Watching Glory Die @ Canadian Rep Theatre in the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs

This was my first visit to Canadian Rep Theatre, Ken Gass' newly formed theatre company after the Factory Theatre unceremoniously dumped him in 2012.  He seems to be doing just fine, judging by the list of donors in his program and the first-rate crew he's assembled for this interesting, intelligent and challenging, if not entirely satisfying production.

Canadian Rep's second show uses Canadian Stage's Upstairs space at the Berkeley Street Theatre to good effect, presenting a solo show written and performed by lauded Canadian playwright, Judith Thompson.

'Watching Glory Die" is an exploration of the death in custody of a teen-aged girl.

"Glory" is a stand-in, of sorts, for Ashley Smith, the 17 year old who died of auto-strangulation while in custody at the Grand Valley Correctional Institution in 2007. Guards stood and watched her asphyxiate, without intervening.  Her death was eventually ruled a homicide.

In her final year of life, Ashley was moved between 17 institutions in one year, including a three-month stint at a forensic mental health facility, where she eventually refused treatment, as is everyone's right. She was then taken to Grand Valley, where she died in solitary confinement.

It was a tremendously disturbing case, highlighting issues with both the Canadian justice system, and the mental health system. As a society, we incarcerate far too many seriously mentally ill people without adequately treating the mental health issues that landed them in prison in the first place.

The play explores the circumstances and events leading up to Glory's incarceration, and eventual death, from three points of view: her mother's, a female prison guard's ; who was present at the time of  Glory's death and Glory's own.

It is the gift of Thompson's writing and performance, and the restrained direction of Gass that allows the audience to empathize with all of the characters. While some of the transitions between scenes were a bit awkward, each character was clear in both the writing and the acting. Gass has given the three characters their own space, which helps clarify and highlight the differences between them.

I saw a grief stricken and enraged mother, a prison guard with a long, sad family history working in the corrections system, and a mentally disturbed girl, ostracized in solitary confinement, who has escaped into a world of fantasy as a refuge from her pain and isolation.  Glory imagines her birth mother as an alligator luring her to a swamp, a poetic allusion to the genetic set-up that perhaps, at least partially determines her fate.

The design (set and costumes by Astrid Janson, lighting by Andre du Toit, sound by Debashis Sinha and projections by Cameron Davis) was brilliant, allowing the actor to interact with the set, creating the sensations of Glory's inner life, and making palpable both the abuse she endured in custody, and her tragic death.

While the structure of the play allows the individual points of view of the characters to be explored in depth, it affords very little interaction or development of the relationships between the characters.

To really explore the tragedy that unfolds, I needed to see the darker side of the personalities of all of the characters, and, how those darker nuances played out in the conflicts in their respective relationships.  For the most part, that didn't happen.

We see the guards watch Glory kill herself. We never see even a glimpse of what it is about Glory's behaviour that turned her into a pariah in prison. Glory's mother idolizes her verbally, but we never see them interact.

There's some beautiful writing here, some very fine acting and a heart-felt exploration of the tragedy of this situation. WATCHING GLORY DIE has the bones of a great play, but it is the wrong kind of subject for a one-woman show. 

Ashley Smith was a physically imposing, socially difficult girl.  She was adopted as a baby and relentlessly bullied at school.  She was diagnosed variously with 'oppositional defiant disorder", "borderline personality disorder" and "sadism".  Her initial incarceration was for throwing crab apples at a postal worker in a small Cape Breton town. A six month sentence in juvenile detention turned into six years of incarceration because of Ashley's pathological inability to stop acting out. In prison, Ashley Smith smeared feces on the walls, covered the cameras and windows in her cell, masturbated and auto-asphyxiated in front of the guards. She strangled herself many times a day.  She assaulted and spit on staff. She took obvious pleasure in hurting people.  I sure as hell didn't see that kid onstage today.  I saw a high-spirited, slightly awkward girl who drifted into delusion under stress. What actually happened is a lot more complex than that.

As it is currently structured, the play is too much of rant against the prison system, and not enough of an exploration of the kinds of questions the Ashley Smiths of the world invite us to consider.

How does someone get to be like Ashley in the first place? As a society, how do we offer equal protection under the law to people who repulse and enrage and exasperate and defy and disgust us?  What, if anything, can we as a society, do for someone hell-bent on destroying  both themselves and any constructive relationship they're offered?  How do we love and care for someone who refuses care, and is determined to be unlovable? When does tough love/not enabling, that is, not rewarding bad behaviour with support or attention- become abuse?

Thompson is a brilliant writer, and a fine actress but I'm not sure this was the best way to tackle such complex material.

The treatment of mentally ill people in custody is a topic worthy of exploration.  WATCHING GLORY DIE is worth seeing for what it is:  a valiant and artistically beautiful, if flawed attempt to look at the mentally ill in prison with sensitivity and compassion.

A warm and funny BINGO! at The Factory Theatre ends the 13/14 Season

Last night,  I went with a friend of a similar vintage to see Daniel MacIvor's BINGO! about a 30 year high school graduating class reunion in a small town in Cape Breton.

Five former friends hook up for a booze-fueled weekend of shared reminisces, regression and regrets. As they approach 50, the reunion confronts them with both the depreciating amount of time left on their clocks, and the limitations aging is beginning to impose on their bodies, and their dreams.

The play starts off  in a hotel suite, with three guys from the class: Nurk, Doogie and Heffer playing bingo, a drinking game in which the first person to throw up, wins.

Doogie (David Keeley) is a big, good-looking, douchey ex-jock, a self-important bully, who sells real estate. Doogie flaunts his trappings of success:  his looks, his marriage to a trophy wife, two kids to brag about, though he prefers the boy to the girl, a job where he makes a lot of money, without much of an education, or getting his hands dirty.  There's trouble in paradise though:  Doogie is on the edge of being turfed from his marriage for lying, and, we suspect, cheating on his no longer impressed spouse.

Heffer (Dov Mikelson) is Doogie's side-kick, and punching bag: a short, slightly over-weight guy ,not smart enough to get into university, or motivated enough to leave his small town.  Heffer has taken the one down seat in every relationship he's ever had, including his marriage.

Nurk (nicely played by John Beale) is a smart, thoughtful guy who got an engineering degree, and a good job in Calgary, in unsexy waste management.  His marriage has recently ended in divorce.

Nurk wins the first round of bingo. Once the lads are loaded for bear, they head to the bar to find the girls, Boots (a terrific Jane Spidell) and Bitsy (the wonderful Sarah Dodd) who never married,and never left town.  Are they lesbians, or just unlucky in love?

High school reunions are about comparing your life against the lives of the people you grew up with. 
Did you win or lose?  Does it matter, and if it does, who and what determines what "winning" looks like, within the confines of that old school-room you left a long time ago?

As the girls stand around in the bar, waiting for the party to start, Boots, a forthright, crusty woman and career mail carrier tells her shy, underdog friend, Bitsy that she looks desperate because she's dancing alone.  "What if I am desperate?" Bitsy replies. 

There's a lot of this kind of smart, observational humour and some wonderful monologues.  Watch for the scene where the two women, neither wearing their glasses at the outset, try to see who's arrived at the party.  Hilarious.

Keeley and Mickelson pushed a bit hard for laughs off the top of the show but as they relaxed and joined the rest of the ensemble, the laughs became more intrinsic and less forced and all the other emotions evoked by MacIvor's script became apparent.

The night wears on, more shots and beers get downed, a cassette player and a bag of tapes comes out, defenses go down and we see and hear much more of the truth about the former classmates' lives.

BINGO! is a gentle, well-written and well-played light romantic comedy, capably directed by Factory co-artistic director Nigel Shawn-Williams. Williams makes great use of music from the period of this gang's youth to evoke all the feelings and memories that old music arouses for both the characters and the audience.

The unified set by Lindsay Anne Black is simultaneously a hotel suite, a boardwalk and a bar.  It clearly creates different playing spaces with the help of a good lighting design by Jennifer Lennon. The set made good use of the breadth of the stage but I did wish it had made better use of the soaring vault of the Factory.  Perhaps in a piece that is largely about failed hopes and diminished expectations, a lower ceiling was an artistic choice.

High school has been over for all of these people for a long time. What is left to hope for after 50?  Well that depends on how you've lived your life and what you're prepared to risk or change on the back nine of the game. MacIvor ends the play hopefully, at least for some of the characters.

In the program notes, MacIvor said he wrote this show for his brother back in Cape Breton.  He wanted to write an approachable piece that spoke to the working stiffs he grew up with.

He clearly knows these people and he paints them with his usual trenchant wit and clear eye but also with much empathy and affection. It's a kinder, gentler MacIvor than I'm used to, but I didn't mind that at all. As he said in ARIGATO TOKYO, "none of us are one thing." I hope his brother liked his present.  I certainly did.

Anyone over 40 who has ever endured one of these "homecoming" weekends - or avoided them like the plague, is bound to enjoy BINGO! The FACTORY is ending a turbulent season on a high note.

Belleville and the Role of the Artist as Critic

I went to see BELLEVILLE this afternoon, Company Theatre's production of the Amy Herzog play about Americans in Paris.

The script owes a debt to GASLIGHT, but is really more about the cognitive dissonance contained in the space between a young American couple's aspirations, and their actual life.

Abby is a girl who'd be at home in a Woody Allan film.  She's trained as an actor, but works as a yoga teacher. She's a neurotic as a cat, can't hold her liquor, and is trying to withdraw from prescription anti-depressants.

Her husband Zack, trained as a doctor, and is in Paris working for Medicins Sans Frontieres, on a cure for HIV in children.  He smokes a lot of dope with their landlord, the male half of a house-owning couple of African immigrants, with two children under five, who lives downstairs.

Zack says they're in Paris because he wants to cheer Abby up.  Abby says they left the States for Zack's career. Early on, we find out the couple is four months behind with the rent.  Abby is unaware of this state of affairs, perhaps because she doesn't speak French.

I just saw BLUE JASMINE, and my question in both these pieces was the same:  who the hell are these university educated women in 2014, who don't know how, or if, the rent is paid?

I don't know: maybe this is commonplace among the bourgeoisie on the U.S. Eastern seaboard. I don't know a single woman of any age, in any class, who doesn't know how much the roof over her head costs, or who is footing the bill, or if the bill is paid.  It's a ridiculous, antediluvian premise, but if you can get past that, the script has merit.

BELLEVILE's strength rests on Herzog's nuanced examination of the marriage of two emotionally unstable people on shaky ground.  The couple reminded me of the twenty-somethings I see in GIRLS. The play works as a study of race, class, and culture. It absolutely nails the fact that French adults in that same age demographic are not, still, semi-adolescents.

Does it work as a thriller?  Almost: but not quite.  A thriller is a twenty-one jewel watch.  It requires a structure of exquisite mechanical precision. This is a collection of intriguing, but not quite functional parts. There was too much telegraphing of plot points, and the ambiguous ending felt lazy, and fell flat.

In the end, because of the script issues, the acting and solid direction by Jason Byrne couldn't sustain the tension he and the cast so carefully built up in the first 3/4 of the play. There's a meal here, thanks to fine work from Allan Hawco, Christine Horne, Dalmar Abuzeid and Marsha Regis. It's worth seeing for the acting, but don't expect great noir.

Now on to topic number two.

There was a very smart and interesting set of articles on theatre criticism on #CanCult Times last week.  Michael Wheeler, the director at Praxis Theatre and a sharp (and delightfully acidic) blogger, political commentator and fine stage director, wrote an article about why Praxis decided not to review their fellow artists' work on their blog. I think he has a valid point: reviewing pushes you outside.  It probably doesn't help you much when you go to be peer-reviewed by arts council juries, either.

There does seem to be a consensus that the community really needs more open and informed discussion about work onstage from more sources, a point well made by reviewer Carly Manga in her #CanCult article on the state of current professional theatre criticism.

When I started this blog back in 2009,  I decided to undertake critical examination of my colleagues' work because I wasn't seeing much writing about why scripts worked or didn't, or about certain issues in the community. I am trying to write less as a reviewer, and more as a writer thinking critically about writing for the stage, and, as an artist writing about the experience of working in the theatre.

There was some discussion by both Manga and Nikki Shaffeeullah about whether reviewers who are not members of a particular community are qualified to discuss work made by that community, an issue several theatre practitioners have raised this winter.

Are there many more theatre creators working now, coming out of a tradition that is not white, or Western?  Sure. It's about time!  Could we use more critical writing about theatre from practitioners who are not middle-aged men, mostly white?  Absolutely.  #CanCult Times issue did just that in a very thoughtful way this week.

For the record, I am a member, not yet carded, of the Metis Nation of Manitoba. My ancestors fought at Batoche.

I had a guy walk up to me in a restaurant over a year after I wrote about a show I didn't think worked very well and tell me we needed to support each other in the Aboriginal community, and that by writing critically about a play by a fellow Aboriginal artist, I had effectively betrayed the community.

I invited him to sit down and join us and discuss the show, and my criticism of it, but he just wanted to talk at me, not to me. After looming and finger-wagging, he walked off.  

Is there anything more patronizing, belittling, and demeaning than assuming my fellow artists, Aboriginal and otherwise, can't tolerate a critical discussion of their work?  Are we really that insecure?Are we to treat each other like kindergarten students, and hand out gold stars just for showing up onstage? 

I'm not going to tell someone that a show works when it doesn't, and I don't care what "community" created the work, even if it is my own, especially if it is my own.  No talk about hegemony excuses a bad show.

THE  PENELOPIAD used an all female, mixed race cast, to talk about war.  It  was brilliant.  Pamela Sinha used  South Asian myth and dance in CRASH to great effect, in a play about a violent sexual assault. She won a well-deserved DORA.  Aboriginal writer and performer Cliff Cardinal made an array of characters come to life in HUFF, and served up an incendiary cocktail of rage, pain and inter-generational abuse, placed very specifically on a reservation. He and Sinha are both at the Playwright's colony at Banff this week.  I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

I have been reviewed since I was eleven years old as an actor, director and writer.  I have had good reviews, mediocre reviews, and bad reviews that smarted like a smack up the side of the head. Some of them were well deserved, some weren't.  I wish more of them had been written by actual theatre practitioners.

If anyone can spend time and money at a show, hopefully it'll be reviewed by the mainstream media.  Why? Because good reviews are free p.r. and sell tickets (duh!) I don't think there's anyone making theatre, who could use less box office revenue.

Like it or not, this still means that means a play, will, most likely, be reviewed by white men, and a few women. If we, as a community, want that to change, more of us are going to have to stick our necks out, and talk about each others' work.

I wouldn't want my work to be reviewed exclusively by mixed race, middle-aged, unmarried, straight, feminist, left-leaning, theatre-making women, anymore than I only want to be seen by that group. Call me willfully naive, but I think if I'm willing to take any one's money for a ticket, anyone who saw the show, can weigh in on my show.

I hope that by thinking long and hard about why my fellow theatre practitioners' plays work, or don't work,  I'll become a better writer myself.  I see the critical thinking required to write about theatre as an important part of my artistic practice. I am trying to write from inside, not outside.

Independence Days: HOMEMAKER, SWELL BROAD and THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Each year 150 or so shows happen at each of the three big summer FRINGE festivals:  Toronto, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

About 10% of those shows are critical and commercial hits on the circuit.  A few of the intrepid creator/producers of those hit shows decide to try and remount in their hometowns during the main theatre season between September and May.

Two shows that ran here briefly this past week were remounted by their respective companies in independent rental spaces after being critical and box office hits on the Fringe.

I saw my first KEYSTONE Theatre show today.  Keystone has had DORA nominations for their work (for music) and had four and five star reviews in Edmonton and Calgary for THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, which I saw Sunday.

KEYSTONE performs theatre in style of silent film.

Like the lovely meringue pies onstage, the production was a frothy confection.  If you've ever made a meringue pie, you know it looks effortless, but it is not that easy to achieve that delicate, airy perfection.  I went with a friend and we ran into another actor-writer buddy of mine at the theatre. We all enjoyed it.

The work was highly stylized, using techniques derived from clown, buffoon, mime and physical theatre to create characters who are in make-up that functions as a kind of masque. Ginette Mohr did a great job of directing, making everything clean and precise. Dana Fradkin and Phil Rickaby were utterly charming as the star-crossed lovers and Sarah Joy Bennet, in a brilliant costume by Kimberly Beaune, very nearly stole the show as the Devil's minion.

In the end, the Devil (an excellent Stephen La Frenie) gets his due and everyone else also gets their just desserts, all puns fully intended.  The live accompaniment by David Atkinson was stellar. It was great good fun and unlike anything else I've seen staged in Toronto this year. They're doing GOLD FEVER at the Toronto Fringe this summer.  I'll be there!

I also saw THE HOMEMAKER, written and performed by Laura Anne Harris and SWELL BROAD which was written by Brooke Banning and directed by Harris. The shows went up this week at THE STOREFRONT THEATRE after being delayed by flooding in their venue back in February.  Friday night, they had a packed house and that made me happy. It was interesting and committed work, looking at women's lives in the 1950s, sexually, professionally and emotionally.

It doesn't surprise me that these shows were remounted by their creators.  What surprises me is that so few hit Fringe shows get picked up for a remount by one of the bigger theatres in town or offered a co-production deal.

KIM'S CONVENIENCE went to  MTC and the NAC in Ottawa, having had a long remount in Toronto at Soulpepper.  I think that's fabulous.  I also think it doesn't happen nearly often enough.

Laura Anne is a colleague and a friend.  I don't have to be her friend to say she had a five-star hit across the country with her previous show,  PITCH BLONDE.  I was astonished that no theatre in the country picked it up for a remount. The closest she got was a half-hour slot (for a polished one-hour show that had sold out the Tarragon Mainstage) from NextStage.

I don't think I'm alone when I say I've seen quite a few new scripts go onstage far from ready, here and elsewhere in larger theatres with systems for play development in place.  I also see great Canadian plays on the Fringe circuit that would be theatre ready, with minor tweaking, and a bigger production budget, and yet, never get a remount.

Instead of spending a fortune putting on a new play that's two drafts shy of a production, I don't understand why more ADs don't take more work that's already been developed independently on the festival circuit or smaller stages into a mainstage season.

At the Winnipeg Fringe, the Manitoba Association of Playwrights presents a Harry Rintoul Award for best new play.  That script is usually pretty great and rarely remounted by a theatre. Daniel Thau Ellef was here with a monologue at Summerworks this year.  I really wish someone had remounted his REMEMBER THE NIGHT here which took the Rintoul a few years back. SCAR TISSUE by Muriel Hogue also won, had a lot of great parts for women and it's never had a remount.

The CENTAUR Theatre in Montreal offers the best English language play in the Montreal Fringe a cash prize and a remount in their theatre.  Boy do I wish that happened across the country.

Ken Brown is a National Theatre school grad, theatre professor and creator of an epic trilogy of plays  called SPIRAL DIVE about WWII pilots. The critically acclaimed work sold out across the West on the Fringe circuit. He brought part one here a few summers ago and once he finally got reviewed, he got 5 stars and they sold out their last show.  Before that, they were a bunch of unknowns from Edmonton and played to tiny houses.  It's been remounted once in Edmonton and I think it got done in once in Ottawa.

Why Ken Brown, who wrote LIFE AFTER HOCKEY, one of the most successful plays ever produced in this country hasn't had a show put up at one of theatres in Toronto in over a decade is beyond me.  It's not like he hasn't written any hits.

Stewart Lemoine, another Edmonton stalwart has had a few shows produced here, but not many. Why in heaven's name has no one ever remounted a TJ Dawe show in Toronto as part of the season?  It's not like the guy can't fill a house. MEDICINE was fantastic.

The best production of Brecht I've seen in ages was done by PRAXIS Theatre at NextStage.  I really hope someone is going to give those guys an in-town show next year.  The writer who did the adaptation, Nicholas Billon, just won the GG for his ICELAND Trilogy.  Remount the trilogy, any ADs out there?

Yes I know, we have a sprawling farm system for play development.  There are pitch opportunities and playwright development money available from nearly every theatre in the province in Ontario, and festivals of new work all over Toronto:  Rhubarb, HATCH, Paprika, Wired, New Ideas.  I'd love to to know the ratio of production to development, from those incubators.

For those of us who put our bums in the seats and our cash in the box office, it is pretty obvious that the current new play development system isn't working very well.  Bad to mediocre new show, after bad to mediocre new show goes up, discouraging the writers from trying again, and dulling the appetites of audiences for new work.

What about paying a talent scout to find a show (or shows) that worked pretty well somewhere else, take it in, hammer it into shape and remount it?  I know it does happen, and I know there are a few people who run around town looking for companies to co-produce with or shows to remount.  The Theatre Centre has just given  several independent companies residency to develop work.  It's a great strategy and I hope more theatres in town will look for ways to co-produce with independent companies to bring more work here from other cities.

Great Canadian theatre gets made across the county but you wouldn't necessarily know that, looking at the season in Toronto. I'd love some shout-outs for great shows from the rest of  Canada you think are ready for a bigger audience.

I'm taking the next week off to celebrate Easter and have a much needed vacation.  Enjoy whatever spring festival you celebrate and the warmer weather.  I'll see BELLEVILLE when I get back and tell you all about it.

50 SHADES...The Musical Parody and COCK: Date Night Theatre

Sometimes you want to be intellectually challenged by art.  You want to have your world view shaken up.  You want the show you go to see to challenge and provoke you, to ask hard questions, to demand  something of you, to make you think.

Other times, you've had a long tough week at work, or home, or both and you just want to go grab a drink, your besties or your significant other and head into a theatre to forget your troubles and have fun.

50 SHADES...is the latter sort of theatrical experience.

You don't have to be one of the 50 million people who bought the book to enjoy this musical parody.

For those of you who have been on a voyage to Mars for the past two years, "50 Shades... " is a trilogy of erotic fiction following the romantic adventures of Anastasia Steele, a virginal English lit undergraduate and hardware store clerk who falls under the spell of Christian Grey, a handsome billionaire with dark secrets.

There were a lot of women there Friday night who appeared to be having "girls' night out".  Many female patrons had worn their black boots and bits of leather in homage to the BSDM theme of the books and some did bring their own handcuffs, as suggested in the publicity.  I saw a pink fuzzy pair pinned to the front of one young lady's sweater like a brooch. Men were definitely in a minority shareholder position. My friend and I estimated the audience was 70% women and 30% men.

In this version of the story, a women's book club (Shelia O'Conner, Tiffany Dissette and Kim David who also plays the ditzy roomie Katherine with great aplomb) decides on "50 Shades..." as their book of the month, having ruled out, "Cooking Soup for One"(too depressing) and "The Diary of Anne Frank" (the ending was too sad).  We come with them, so to speak, on their voyage of not-so-literary adventures.

"50 Shades..." is a grown-ups' version of of a Christmas pantomime, complete with sight-gag casting, singing and dancing and a loose and loud audience that felt free to shout suggestions ( "NO! take the hot guy!") at critical moments during the performance.

Instead of the ugly step-sisters or the evil queen being played by some middle-aged man in bad drag, we have a Christian Grey (the hilarious Jack Boice) who looks more like Santa's red-haired kid brother than a love god. The delightful Boice would not be out of place at Bears' Night at the Black Eagle. It was a bit like expecting George Clooney and getting Ron Jeremy instead.

Happily for the patrons, his back-up dancers ( BJ Gruber, who is also a very hot Elliot Grey and Datus Puryear)  more than had the good-looking man angle covered. The lovely Caroline Reade embodies Anastasia's "Inner Goddess" with some sultry tango dancing.

The entire cast is a talented bunch of singers, dancers and comedians with a great group dynamic and a lot of energy and charm. There was a certain amount of very cheeky engagement with the audience, especially by the show-stealing Boice in his big number "I Don't Make Love, I F...." and by O'Conner, the recently single housewife in the book club who tries to pick up a man in the front row.

There's a clever and well-performed Gilbert and Sullivan parody song detailing Christian's sexual interests.  The whole script makes great sport of the absolute absurdity of the books:  "I love you and I want to beat the crap out of you". "I'm totally controlled and I feel so free!" At one point, our heroine (Eileen Patterson who is a sweet-voiced ingenue) flees Mr. Spanky-Pants by bailing out of his helicopter. I thought that was a great decision, but as is always the case in these things, love trumps sense and conquers all.

With a bare-bones set, a fine back-up band and a lot of hoary sexual jokes, this over-the-top silly and mildly subversive show is a feather-light entertainment.  I hated the book ( I couldn't get through more than one) but this musical parody of a bad romance makes an enjoyable night out.

Then Saturday night, I went to see COCK at the new Theatre Centre.  It's a fabulous space and I hope they never move again.  They have taken in a few established independent theatre companies to share their new home and develop work. Studio 180  is one of those companies and this is their inaugural production in the new theatre.

COCK is a tight, tense and riveting story about a romantic triangle by Olivier award-winning British playwright Mike Bartlett.

John (well-played by Andrew Kushner) has spent seven years in a problematic live-in relationship with M (an excellent Jeff Miller), a somewhat older and intense man.  John meets the forthright and attractive W (a nicely nuanced Jessica Greenberg) and they begin an affair.  John has never slept with a woman before.  Complications ensue. At on point, M's dad (a terrific Ian D. Clark) turns up to ask John two very good questions: "who are you?" and "what do you want?"

If I say much more, I'll spoil it. The script had the audience laughing and wincing in recognition.

I've dated guys like John once or twice.  This play isn't so much about accepting a range of sexual preferences as it is about a nasty power game played by a passive-aggressive man with everyone around him.

A very wise friend of mine once said to me, "Any relationship is a decision and a commitment."

If you're at the "so, what are we doing here?" phase of your relationship, this could be a tense night out. If you both know who you are and what you want, it's a very good night of theatre. Certainly it is one of the best scripts I've seen on stage this year.

Finally, there was an absolute twitter-storm in the theatrical community in Toronto this week over "Conte D'Amour", the three hour durational performance art/theatre hybrid that was part of World Stage at Harbourfront this week. J. Kelly Nestruck, the Globe and Mail's main theatre critic, publicly declared he booed at the end of the performance.  Lynne Slotkin, a well-regarded and excellent theatre blogger applauded his decision. After that, all hell broke loose.

I decided not to see or review the show.

Nestruck made one comment which I did want to weigh in on.  He said the production was morally bankrupt.  That remark was far more interesting to me than whether or not he booed at the end of the show.

Oscar Wilde famously said of literature that, "Books are neither moral nor immoral.  They are simply well or badly written, that is all."  Is this also true of theatre?

I agree with Wilde for the most part.

When I see work I dislike, it often feels lazy and unfinished.  I feel insulted and ripped off because I paid money to and/or spent time with someone who hadn't cleaned up their thinking and their laziness showed up on stage. When a film or a play is really long, it often (but not always) is an indication of unfinished thinking.

Now, I was raised by old-school Catholics who taught me laziness is a sin and therefore immoral. Is this the kind of immorality under scrutiny here?  Or is this about something else? Talk amongst yourselves.

A Cool Encounter with DANCEMAKERS: "AROUND"

DANCEMAKERS is celebrating their 40th anniversary this season.  AROUND is a new work built especially for this gala occasion.

The Distillery was just opening up when I left town for half a decade and I had never been in DANCEMAKERS new and incredibly beautiful space. Finding it was a bit of a challenge, even with the map. When I got there, I discovered a fabulous hidden venue.

For the performance, they had transformed one of their studios into a lobby/box office/bar with tunes, red carpets over the marley, vintage furniture and brocade upholstered benches that functioned as cocktail tables.  They put out little snacks and offered people a free place to leave their coats. It's an intimate space with a cool yet friendly vibe, a portent of things to come.  We were invited to drink in theatre during the performance.

The house opened and we were escorted into a white curtained studio/performance space in the round with a black marley on the floor and two mikes, one suspended and one on the floor, both corded.  Two rows of chairs inside the white curtained area, tall ones at the back and low ones at the front meant we could see each other as well as we could see the performers. This device integrated and implicated the spectators in a different kind of complicity with the performance than the one provided by the more usual private sanctuary of a seat in the dark.

AROUND is devised, created through a process of improvising on the theme of encounters. The choreographer worked with five company members and five EDAP (emerging dance artist project) dancers to co-create this performance. Designers (sound, lights and costume) and a dramaturge were also involved heavily in the construction.

Everyone is in white.  The curtains that contain the audience gets moved around so the parameters of the container are in flux.  The work is visually, textually and aurally fairly austere.  There's more movement than dance in any conventional sense. It is a cool show: edgy, self-consciously stylish and game.

Devised work is always a little loose.  If you like rigour this isn't going to be your cup of tea.  I thought there was an interesting mash-up of ideas playfully and provocatively executed.   I liked that it demanded that I come half-way to meet the piece and the performers but I didn't always feel I was met in the middle.

I particularly liked a staring contest between two male dancers and the audience near the top of the show. The deconstruction of the nature of the gaze is an interesting thing to play with.   A piece where sound score creator Christopher Willes joins the company onstage to play a white electric guitar with his head literally left blood on the floor. Coupled with the microphones stuffed into two of the male dancers' pants, it gave "cock rock" a whole new meaning.

This is dance walking on the edge of performance art.  My encounter with AROUND was thought-provoking and blackly amusing but spoke more to more to my head than my heart.  It certainly elicited some interesting conversations afterward outside the theatre.

DANCEMAKERS' AROUND continues until April 6th in their studio on the third floor of 9 TRINITY in the Distillery.

Dance, Dance Evolution: EUGENE ONEGIN at The National Ballet & EUNOIA at WorldStage

I saw two very  different nights of dance this past weekend:  EUGENE ONEGIN, performed by THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA at the Four Seasons Centre for The Performing Arts on Friday and EUNIOA by FUJIWARA DANCE INVENTIONS at WorldStage Theatre Festival in the EnWave Theatre at Harbourfront on Saturday night.

I've seen the opera based on the poem by Alexander Puskin a few times.  It's a sentimental favourite as it was the first opera I ever saw performed live. I knew the ballet was performed using a different score than the opera, although still a score of music by Tchaikovsky.

Like Tatiana in Act III,  I'm now much older than I was when my relationship with ONEGIN began. It has lost none of its power but now seems much less romantic to me and more tragic.

In Act I, Tatiana is a young, romantic girl, reading novels.  What she knows of love and the world outside her country home comes from books.  Her sister Olga, danced by a charming and vivacious Jillian Vanstone  is engaged to a poet, Lensky danced by Naoya Ebe in a very promising debut.  Lensky brings home a friend a sophisticated, urbane and trouble-making Onegin.

Onegin was wonderfully performed by Guillaume Cote on Friday night and he was marvelously matched by a spectacularly good Greta Hodgkinson as Tatiana.  Both performances displayed stunningly good marriages of technique and emotion.

We all know someone like Onegin.  He has a rich dad, he's a bit of a dandy, he's spoiled and too handsome for his own good.  He loves sensation but is too shallow for complex emotion. He causes trouble because he can't stand not being the centre of attention and a hurricane with him at the vortex is a good way to hold the room. He trifles with girls' affections because he can.

He pays attention to Tatiana and Tatiana mistakes their shared interests in a larger world she's only experienced in books, for love.  She throws herself at him the night before her birthday, writing him an impassioned letter.

Onegin not only spurns her, he flirts with her sister Olga shamelessly at Tatiana's birthday. He is bored at her party and rude to her widowed mother's guests, who are unaffected country people.

Lensky is so affronted by his friend's behaviour that he challenges Onegin to a duel.  The girls beg Onegin to call it off.  Lensky is killed and both Olga and Tatiana are left heartbroken.  Onegin flees abroad.

Tatiana grows up, marries Prince Gremin, an older, distant cousin (elegantly executed by Etienne Lavinge) and lives happily in his palace with a man with whom she shares respect and love.

Many years later, Onegin returns from his exile abroad.  The Prince receives him.  Onegin is astonished to find Tatiana has become a beautiful and powerful woman.  Finally overcome with sorrow and remorse, he declares his love to Tatiana in an impassioned letter and impatiently presses her to reciprocate.  It is far too late.  The grown Tatiana tells Onegin the truth:  she loves him but she knows that love will only bring her misery.  She sends him away, he goes and when he does she weeps painfully, fully and freely for everything they both lost.

The orchestra, chorus and design were as good as the principals, supporting and enhancing the story.

I loved the restrained palette of the design, especially the way the colors of the costumes were used to underscore the mood and emotions of the characters wearing them. Tatiana wears a white dress for her birthday and a brown one, sombre and autumnal, the day she sends Onegin packing.

The story in the beautiful poem was brought fully to life without a word being spoken.  It is the great power of dance to be able to convey with the body, all the emotions underlying what is never said and felt by us all.

When Tatiana cried, so did I.  Bravo to the National Ballet for a beautiful and moving performing.

Then Saturday night, I headed off to the Enwave Theatre for EUNOIA.

EUNOIA is a stage adaptation of a "univocal lipogram" (not univoweled?). Whatever: the well-known piece of literary cleverness by Governor General award-winning poet and language manipulator Christian Bok received a spirited and very charming stage production this weekend as part of WorldStage at Harbourfront.

The program contains very interesting notes from creator/choreographer Denise Fujiwara about her meticulous process with the dancers and designers. The result of the four-year collaboration was arch, delicate, droll and endearing.

I loved video designer Justin Stephenson's evocative manipulations and deconstructions of the text in projections.

The colour choices of costume designer Andjelija Djuric amplified the emotional tone of the five sections: A/E/I/O/U.

The dancers were some of the most highly regarded contemporary dance artists in the country: Sylvie Bouchard, Claudia Moore, Lucy Rupert, Miko Sobriera, Rebecca Hope Terry and Gerry Trentham. From the opening game of hang-man, they engaged the audience with ease and charm.

The piece required they speak a dense and difficult text while dancing, not an easy task.  Dancers are not actors.  They do not have the vocal muscularity and flexibility of those who speak for a living.  Their voices required the amplification of a hand mike.

I loved all of their physical performances.  I felt they did their best with the text which is not their metier. They brought great elegance to the awkward task of working with a hand mike during a dance performance.  Phil Strong, sound designer and composer and the technical staff of the theatre controlled the levels of music and other sounds with skill and restraint.

The audience gave EUNOIA a loud and spontaneous standing ovation.  It was well deserved by Denise and her cast and design team for executing a complex, protean task with sophistication, beauty and grace.