male stripper.  The demi-monde of ambiguous and tawdry sexual relations ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Girlfriend Experience) is a place filmmaker Steven Soderburgh has visited before. In some ways, this script and his talents as a director and a shooter are a natural pairing. Here, he runs sexual desires and economic desperation together in yet another uneasy and unholy alliance.

The film begins with a scene of financial emasculation.  Adam is a 19 year old man who has shown great promise as an athlete.  Accepted to university on a football scholarship, he gets kicked out day one for hitting his coach. Now broke and sleeping on his sister's couch, he is reduced to scrambling for day labour as a roofer.  The pay is crap, the work is brutal and the boss makes Scrooge look like a reasonable guy.  With little education and few skills, our young hero's journey toward better prospects is not going to be an easy one.

Fellow roofer Mike is saving to start a custom furniture business .  To facilitate this, he has a second job at night, taking his clothes off in front of women. It's fairly lucrative and easier than roofing. Adam starts peeling for a living and his nice boy good looks and buff bod make him an instant hit with the college girls and middle aged ladies who come to watch his act in Tampa. He becomes a professional party boy in a tourist town that loves a good time.

This role reversal: mostly young men stripping for mostly young women initially gives the film a kind of innocence.   Soderburgh, perhaps wanting to curry favour with a straight(er) audience or perhaps wanting to ignore the fact that gay or straight, it is mostly men who pay for sex of every sort, avoids that territory entirely.

As the story progresses, the level of dis-inhibition required by such a public display of sexual desire on the part of both the spectators and the dancers is frequently arrived at through the use of drugs.  This leads to the usual unhappy and dangerous consequences.

The sinister and overheated glow Soderburgh bathes much of the film in taints everything it touches with the nasty chemical patina of a fake tan. The heat is on and it is both seductive and hellish.

Mike and Adam make a deal with the Devil in the form of strip club owner, Dallas. Matthew McConaughy  is riveting in the role of the MC/owner. He's the degenerate glamour of evil personified.  I've seldom seen a better depiction of a certain kind of narcissistic male: superficial charm on the outside and a sucking hole of need and entitlement on the inside that no amount of cash, coke or sexual adulation will ever fill.  The only person in the film old enough to be a parent to any of the young men who work for him, Dallas is a bad Daddy indeed.  He dangles the possibility of partnership in the club in front of Mike, then Adam with no intention of ever making them equals.  Dallas is as emasculating and enslaving as the business he's in. When he tears off his leather pants and flings his gilded body on the edge of the thrust stage of the nightclub, allowing girls to cover him with caresses and money, we feel the both his thrill in tantalizing and his terror. His performance is an act of supplication to the sure knowledge that he is at the end of his ephemeral and vacuous power, the thrall of his impossible and rapidly decaying beauty.

In MAGIC MIKE, all the jobs working class men used to do to command worth, respect and social currency:  the cowboy, the fireman, the construction worker, the cop, the military man are on offer as impotent parodies of themselves. Even the rebels, the biker boy and the beat box dancer, Magic Mike himself, are up for sale at the club.  The bad boys have become someone college girls and working women buy for the night before they go home to a boyfriend or husband with real career prospects.

When the military act comes onstage on the 4th of July, the U.S. Army is reduced to a tease, The men in uniform are a display of  hyper-masculinity that is really about currency extraction, as evidenced by the stuffed g-strings that end the dance. The film's metaphor is complete: this is America as strip club, a glossy, sexed-up spectacle of ersatz male dominance, offering only an illusion of power, the tropes of masculinity devoid of potency or command.

Of course the army is the only other real employment option for these young men and the theatre of war is no jiggle show. However there is no more moral certainty in taking up the gun abroad than there is in pretending sexual desire for money. The choice on offer for these men is a choice between rings in hell.

Soderburgh does a bit of a tease here himself.  He sets up all kinds of interesting questions.  What happens to a man when he divorces himself from his own sexual desires to service the desires of others? Is the wash of money in certain businesses as addictive as the drugs?  He then, sadly fails to answer them or even fully explore them.

Mike's attraction to Brooke, Adam's grounded older, working class, medical admin sister gives the film its heart. Both Tatum Channing and Cody Horn's performances are great.  Horn makes a meal of being a shrewd and silent observer of fools who think anything in life worth having will be easy or cheap. Channing shows us the suffering of a man who is not valued for who he is, a kind, hardworking and generous person, but rather  for what he looks like. There's a great moment in a bar when Mike runs into a girl he's been sleeping with who is out with her fiance.  He's one down, the dirty secret, the piece on the side, as disposable to this woman as last season's party shoes.

When Mike steps up and protects Adam from thugs after a drug deal gone awry, Brooke is finally able to see his moral worth and they have a tenuous but hopeful, human connection. Like Mike and Brooke, the audience is invested in Adam.  The ending is so ambiguous with regard to his fate, it fails to satisfy on any level.

The film ends up evoking much more than it delivers. MAGIC MIKE is a great tease and fun to look at, but in the end, like the strippers at its heart, it promises much more than it delivers.