Wednesday, December 18, 2013
THE VALLEY and the Delights of the Holiday Season
Sunday was a two-show day. It began as I scrambled into a taxi at 9:15 am to make my god-daughter's Christmas pageant at her family church. Her mother is a very talented writer for screen and television and wrote the script for this stage outing: a very endearing re-telling of the Christmas story, giving the inn-keepers a major role.
There were angels in tinsel and cardboard wings, a kid dressed as a sheep and a Cabbage-Patch baby Jesus. My god-daughter delivered the "tidings of great joy" standing on a chair and wearing a golden star and tinsel garland halo. The whole exercise was followed by carols, dainties, those mini-sandwiches I so adore, clementines and a toboggan run down-hill behind the church. There was a brief moment where I thought my time on earth was going to end careening into the side of a Lutheran church on a sheet of plastic but we managed to avert catastrophe and dumped over into a snowbank. Yes, boys and girls, it's Christmas Time once more.
The serious plays are coming to an end for the fall half of the theatre season, giving way to parties and pantomimes and pageants and ballets with dancing bears. Before I trot off, shortbread in hand, to several weeks of family friendly seasonal delights, I went and got one last good dose of serious drama.
I hit the TARRAGON for the closing matinee of THE VALLEY.
Two very different families, both struggling with mental illness, collide through a happenstance on the Vancouver Sky Train.
Any deep relationship tests your human capacity for unconditional love. A relationship with a mentally ill family member, lover or friend can take you to the edge of your own sanity.
The marriage between Daniel, the cop ( Ian Lake) and his post-postpartum depressed wife, Janie ( Michelle Monteith), desperate to escape the house and the suffocating demands of a colicky baby was really well drawn. So was the relationship between the anxious,over-functioning, divorced, obsessional mom Sharon, (Susan Coyne) and her collapsing mess of a resentful, angry, brilliant, struggling, depressed son, Conner (Colin Mercer).
THE VALLEY was well-written by Joan MacLeod, well-directed by Richard Rose and uniformly well-acted with great work from all four performers. Placing the audience on either side of the pit of a stage was a terrific choice. This was thoughtful theatre with an up-to-the minute subject.
I was very glad to see a realistic depiction of what life is like for families coping with mentally ill family members. I think plays like McLeod's and the discussions that follow help eradicate the stigma that still exists around mental illness. That is a good and very necessary thing if mentally ill people are going to get help.
The upbeat ending was a little hard for me to take.
The therapies currently available for depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder manage the symptoms and give sufferers and their families and loved ones better coping skills.With luck, patients go into remission. If the drugs don't work and this happens more often than Big Pharma would like you to think, patients commit suicide. This has happened to people I know..
Mental illness can be managed: it can't, at present, be cured. I hope the money raised for CAMH by the TARRAGON helps change that fact.
There's two weeks left in the year and I have seen all the gloom and doom I can stand. It's time to go get jolly!
Last night, I went to "MORRO and JASP: Eat Your Heart Out." the launch of a cookbook by the delightful and intrepid DORA-award-winning clown duo. Food made from the recipes was on offer and it was delicious. I plan to try out some of the recipes on my holiday guests. The cookbook is available for those of you who are looking for a last minute holiday gift.
I'm going to go AWOL for a while while I bake and decorate and develop some shortbread muscles. If the weather holds, there may even be more toboggan runs! May your holiday celebrations be joyous and may your New Year be blessed in every way. I'll be back in 2014 ( if not before)!
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
The Sublime and the Superficial: NEEDLES AND OPIUM and WINNERS and LOSERS at Can Stage
When you and your best friend come from different classes, how do you navigate that divide?
How do great artists transform their deepest emotions into art?
These were two seminal questions posed by two very different productions at Canadian Stage this past weekend. One production provided a rich and affecting exploration of its subject matter: the other was content to skim the surface, and was consequently, much less satisfying.
Let me explain.
On Friday night, I saw WINNERS and LOSERS. Crow's Theatre presents challenging and thought-provoking work and they were co-presenting with Canadian Stage.
The show is one of those high concept things: reality television meets improv theatre. The two actors, Marcus Youssef and James Long are friends in real life. They created the script together. It is 75% memorized and 25% improvised. It's done a bit like a game show and games get played; wrestling and ping pong. Lines get drawn on the floor to define the parameters of space, and perhaps debate. Bells get rung: to end things.
This was less a discussion about class, and more a discussion about money, and how some people use money as a way to keep score in relationships. Is the person with the most money always the winner? How do men judge their male friends? Their fathers? What makes someone or something a winner or a loser?
I wanted to like the piece: I liked the actors and some of the dialogue was funny, some of it was thought provoking, but always, I felt what wasn't being said or discussed was more interesting than what was.
Youssef married young and has grown children. Long married late and has young children. That means Long dated a lot longer. It also means they had two very different experiences of being a parent.
These two subjects alone would have made a meal, but we barely get an appetizer.
Long masturbates watching porn: Youssef uses his imagination, which is pretty lively. Did they take on how they felt about watching porn? Or why one guy watched porn and the other didn't? No.
Long is white with a cop for a dad. Youssef comes from an Egyptian family of intellectuals and bankers. There was a lot of talk about Youssef's dad handing him money, but did they touch white male privilege, that thing money can't buy? Oh no, hell no.
A deeper conversation about parenting, and about their respective relationships to their own parents comes close to happening, but backs off as soon as it goes deep.
That was too bad. As actors, I am convinced these two had the chops to do this, but the subject matter needed the distance and structure of fiction to elevate the text from play to art.
As it stands, WINNERS AND LOSERS is a night spent watching two skilled players in a shinny game: no hard hits, skating on the surface, old buddies drinking a beer and passing the puck around, a bit of stylized aggression going nowhere with no real stakes. This was a rec game. No one really cared who won. The concept was better than the pay-off. I would have preferred to have seen an actual play that fully addressed the questions this provoked, but never really dealt with. You know: less game and more play.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, I had an experience in a theatre I will treasure for the rest of my life: Robert's Lepage's intense and exquisite re-visitation to his script from over 25 years ago: NEEDLES AND OPIUM.
The play starts off with an illuminated map of the acupuncture points on the human body projected on to Robert (Marc Labreche), an actor in Paris doing the English and French voice-over for an American/French film about Miles Davis. Alone in a hotel room where Julie Greco, Satre and de Beauvoir once lived in the over-heated Hotel Louisiana, Robert is struggling in the aftermath of a break-up. Acupuncture can cure almost everything: except anguish and a broken heart.
Lepage muses on Jean Cocteau, existentialism, jazz and the life and the music of the great Miles Davis to create an exquisite and compelling aural and visual meditation on the power of artists to transform their personal anguish and heartbreak, their needles, if you will, into the great opiate of sublime art.
Cocteau and Davis both fell prey to the needle of opium: heroin. Lepage, the writer understands that addiction is about the self medication of the existential pain of living. Art is an alternative track: in the right hands, it yields similarly consuming results but offers a path not to destruction, but to creation. In the transformation of human anguish to art, the stars are truly born.
The show features three fabulous performers: Marc Labreche, who plays both Robert and Cocteau, seamlessly moving between two worlds and two characters, Wellesley Robertson III who plays Miles Davis with powerful physicality and great elegance, and an uncredited woman who plays the sensuous Julie Greco.
Lepage's highly skilled and accomplished design team provided the cast with an endlessly evocative and inventive set: a rotating blank canvas of a cube that shape-shifted with a series of lighting and costume changes, traps, aerial wires, sound, music, and projected film to create a world of beauty, sensation and human emotion.
One hundred and twenty uninterrupted minutes flew by: a complete psychic immersion for the audience. We were transported, body and soul.
NEEDLES and OPIUM was intellectually rigorous, aesthetically beautiful and profoundly moving.
This was absolutely the high point of my theatrical experiences this year. What a trip!
On Friday night, I saw WINNERS and LOSERS. Crow's Theatre presents challenging and thought-provoking work and they were co-presenting with Canadian Stage.
The show is one of those high concept things: reality television meets improv theatre. The two actors, Marcus Youssef and James Long are friends in real life. They created the script together. It is 75% memorized and 25% improvised. It's done a bit like a game show and games get played; wrestling and ping pong. Lines get drawn on the floor to define the parameters of space, and perhaps debate. Bells get rung: to end things.
This was less a discussion about class, and more a discussion about money, and how some people use money as a way to keep score in relationships. Is the person with the most money always the winner? How do men judge their male friends? Their fathers? What makes someone or something a winner or a loser?
I wanted to like the piece: I liked the actors and some of the dialogue was funny, some of it was thought provoking, but always, I felt what wasn't being said or discussed was more interesting than what was.
Youssef married young and has grown children. Long married late and has young children. That means Long dated a lot longer. It also means they had two very different experiences of being a parent.
These two subjects alone would have made a meal, but we barely get an appetizer.
Long masturbates watching porn: Youssef uses his imagination, which is pretty lively. Did they take on how they felt about watching porn? Or why one guy watched porn and the other didn't? No.
Long is white with a cop for a dad. Youssef comes from an Egyptian family of intellectuals and bankers. There was a lot of talk about Youssef's dad handing him money, but did they touch white male privilege, that thing money can't buy? Oh no, hell no.
A deeper conversation about parenting, and about their respective relationships to their own parents comes close to happening, but backs off as soon as it goes deep.
That was too bad. As actors, I am convinced these two had the chops to do this, but the subject matter needed the distance and structure of fiction to elevate the text from play to art.
As it stands, WINNERS AND LOSERS is a night spent watching two skilled players in a shinny game: no hard hits, skating on the surface, old buddies drinking a beer and passing the puck around, a bit of stylized aggression going nowhere with no real stakes. This was a rec game. No one really cared who won. The concept was better than the pay-off. I would have preferred to have seen an actual play that fully addressed the questions this provoked, but never really dealt with. You know: less game and more play.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, I had an experience in a theatre I will treasure for the rest of my life: Robert's Lepage's intense and exquisite re-visitation to his script from over 25 years ago: NEEDLES AND OPIUM.
The play starts off with an illuminated map of the acupuncture points on the human body projected on to Robert (Marc Labreche), an actor in Paris doing the English and French voice-over for an American/French film about Miles Davis. Alone in a hotel room where Julie Greco, Satre and de Beauvoir once lived in the over-heated Hotel Louisiana, Robert is struggling in the aftermath of a break-up. Acupuncture can cure almost everything: except anguish and a broken heart.
Lepage muses on Jean Cocteau, existentialism, jazz and the life and the music of the great Miles Davis to create an exquisite and compelling aural and visual meditation on the power of artists to transform their personal anguish and heartbreak, their needles, if you will, into the great opiate of sublime art.
Cocteau and Davis both fell prey to the needle of opium: heroin. Lepage, the writer understands that addiction is about the self medication of the existential pain of living. Art is an alternative track: in the right hands, it yields similarly consuming results but offers a path not to destruction, but to creation. In the transformation of human anguish to art, the stars are truly born.
The show features three fabulous performers: Marc Labreche, who plays both Robert and Cocteau, seamlessly moving between two worlds and two characters, Wellesley Robertson III who plays Miles Davis with powerful physicality and great elegance, and an uncredited woman who plays the sensuous Julie Greco.
Lepage's highly skilled and accomplished design team provided the cast with an endlessly evocative and inventive set: a rotating blank canvas of a cube that shape-shifted with a series of lighting and costume changes, traps, aerial wires, sound, music, and projected film to create a world of beauty, sensation and human emotion.
One hundred and twenty uninterrupted minutes flew by: a complete psychic immersion for the audience. We were transported, body and soul.
NEEDLES and OPIUM was intellectually rigorous, aesthetically beautiful and profoundly moving.
This was absolutely the high point of my theatrical experiences this year. What a trip!
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Luminous Art: The Margie Gillis Dance Foundation at the Paula Fleck Theatre
It's been seventeen years since The Margie Gillis Dance Foundation, the company of internationally renowned dancer and choreographer, Margie Gillis appeared in Toronto.
As I watched last night's performance, I could only wonder how much we've missed.
Margie Gillis is celebrating her 40th year as a dance creator this year. THE LIGHT BETWEEN, one of three works she is presenting this year, ran for two nights at the Paula Fleck Theatre at the Harbourfornt Centre this week.
More than two years in the making, THE LIGHT BETWEEN is a highly evolved collaboration between Margie Gillis and sculptor and painter, Randal Newman. The work explores the charged, complex and nuanced terrain of the relationship between an artist's life and their work. They were joined in their creative process by dancer, director and dramaturge Paula Styron, dancer Marc Daigle, costume designer Anne Dixon, lighting designer, Pierre Lavoie, sound and music designer Larsen Lupin and dancer Holly Bright, who did not perform last night, but was instrumental in the creation of the piece.
The result is an exquisitely beautiful, highly refined, deeply felt and profoundly moving work of art. Sound, text, music, visual elements, dance and performance were intelligently and sensitively synthesized by a team of seasoned collaborators.
Joy, passion, carnality, desire, longing, grief, suffering, compassion, empathy and loss all passed before us and indeed through us, as Gillis, Styron and Daigle took us on a journey through a series of shifting relationships with themselves and others. The company made palpable the human struggle to fill the deep soul need for love and connection and how that need gets channeled through and satisfied by the creative process of making art.
Lately, I am often physically impressed by dance performances I see, but mostly I'm left feeling cold. Last night, the lyricism and emotional commitment of the performers combined with the other creative elements of the production achieved what physical pyrotechnics seldom do. I was moved to tears.
Ms.Gillis and I share a set designer, Randal Newman so I know from professional experience what a sensitive and inventive collaborator he is. Here, Newman has created a series of eight, large, sculptural, hanging black mesh panels incorporating both fragments of text and elements of the human body As a stand-alone work of art, the set is beautiful. As the dancers both moved through and interacted with.it, it became a performer in its own right.
I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I've seen a production this good on every level. Each and every element of the performance: physical, technical and artistic was executed at the highest possible level.
The only thing I was sorry about last night was that the show was over. Toronto was the last stop for this production for now. I hope some producer will bring it back here again for a longer run. If you missed THE LIGHT BETWEEN, you missed something very special.
As I watched last night's performance, I could only wonder how much we've missed.
Margie Gillis is celebrating her 40th year as a dance creator this year. THE LIGHT BETWEEN, one of three works she is presenting this year, ran for two nights at the Paula Fleck Theatre at the Harbourfornt Centre this week.
More than two years in the making, THE LIGHT BETWEEN is a highly evolved collaboration between Margie Gillis and sculptor and painter, Randal Newman. The work explores the charged, complex and nuanced terrain of the relationship between an artist's life and their work. They were joined in their creative process by dancer, director and dramaturge Paula Styron, dancer Marc Daigle, costume designer Anne Dixon, lighting designer, Pierre Lavoie, sound and music designer Larsen Lupin and dancer Holly Bright, who did not perform last night, but was instrumental in the creation of the piece.
The result is an exquisitely beautiful, highly refined, deeply felt and profoundly moving work of art. Sound, text, music, visual elements, dance and performance were intelligently and sensitively synthesized by a team of seasoned collaborators.
Joy, passion, carnality, desire, longing, grief, suffering, compassion, empathy and loss all passed before us and indeed through us, as Gillis, Styron and Daigle took us on a journey through a series of shifting relationships with themselves and others. The company made palpable the human struggle to fill the deep soul need for love and connection and how that need gets channeled through and satisfied by the creative process of making art.
Lately, I am often physically impressed by dance performances I see, but mostly I'm left feeling cold. Last night, the lyricism and emotional commitment of the performers combined with the other creative elements of the production achieved what physical pyrotechnics seldom do. I was moved to tears.
Ms.Gillis and I share a set designer, Randal Newman so I know from professional experience what a sensitive and inventive collaborator he is. Here, Newman has created a series of eight, large, sculptural, hanging black mesh panels incorporating both fragments of text and elements of the human body As a stand-alone work of art, the set is beautiful. As the dancers both moved through and interacted with.it, it became a performer in its own right.
I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I've seen a production this good on every level. Each and every element of the performance: physical, technical and artistic was executed at the highest possible level.
The only thing I was sorry about last night was that the show was over. Toronto was the last stop for this production for now. I hope some producer will bring it back here again for a longer run. If you missed THE LIGHT BETWEEN, you missed something very special.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Autumn In Toronto: Les MISERABLES & VENUS IN FURS
I first came to Toronto in autumn, many, many years ago to work on a show at what is now Canadian Stage. I lived with a friend in his Victorian loft on King Street East, near Parliament Street. I rehearsed near the corner of Queen Street West and Spadina in a long-gone Hungarian church.
I was 16 years old. It was my first time away from home, my first time on an airplane, my first time living in a city other than Winnipeg where I grew up.
There was a transit strike that fall and I often walked the 16 blocks to work in the morning, past the 19th century houses and shops of Cabbagetown, past the bank towers further up King Street and then I'd switch and head north, usually up Bay or Simcoe towards Queen Street West.
There were still greengrocers and vintage shops along that stretch of Queen. I ate my first concord grapes and my first russet apples that October. I also started going to see new Canadian plays, in spaces down alleyways and up dark staircases. It was that autumn, spent wandering through Toronto's many delights: the Museum, the Royal Winter Fair, the University of Toronto grounds, St Lawrence and Kensington Market, the green house in the Allan Gardens that made me fall in love with this place and determine I wanted to make it my home. It was also the fall that really clinched my life-long love affair with theatre.
To this day, there is no thrill for me like the thrill of sitting in a darkening theatre, as the music starts and the lights come up on the stage.
I had that old feeling last week when I sat in the Princess of Wales Theatre as the orchestra tuned up and the curtain rose on the new production of LES MISERABLES. I remembered not only the delicious anticipation of waiting for a big show, in a big theatre, in a big city to begin but also how it felt to be that young woman standing in the wings, waiting to go onstage in a big show on opening night.
The new production is fabulous, with a fine cast, a tight orchestra and a brilliant stage design combining to provide a memorable night at the theatre. Hugo's tale of love, politics and redemption is well-served in this inventive revival. I was moved to tears several times by the beautiful singing of the affecting score. It is well worth splashing out for a ticket.
Then, last weekend, an actress friend of mine and I went to see VENUS IN FURS at Canadian Stage. PIG, which I didn't see, just closed at BUDDIES. BSDM is very flavour of the month in the theatre community this year. Personally I'll be glad when this trend is over.
There were however, a lot of younger couples there on dates. I'm glad CanStage found a script that appealed to a more youthful audience, though its charms were largely lost on me.
The play depicts a battle of the sexes between a very attractive and determined working -class actress and a somewhat nebbish bourgeois male writer-director who is trying to cast the female lead in his adaptation for the stage of the famous 1920s novel about a sadomasochistic relationship. The cat and mouse game between the two characters in VENUS... heats up, but it is more tepid than hot and in many ways felt like a very old story about heterosexual relationships.
I'm not sure this show wouldn't have been better served by the intimacy of Berkley Street. The huge stage on Front Street, stripped nearly bare, seemed to dwarf both the actors and the story.
The stage needs a desk, two chairs, a tea cart, a casting couch and a pole. A more intimate space might have helped crank up the heat and made the shifts in dynamics between the pair more unsettling for the audience
Street is a terrific actress and she makes a meal of the part. The show is worth seeing for her performance alone.
Miller's role is somewhat underwritten. As well, he's a charming and likeable performer, but not an imposing guy on stage. I would have liked to have seen an actor with a bit more of an edge. Street so clearly has the upper hand and Miller is so non-threatening that there was no real game for me to buy into.
There's a rule in writing that if you make a weapon appear, someone has to use it. Two knives come out in this play and no one really uses them or is even very threatening with them.
This is basically a play about a hot woman using her sexuality to try get a job and a guy using his power to offer a job so he can get to see a bunch of women stand around in front of him in their underwear for free. Sorry folks but any way you want to slice it, the guy who signs the paycheque is the guy with the power in this exchange.
And as usual, in a play about straight sex, the girl is in her panties and bra and high heels for most of the show and the guy - wait for it, takes his shirt off near the end. I never want or need to see that on stage again.
UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS... is a hell of lot scarier, a hell of a lot sexier and has a lot more to say about the state of relations between men and women and about bsdm. Come to think of it so does any decent production of PRIVATE LIVES.
This material would have needed to be smarter and the partners more evenly matched economically to be a hot, even-handed battle of the sexes for me. As explorations of contemporary power dynamics between men and women go, VENUS is pretty vanilla and very old-school.
I did see a great Canadian play at SUMMERWORKS about young people, sex and relationships back in August: WILD DOGS ON THE MOSCOW TRAINS. I'd LOVE to see CanStage mount a production of that script.
Oh yes, and Pamela Sinha is remounting her electrifying Dora-award-winning production of CRASH at Theatre Passe Muraille this weekend. The entire run has nearly sold out. It's too bad someone didn't give her a bigger theatre. There's nothing tepid about the gut-wrenching story she tells. If you missed it last time, go.
I was 16 years old. It was my first time away from home, my first time on an airplane, my first time living in a city other than Winnipeg where I grew up.
There was a transit strike that fall and I often walked the 16 blocks to work in the morning, past the 19th century houses and shops of Cabbagetown, past the bank towers further up King Street and then I'd switch and head north, usually up Bay or Simcoe towards Queen Street West.
There were still greengrocers and vintage shops along that stretch of Queen. I ate my first concord grapes and my first russet apples that October. I also started going to see new Canadian plays, in spaces down alleyways and up dark staircases. It was that autumn, spent wandering through Toronto's many delights: the Museum, the Royal Winter Fair, the University of Toronto grounds, St Lawrence and Kensington Market, the green house in the Allan Gardens that made me fall in love with this place and determine I wanted to make it my home. It was also the fall that really clinched my life-long love affair with theatre.
To this day, there is no thrill for me like the thrill of sitting in a darkening theatre, as the music starts and the lights come up on the stage.
I had that old feeling last week when I sat in the Princess of Wales Theatre as the orchestra tuned up and the curtain rose on the new production of LES MISERABLES. I remembered not only the delicious anticipation of waiting for a big show, in a big theatre, in a big city to begin but also how it felt to be that young woman standing in the wings, waiting to go onstage in a big show on opening night.
The new production is fabulous, with a fine cast, a tight orchestra and a brilliant stage design combining to provide a memorable night at the theatre. Hugo's tale of love, politics and redemption is well-served in this inventive revival. I was moved to tears several times by the beautiful singing of the affecting score. It is well worth splashing out for a ticket.
Then, last weekend, an actress friend of mine and I went to see VENUS IN FURS at Canadian Stage. PIG, which I didn't see, just closed at BUDDIES. BSDM is very flavour of the month in the theatre community this year. Personally I'll be glad when this trend is over.
There were however, a lot of younger couples there on dates. I'm glad CanStage found a script that appealed to a more youthful audience, though its charms were largely lost on me.
The play depicts a battle of the sexes between a very attractive and determined working -class actress and a somewhat nebbish bourgeois male writer-director who is trying to cast the female lead in his adaptation for the stage of the famous 1920s novel about a sadomasochistic relationship. The cat and mouse game between the two characters in VENUS... heats up, but it is more tepid than hot and in many ways felt like a very old story about heterosexual relationships.
I'm not sure this show wouldn't have been better served by the intimacy of Berkley Street. The huge stage on Front Street, stripped nearly bare, seemed to dwarf both the actors and the story.
The stage needs a desk, two chairs, a tea cart, a casting couch and a pole. A more intimate space might have helped crank up the heat and made the shifts in dynamics between the pair more unsettling for the audience
Street is a terrific actress and she makes a meal of the part. The show is worth seeing for her performance alone.
Miller's role is somewhat underwritten. As well, he's a charming and likeable performer, but not an imposing guy on stage. I would have liked to have seen an actor with a bit more of an edge. Street so clearly has the upper hand and Miller is so non-threatening that there was no real game for me to buy into.
There's a rule in writing that if you make a weapon appear, someone has to use it. Two knives come out in this play and no one really uses them or is even very threatening with them.
This is basically a play about a hot woman using her sexuality to try get a job and a guy using his power to offer a job so he can get to see a bunch of women stand around in front of him in their underwear for free. Sorry folks but any way you want to slice it, the guy who signs the paycheque is the guy with the power in this exchange.
And as usual, in a play about straight sex, the girl is in her panties and bra and high heels for most of the show and the guy - wait for it, takes his shirt off near the end. I never want or need to see that on stage again.
UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS... is a hell of lot scarier, a hell of a lot sexier and has a lot more to say about the state of relations between men and women and about bsdm. Come to think of it so does any decent production of PRIVATE LIVES.
This material would have needed to be smarter and the partners more evenly matched economically to be a hot, even-handed battle of the sexes for me. As explorations of contemporary power dynamics between men and women go, VENUS is pretty vanilla and very old-school.
I did see a great Canadian play at SUMMERWORKS about young people, sex and relationships back in August: WILD DOGS ON THE MOSCOW TRAINS. I'd LOVE to see CanStage mount a production of that script.
Oh yes, and Pamela Sinha is remounting her electrifying Dora-award-winning production of CRASH at Theatre Passe Muraille this weekend. The entire run has nearly sold out. It's too bad someone didn't give her a bigger theatre. There's nothing tepid about the gut-wrenching story she tells. If you missed it last time, go.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
If A Change is a Good as A Rest, Why Am I So Damn Tired?
Gentle Readers,
The Toronto Fringe ended and what was supposed to happen was this: I was to get on a plane, go home, see my nephew and niece-in-law tie the knot, visit with friends and family and spend a week at the Winnipeg Fringe.
What actually happened was this: one of my bosses ( I can't quit my day jobs and pay rent) decided it was preferable I holiday in August. If I went home it would be for two days, max.
Also, the Monday after the wedding, which would have been Day 5 of the Winnipeg Fringe, my worldly goods and chattel - well, most of it, at any rate - which had come out of a storage locker in Winnipeg on the previous Wednesday arrived on my doorstep in Toronto. I spent last week, not at the Winnipeg Fringe, but doing something I longed to do and dreaded doing, something I had both worked hard to make happen and avoided: I unpacked my baggage and settled into one place for the foreseeable future.
My plans for celebrating my nephew and niece-in-law's joy (and my family's) and spending time with hometown friends and my Fringe buddies from all over the world got buried in a pile of paper and packing lists, as I re-established a permanent home in Toronto.
When I lived in Winnipeg, for a good part of the time, I lived with my (now-ex) fiance. I left that city and that apartment, in large part, because his ghost haunted every corner of the place.
I felt frozen in time. Like a shark, I knew I either moved forward or died.
This week, as cards he wrote me and gifts he gave me came out of boxes, as I found a picture taken of us on the weekend of our first anniversary that used to sit on my dresser in our old bedroom, as I repositioned furniture we'd bought together in another city into different spots in my new singleton apartment, as I discovered I'd given him his books and my bookcases and kept my books and a few of his bookcases, I realized this: no matter where I go or what I do, his ghost will haunt me for the rest of my life. Not in a bad way: I just came to realize that no amount of moving was going to change what happened. We were supposed to get married and we didn't. We were supposed to spend the rest of our lives together and we won't.
Five years later, as I emptied box after box and positioned the furniture in my new, lovely apartment I also realized that I am not good at letting go of things - or people. The surplus is in a pile in the hallway and I'm giving it away. It needs a new home that's not mine.
I also realized I now have a reasonably well-equipped kitchen again and one of the things that gives me joy: having friends over to dinner and cooking for them on a regular basis will be possible once again. Books and art and sweaters I'd loved and forgotten about reappeared like long-lost friends. For the first time in nearly three years, I slept in my own bed. It felt right and good.
My dad has also been gone for five years now. I put his picture in one of those bookcases and I heard his voice, " Sweetheart, it beats hell out of the alternative." Yes Chief. I think of him every day, hear his voice in my head every day. I know I will until I die.
For the past three years, I have performed Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" at Dalnavert Museum in Winnipeg at Christmas. It is a gig I look forward to with great joy. At the end of the play, Scrooge says, " I will live in the past, the present and the future and strive to let the Spirits of all Three live within me."
As I unpacked, I was with Scrooge: haunted by the ghosts of the past, dealing with the present and not really sure what the future looks like besides amorphous and somewhat overwhelming.
This week, I'm having dinner in my new home with a friend who has been instrumental in helping me make this move. Like me, she went away and has returned to an uncertain and precarious future. We are both trying to move forward, in late middle age, with purpose and hope.
I have work I like. I enjoy my health, a nice place to live, family, friends. I live in a safe country. It's lonely sometimes and scary sometimes but it is not so bad.
I'll paint the furniture on my balcony that used to be in my kitchen and in the instance of the table, my grandmother's kitchen before that. I'll plant more flowers. In the mornings, I'll have coffee outside before I walk along the harbour to meet my colleague and her daughter to drive to work together for one more week before she moves from an apartment on the water to the house she and her husband have spent the summer renovating. They moved back here too - from Chicago.
Not long after I returned here, I met a man who was similarly in transition. His marriage and his last job were both over. His dad had died the year before.
Like me, he put everything in a locker and went away for awhile and like me, he came back here to start over, one more time. For a while, we were both crashed out with friends, hanging out, two souls adrift. Then our respective ghosts came between us. We quarrelled and I lost track of him. I hope he can unpack the past, deal with present challenges and embrace the future with more joy than trepidation. I hope he finds what he needs, whatever that may be.
I needed to stop moving. I needed a home of my own again.
After two and half years, twenty-five beds here and on the road, some false starts and failed experiments, I am home, "home at last, home for good and all, home for ever and ever," to quote Dickens.
My ex said that to me when he moved in. The future, I have learned, is an uncertain thing.
Me and my baggage, all of it, are for better or worse, once again in one place. A few friends helped me do this. You know who you are and I need you to know how grateful I am for your love, your faith and support.
That's not to say I won't go back on the road. I will. I will do it from a base of operation. I am done with being homeless. I plan to stay here and to do my best to make that plan go forward.
I have two plays that need to get written, furniture that needs painting, pictures that need hanging and friends I want to cook for. For the next while, I'll stay home, cook, redecorate, plan my next production - and write.
Oh yeah, and go to movies and the theatre. When I come home from the shows late at night, I'll sit on the balcony and look out at the city skyline and feel happy and lucky to be here, to be home at last.
Next week, I'll write about something I've seen, I promise.
The Toronto Fringe ended and what was supposed to happen was this: I was to get on a plane, go home, see my nephew and niece-in-law tie the knot, visit with friends and family and spend a week at the Winnipeg Fringe.
What actually happened was this: one of my bosses ( I can't quit my day jobs and pay rent) decided it was preferable I holiday in August. If I went home it would be for two days, max.
Also, the Monday after the wedding, which would have been Day 5 of the Winnipeg Fringe, my worldly goods and chattel - well, most of it, at any rate - which had come out of a storage locker in Winnipeg on the previous Wednesday arrived on my doorstep in Toronto. I spent last week, not at the Winnipeg Fringe, but doing something I longed to do and dreaded doing, something I had both worked hard to make happen and avoided: I unpacked my baggage and settled into one place for the foreseeable future.
My plans for celebrating my nephew and niece-in-law's joy (and my family's) and spending time with hometown friends and my Fringe buddies from all over the world got buried in a pile of paper and packing lists, as I re-established a permanent home in Toronto.
When I lived in Winnipeg, for a good part of the time, I lived with my (now-ex) fiance. I left that city and that apartment, in large part, because his ghost haunted every corner of the place.
I felt frozen in time. Like a shark, I knew I either moved forward or died.
This week, as cards he wrote me and gifts he gave me came out of boxes, as I found a picture taken of us on the weekend of our first anniversary that used to sit on my dresser in our old bedroom, as I repositioned furniture we'd bought together in another city into different spots in my new singleton apartment, as I discovered I'd given him his books and my bookcases and kept my books and a few of his bookcases, I realized this: no matter where I go or what I do, his ghost will haunt me for the rest of my life. Not in a bad way: I just came to realize that no amount of moving was going to change what happened. We were supposed to get married and we didn't. We were supposed to spend the rest of our lives together and we won't.
Five years later, as I emptied box after box and positioned the furniture in my new, lovely apartment I also realized that I am not good at letting go of things - or people. The surplus is in a pile in the hallway and I'm giving it away. It needs a new home that's not mine.
I also realized I now have a reasonably well-equipped kitchen again and one of the things that gives me joy: having friends over to dinner and cooking for them on a regular basis will be possible once again. Books and art and sweaters I'd loved and forgotten about reappeared like long-lost friends. For the first time in nearly three years, I slept in my own bed. It felt right and good.
My dad has also been gone for five years now. I put his picture in one of those bookcases and I heard his voice, " Sweetheart, it beats hell out of the alternative." Yes Chief. I think of him every day, hear his voice in my head every day. I know I will until I die.
For the past three years, I have performed Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" at Dalnavert Museum in Winnipeg at Christmas. It is a gig I look forward to with great joy. At the end of the play, Scrooge says, " I will live in the past, the present and the future and strive to let the Spirits of all Three live within me."
As I unpacked, I was with Scrooge: haunted by the ghosts of the past, dealing with the present and not really sure what the future looks like besides amorphous and somewhat overwhelming.
This week, I'm having dinner in my new home with a friend who has been instrumental in helping me make this move. Like me, she went away and has returned to an uncertain and precarious future. We are both trying to move forward, in late middle age, with purpose and hope.
I have work I like. I enjoy my health, a nice place to live, family, friends. I live in a safe country. It's lonely sometimes and scary sometimes but it is not so bad.
I'll paint the furniture on my balcony that used to be in my kitchen and in the instance of the table, my grandmother's kitchen before that. I'll plant more flowers. In the mornings, I'll have coffee outside before I walk along the harbour to meet my colleague and her daughter to drive to work together for one more week before she moves from an apartment on the water to the house she and her husband have spent the summer renovating. They moved back here too - from Chicago.
Not long after I returned here, I met a man who was similarly in transition. His marriage and his last job were both over. His dad had died the year before.
Like me, he put everything in a locker and went away for awhile and like me, he came back here to start over, one more time. For a while, we were both crashed out with friends, hanging out, two souls adrift. Then our respective ghosts came between us. We quarrelled and I lost track of him. I hope he can unpack the past, deal with present challenges and embrace the future with more joy than trepidation. I hope he finds what he needs, whatever that may be.
I needed to stop moving. I needed a home of my own again.
After two and half years, twenty-five beds here and on the road, some false starts and failed experiments, I am home, "home at last, home for good and all, home for ever and ever," to quote Dickens.
My ex said that to me when he moved in. The future, I have learned, is an uncertain thing.
Me and my baggage, all of it, are for better or worse, once again in one place. A few friends helped me do this. You know who you are and I need you to know how grateful I am for your love, your faith and support.
That's not to say I won't go back on the road. I will. I will do it from a base of operation. I am done with being homeless. I plan to stay here and to do my best to make that plan go forward.
I have two plays that need to get written, furniture that needs painting, pictures that need hanging and friends I want to cook for. For the next while, I'll stay home, cook, redecorate, plan my next production - and write.
Oh yeah, and go to movies and the theatre. When I come home from the shows late at night, I'll sit on the balcony and look out at the city skyline and feel happy and lucky to be here, to be home at last.
Next week, I'll write about something I've seen, I promise.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
The 25th Toronto Fringe: The Site and the Shows in a Wet and Wild Year
The last time I lived through a summer this wet in Toronto was 1993. It rained every weekend for two straight months.
One night I awoke and the top of my head was wet. A big chunk of the ceiling above my bed had collapsed and fallen on my pillow while I slept.
The exterior concrete on my apartment building could not withstand the amount of rain we received that summer. Water had seeped through the exterior walls into the building and was causing the interior ceilings to collapse.
The festival has suffered under a similar record-setting deluge this year. The beer tent, which is so nice this year and really feels like a wonderful summer party and art space again was shut down Sunday night and Monday due to the rain. When I walked through the grounds on Monday to try and find out which theatres were still up and running, many of the roofs of the tents had collapsed under the weight of the water.
By Tuesday, the intrepid festival staff had the site up and rocking, looking as if nothing had happened. There was art, music, alley shows, food, laughter: eating ,drinking, theatre and art-making, sharing, socializing and fun. Well done!
The same festival staff magically turned Honest Ed's underground garage into a club on Saturday night - a hot, steamy dance club with bartenders mixing Fringetinis, curtained walls, vintage festival posters, fancy coloured lights and a DJ. Thanks guys - that was the most fun I've had working up a sweat in a while:)
The Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille and the Annex Theatre lost power in Monday night's rainstorm. A board member told me last night that the Factory remained closed for much of Tuesday as staff struggled to restore power.
This is financially devastating to both the festival and the performers in the shut down venues. They need every minute of every day to make back their costs.
Bridget McIntosh, one of the Toronto Fringe's many brilliant former administrators, made a great post on Facebook yesterday, encouraging festival patrons and supporters to "buy the festival a beer".
The Fringe is literally financed in large measure on revenue from the sale of alcohol (and other beverages) at the bar in the beer tent. If every person who would have had a drink on Sunday or Monday night on the site put that $10 in a "tip the Fringe" can, we could all help finance what has, to date, been one of the best Toronto Fringes in years.
As to the performers, help them sell out this last Fringe weekend and make up their lost revenue.
Some shows I've seen this week and enjoyed include:
JEM ROLLS ATTACKS THE SILENCE!: the circuit's poet laureate in fine form at the George Ignatieff. At least five seasoned Fringe goers have come up to me and said they thought it was his best show yet and that's a high benchmark.
THE HOMEMAKER: Laura Anne Harris is closed now, but she did a delightful, then devastating turn as a 1960s French-Canadian Saskatchewan housewife married to both her husband and the bottle.
YARN: Alex Eddington, in probably the nicest BYOV I've ever been to, inventively tells a story of a voyage of personal discovery in the Scottish Highlands. I particularly loved his imaginative use of both a sheep puppet and a ball of yarn and his fabulous live soundscape.
ASSASSINATING THOMSON: Incredibly talented Bruce Horak explores, art, creativity, ways of seeing and the death of Tom Thomson in a unique, engaging, and understated performance.
THREADS: my favourite script so far this week by Tonya Jones Miller. Miller's mother taught English at the Buddhist University in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, while living with her Vietnamese partner's family. Miller's mother's history is fascinating, gut-wrenching, and completely unforgettable. She's in a 50 seat venue. Get there before she totally sells out her run.
GOD IS A SCOTTISH DRAG QUEEN: Mike Delamont may not be God, but he is a gift from God to comedy. The last time I laughed that hard at a Fringe show was the year I saw HOOPAL, Chis Gibbs' former comedy duo. Delamont riffs on everything from homophobia to the afterlife with such pointed wit, candor and insight that he had the audience in stitches the entire time.
Stuff I'm planning to see before the festival is over:
THE ADVERSARY by Andrew Bailey, who is one of the best writers on the circuit
LOVE IS A POVERTY YOU CAN SELL: Weimar cabaret always floats my boat.
KUWAITI MOONSHINE: I want to see what the charming Tim Murphy does with a tale that evolved out of his time spent teaching in Kuwait.
TEACHING HAMLET: no Fringe experience is complete without a Keir Cutler show.
KIN: I know nothing about the script but I've heard great things about the acting
WEAKSAUCE: I have tried twice to get into this show, and am hoping three is the charm. Sam Mullins isn't in the program but his last show, TINFOIL DRAGON was a hit, and I want to see his new work.
THE SOAPS: National Theatre of the World takes on the Ford Nation.
I have seen the Dora-award winning MORRO AND JASP: GO BAKE YOURSELF, but if you haven't, go see Toronto's favourite clown duo in a BYOV.
I am going to lose most of my Thursday night sitting around waiting for Bell to show up and fix my internet connection. After that's over with, I will come down and party like it's 1989 at the festival's anniversary party. Hope to see you there!
Happy Fringing and remember to tip the Fringe generously this week. They've done a great job and they need the money.
One night I awoke and the top of my head was wet. A big chunk of the ceiling above my bed had collapsed and fallen on my pillow while I slept.
The exterior concrete on my apartment building could not withstand the amount of rain we received that summer. Water had seeped through the exterior walls into the building and was causing the interior ceilings to collapse.
The festival has suffered under a similar record-setting deluge this year. The beer tent, which is so nice this year and really feels like a wonderful summer party and art space again was shut down Sunday night and Monday due to the rain. When I walked through the grounds on Monday to try and find out which theatres were still up and running, many of the roofs of the tents had collapsed under the weight of the water.
By Tuesday, the intrepid festival staff had the site up and rocking, looking as if nothing had happened. There was art, music, alley shows, food, laughter: eating ,drinking, theatre and art-making, sharing, socializing and fun. Well done!
The same festival staff magically turned Honest Ed's underground garage into a club on Saturday night - a hot, steamy dance club with bartenders mixing Fringetinis, curtained walls, vintage festival posters, fancy coloured lights and a DJ. Thanks guys - that was the most fun I've had working up a sweat in a while:)
The Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille and the Annex Theatre lost power in Monday night's rainstorm. A board member told me last night that the Factory remained closed for much of Tuesday as staff struggled to restore power.
This is financially devastating to both the festival and the performers in the shut down venues. They need every minute of every day to make back their costs.
Bridget McIntosh, one of the Toronto Fringe's many brilliant former administrators, made a great post on Facebook yesterday, encouraging festival patrons and supporters to "buy the festival a beer".
The Fringe is literally financed in large measure on revenue from the sale of alcohol (and other beverages) at the bar in the beer tent. If every person who would have had a drink on Sunday or Monday night on the site put that $10 in a "tip the Fringe" can, we could all help finance what has, to date, been one of the best Toronto Fringes in years.
As to the performers, help them sell out this last Fringe weekend and make up their lost revenue.
Some shows I've seen this week and enjoyed include:
JEM ROLLS ATTACKS THE SILENCE!: the circuit's poet laureate in fine form at the George Ignatieff. At least five seasoned Fringe goers have come up to me and said they thought it was his best show yet and that's a high benchmark.
THE HOMEMAKER: Laura Anne Harris is closed now, but she did a delightful, then devastating turn as a 1960s French-Canadian Saskatchewan housewife married to both her husband and the bottle.
YARN: Alex Eddington, in probably the nicest BYOV I've ever been to, inventively tells a story of a voyage of personal discovery in the Scottish Highlands. I particularly loved his imaginative use of both a sheep puppet and a ball of yarn and his fabulous live soundscape.
ASSASSINATING THOMSON: Incredibly talented Bruce Horak explores, art, creativity, ways of seeing and the death of Tom Thomson in a unique, engaging, and understated performance.
THREADS: my favourite script so far this week by Tonya Jones Miller. Miller's mother taught English at the Buddhist University in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, while living with her Vietnamese partner's family. Miller's mother's history is fascinating, gut-wrenching, and completely unforgettable. She's in a 50 seat venue. Get there before she totally sells out her run.
GOD IS A SCOTTISH DRAG QUEEN: Mike Delamont may not be God, but he is a gift from God to comedy. The last time I laughed that hard at a Fringe show was the year I saw HOOPAL, Chis Gibbs' former comedy duo. Delamont riffs on everything from homophobia to the afterlife with such pointed wit, candor and insight that he had the audience in stitches the entire time.
Stuff I'm planning to see before the festival is over:
THE ADVERSARY by Andrew Bailey, who is one of the best writers on the circuit
LOVE IS A POVERTY YOU CAN SELL: Weimar cabaret always floats my boat.
KUWAITI MOONSHINE: I want to see what the charming Tim Murphy does with a tale that evolved out of his time spent teaching in Kuwait.
TEACHING HAMLET: no Fringe experience is complete without a Keir Cutler show.
KIN: I know nothing about the script but I've heard great things about the acting
WEAKSAUCE: I have tried twice to get into this show, and am hoping three is the charm. Sam Mullins isn't in the program but his last show, TINFOIL DRAGON was a hit, and I want to see his new work.
THE SOAPS: National Theatre of the World takes on the Ford Nation.
I have seen the Dora-award winning MORRO AND JASP: GO BAKE YOURSELF, but if you haven't, go see Toronto's favourite clown duo in a BYOV.
I am going to lose most of my Thursday night sitting around waiting for Bell to show up and fix my internet connection. After that's over with, I will come down and party like it's 1989 at the festival's anniversary party. Hope to see you there!
Happy Fringing and remember to tip the Fringe generously this week. They've done a great job and they need the money.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
As the 25th Toronto Fringe Opens, let's toast the guy who got the party started!
Tonight, the 25th Toronto Fringe Festival opens.
The largest theatre festival in Toronto will have 148 shows in 35 venues, site-specific performances, an art alley, rocking parties, bands and a beer tent.
There will be new plays, revivals of classic texts, poets, clowns, musical theatre, dance, street performances and hybrids of some or all of the aforementioned. It is a feast of theatre that is central, accessible, inexpensive, and a ton of fun.
Instead of previewing shows I think you might enjoy this week ( I'll do that in a day or so), I'd like to invite you to stop and thank the person who initially made the Fringe festival in Toronto possible in the first place.
As audiences and performers experience the large, (relatively) well-financed festival we have today, it is hard to believe this started with a few venues, 25 shows, very little money, and a guy who was crazy enough to give bringing the Fringe festival concept to Toronto a shot.
While he was still in his 20s, Gregory Nixon, a musician, producer, and actor got together with a few friends and decided to create an artist-driven theatre festival in Toronto.
Edmonton, Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver already had fringe festivals. Bringing an unjuried and uncensored theatre festival to the largest centre for theatre production in the country (and one of the more conservative) was a gutsy and risky move that has brought enormous benefit to theatre practitioners and audiences alike.
Commercial hits were never the point of the festival however. The point was to give artists a venue for absolutely free expression. That fine and laudable tradition continues to this day. As long as you don't go over your time, you can do anything you want at the Fringe.
After five years at the helm of the festival, Gregory went on to contribute to the growth and development of other important cultural events, and institutions in Toronto including Nuit Blanche, Harbourfront Centre and the Toronto Arts Awards. He has made over 20 films about art, and artists from a range of disciplines, exhibited his photography, and served on the boards of directors of many arts organizations.
As we get our party on for the next twelve days, and celebrate all the great theatre we'll see this week, the generosity of the sponsors, and the hard work of the administration and staff of the festival, past and present, I think we ought to pause, and take a moment to thank the man who made all of this possible in the first place. All of us who have ever attended or made work at the Toronto Fringe owe a debt of gratitude to Gregory Nixon.
Gregory, we are all richer for your vision and your commitment to the arts community in the city. Thank you.
The largest theatre festival in Toronto will have 148 shows in 35 venues, site-specific performances, an art alley, rocking parties, bands and a beer tent.
There will be new plays, revivals of classic texts, poets, clowns, musical theatre, dance, street performances and hybrids of some or all of the aforementioned. It is a feast of theatre that is central, accessible, inexpensive, and a ton of fun.
Instead of previewing shows I think you might enjoy this week ( I'll do that in a day or so), I'd like to invite you to stop and thank the person who initially made the Fringe festival in Toronto possible in the first place.
As audiences and performers experience the large, (relatively) well-financed festival we have today, it is hard to believe this started with a few venues, 25 shows, very little money, and a guy who was crazy enough to give bringing the Fringe festival concept to Toronto a shot.
While he was still in his 20s, Gregory Nixon, a musician, producer, and actor got together with a few friends and decided to create an artist-driven theatre festival in Toronto.
Edmonton, Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver already had fringe festivals. Bringing an unjuried and uncensored theatre festival to the largest centre for theatre production in the country (and one of the more conservative) was a gutsy and risky move that has brought enormous benefit to theatre practitioners and audiences alike.
In large measure, I write plays because of the Toronto Fringe. I know I'm not alone in owing an enormous part of my career to the festival. DA KINK IN MY HAIR, ONE MAN STAR WARS, THE DROWSY CHAPERONE, Rick Miller, Mump and Smoot, Sandra Shamas: the shows and performers who started at the Toronto Fringe are legendary.
Commercial hits were never the point of the festival however. The point was to give artists a venue for absolutely free expression. That fine and laudable tradition continues to this day. As long as you don't go over your time, you can do anything you want at the Fringe.
After five years at the helm of the festival, Gregory went on to contribute to the growth and development of other important cultural events, and institutions in Toronto including Nuit Blanche, Harbourfront Centre and the Toronto Arts Awards. He has made over 20 films about art, and artists from a range of disciplines, exhibited his photography, and served on the boards of directors of many arts organizations.
As we get our party on for the next twelve days, and celebrate all the great theatre we'll see this week, the generosity of the sponsors, and the hard work of the administration and staff of the festival, past and present, I think we ought to pause, and take a moment to thank the man who made all of this possible in the first place. All of us who have ever attended or made work at the Toronto Fringe owe a debt of gratitude to Gregory Nixon.
Gregory, we are all richer for your vision and your commitment to the arts community in the city. Thank you.
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