Fringe 2017: Fifty Shades of Dave

My second Fringe show yesterday was Fifty Shades of Dave. Full disclosure: this one I went to because I know the writers and performers. Co-writer and performer Nico Dicecco was my former PhD student, and co-writer Kyle Carpenter is currently finishing his PhD in the English Department at SFU. With this work they both reveal additional hidden talents I didn't know either had.

Fifty Shades of Dave, punning on the E.L. James novel, is an erotic parody of Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe stories, with husband and wife protagonists Dave and Morley accidentally discovering a penchant for BDSM. Dicecco, doing what I gather is a spot-on impression of McLean's voice, spins three such tales in a hilariously homespun manner, the very dailiness of the details (Dave heading off to the hardware store to buy rope to tie up Morley) parcelled out in the set-up to each increasingly hot and heavy story climax making the narrative payoff that much more satisfying. While I confess to never having listened to The Vinyl Cafe, I do understand good writing, and this show has it in spades. To wit: after seeing this show, your understanding of the meaning of eating ice cream will forever be changed.

Nico, as McLean, is also a natural performer. And while I'd very much like for some academic institution to give him a job, I was delighted to discover that another possible career also awaits him. I look forward to hearing more from this duo.

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Fringe 2017: Lovely Lady Lump

Once again my plans to see a whack of Vancouver International Fringe Festival shows were thwarted this year, my whole experience reduced to two shows on yesterday's final day. First up was Lovely Lady Lump, by Australia's Lana Schwarcz. The show fits the standard Fringe template of one-hour solo comedy, which if I'm honest is partly why I see fewer and fewer Fringe shows each year. The line between theatre and stand-up comedy is increasingly thin, and while the subject matter may change from show to show, I find the homogeneity of form to verge on stupefying my spectating sensibilities. Of course, I'm generalizing--lots of dramas and multi-character and longer form works do exist at the Fringe. And there are all sorts of reasons why the one-hour one-hander tends to proliferate--cheapness being one of them. But I do think fringe festivals are facing something of a crisis of identity when it comes to fostering meaningful new theatre voices.

Schwarcz makes her living as a stand-up comic, so there's no getting around this set up for Lovely Lady Lump. Except in this case the subject matter is novel: Schwarcz's breast cancer diagnosis, treatment and survival. That Schwarcz's breasts (she still has both of them) are the stars of the show is an understatement. She reveals them to us at the top of the show, as part of an explanatory vignette involving a visit for radiation treatment, and we see them again and again during subsequent visits. There is nothing titillating here; indeed, one of Schwarcz's concerns is to demonstrate that the very routine of cancer treatment is one of its most brutalizing effects. But mostly the mood is light and Schwarcz is, it has to be said, very very funny. She's also an amazing puppeteer, and she combines both skills memorably during a sequence involving a nightmare reference to The Shining, and also in a bit about her hormone blocking therapy in which a shadow puppet valley girl incarnation of estrogen becomes a pile of shit.

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Stan Douglas' Circa 1948 and SCA House Party at SFU Woodward's

Yesterday, on my way to the School for the Contemporary Arts' 50th anniversary House Party at SFU Woodward's, I had thought I would hustle down to Granville Island to take in a quick 1 pm Fringe show. Timing is everything at the Fringe, and those precious minutes between the end of one show and the start of another can require major distance and speed calculations on the part of audience members. For me, all I needed to do was get out of the house in a mildly alacritous manner. So far this year my teaching schedule and other beginning-of-semester commitments have wreaked major havoc on my Fringeing. Likewise yesterday. I was ready and able, but Translink wasn't. Knowing I was going to miss the start of Brendan McLeod's Brain by more than 10 minutes, I opted to stay on the bus and head downtown. I walked through the main floor of the new Nordstrom's instead--which provided its own kind of neurological dissonance. Watching what looked liked hundreds of folks waiting to file onto escalators in an American brand-name store that used to be Sears, and before that Eaton's (two Canadian retail giants felled by successive recessions), reminded me--in this globalized age of the metropolitan "non-places"--of the need, in Frederic Jameson's famous take on blandified commodity culture in late capitalism, for place-specific cognitive maps of one's city.

Such is what celebrated Vancouver-based visual artist Stan Douglas attempts to give us in Circa 1948, an app, website and immersive installation project co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada. The installation is up in the Cordova Street concourse of SFU Woodward's as part of the "Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures" festival of immersive arts that SFUW's Cultural Unit has programmed as part of the university's 50th anniversary celebrations. The installation combines computer-generated technology and kinaesthetic navigation to provide participants with a 3D-like, immersive experience of two Vancouver landmarks no longer in existence: the original Hotel Vancouver and Hogan's Alley. A docent with an iPad invites you into a square wooden room. On the floor is what looks like a painted archery target: a solid black inner circle enclosed within a grey one of larger diameter. The black circle is your stop button; walking along the grey one moves you into and through the projections.

I chose to explore the Hotel Vancouver and was plopped into the middle of the ballroom, the interior of which is recreated based on Douglas' meticulous historical research. Frankly, it looked rather empty, and when I went to the edge of the grey circle on each side of the installation walls I wasn't lead through the projected sets of doors or windows into another area of the hotel, as I'd expected; instead, the projections just came to a stop. Eventually, I did make it through one doorway and into an office. Snippets of voice-over reminiscent of the film noir dialogue of Douglas' recent Helen Lawrence informed me that a woman wished to pawn some jewelry. And then the walls went blank. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and was rather underwhelming in terms of both its interactivity and what, on the display text outside, we are told is Douglas' interest in historically-based diachronic/recombitant storytelling. The docent told me I could come back and explore other rooms in the Hotel Vancouver, as well as multiple views of Hogan's Alley, but I'm pretty sure I won't.

From there, it was inside the SFU Woodward's building for SCA's big celebration of its own past, present and future. The work of alumni, current students and faculty was on display throughout the building: the current MFA Visual Art Graduating Exhibition in the Audain Gallery on the main floor (featuring work by Lucien Durey, Curtis Granhauer, and Jamie Williams); audio and video installations by MFA student Lara Amelie Abadir and my faculty colleague Henry Daniel in Studios D and T on the second floor; and open rehearsals in the fourth floor studios by recent dance and theatre alumni (including Billy Marchenski and Nneka Croal, and the companies Hong Kong Exile, New to Town Collective, Raven Spirit Dance, and Warehaus Dance Collective). At 4 pm, my colleague Ker Wells presented a site-specific performance co-created with graduate students Robert Leveroos and Ashley Aron, and featuring students in his undergraduate playmaking classes; it took place outdoors in the concourse in the pouring rain, and we watched from the second floor World Art Centre patio as two rival groups of students squared off Sharks and Jets style, before being scattered in all directions by a gold lamé and stilt-wearing fairy--played by Kerr himself. Finally, following a reception, music alums Stefan Smulovitz and Bill Clark joined faculty members Martin Gotfrit and Albert St. Albert in improvising a live score to a screening of the animated NFB/Radio-Canada short film The Man Who Planted Trees--which was amazing (the film and the improvised music). There was also a screening of award-winning short films by SCA film alums, but I was already so over-stimulated (and also in need of some dinner) that I ducked out and headed home.

Still, what I saw confirmed to me that, with my official new cross-appointment to SCA, I've definitely found my own institutional place at SFU.

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For a good time...

Last night I had the great good fortune of moderating a panel at the Fringe Festival's St. Ambroise Bar on Railspur Alley. The panel was called "Let's Get it On: Sexuality in the Theatre," and featured a who's who of amazing women theatre artists talking about sex on stage and, just as importantly, about sexing staging.

I won't go into all the smart and hilarious stuff that was said, but I did want to plug these women's shows:

Celene Harder and Val Duncan (Calgary), Does This Turn You On?, Studio 1398

Gigi Naglak and Meg Williams (Philadelphia), Chlamydia dell'Arte: A Sex-Ed Burlesque, Performance Works

Cameryn Moore (Boston), slut (r)evolution, (Performance Works)

They were joined by Fringe vet Deb Pickman (Shameless Hussy Productions), who doesn't have a show at the festival this year, but who gave us a tantalizing hint of what her company has in the works.

The Fringe continues until this Sunday.

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Early Lanford Wilson at the Fringe

American playwright Lanford Wilson and La MaMa impresario Ellen Stewart more or less invented Off-Off-Broadway theatre in New York. Both died last year, a great loss to the theatre community. But their legacies live on, Stewart's in the Lower Eastside institution that remains a hotbed of creative theatrical experimentation, and Wilson's in a oeuvre that spans iconic works like his Talley family trilogy (Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, Talley and Son), The Hot l Baltimore, and Burn This (which Richard and I saw in a stunning New York revival by Signature Theatre starring Catherine Keener and Edward Norton).

But  Wilson, who was also a co-founder of the Circle Rep Theatre Company, also wrote heaps of short plays. Home Free (1964) was one of his earliest, and it premiered last night at the 2012 Fringe Festival, in a production by the local company Staircase XI.

The play bears more than a passing resemblance to Jean Cocteau's novel Les enfants terribles. Like that work, Wilson's Home Free centers on two siblings, Lawrence and Joanna, who have isolated themselves from the outside world, whether as a consequence or because of their apparently incestuous sexual relationship is never made clear. What is clear is that they live largely within their own fantasy world, one that combines both the worst excesses of arrested adolescent development and wishful adult responsibility. Most of these excesses are borne by their imaginary children, Claypone and Edna, with whom they speak throughout, and whom they order about imperiously. None of this bodes well for what we assume is the real child growing inside Joanna's womb, whose imminent birth, we are to understand, will almost certainly lead to their eviction from their cloistered apartment.

What is real and what is imaginary is the central dialectic upon which this drama hinges, and as tensions escalate between brother and sister each (again like their counterparts in Cocteau's novel) knows exactly how to insert the knife wound into the heart of the other by calling into question what he or she most believes in. However, the stakes are high, and when--SPOILER ALERT--the pain in her shoulder Lawrence accuses Joanna of faking becomes seriously life-threatening, the choice the agoraphobic Lawrence makes--to send Edna in search of help rather than going himself--will prove fatal.

All of this is played with absolute conviction by Jason Clift and Maryanne Renzetti (also producer and, with Becky Shrimpton, Co-Artistic Director of Staircase XI). It is not easy in a house as intimate as the Carousel to direct dialogue at imaginary interlocutors downstage while maintaining the theatre's traditional fourth wall--a division crucially important in a psychological drama such as this. It is a credit to both actors--and director Brian Cochrane--that they make us believe in their belief in Claypone and Edna. Kudos as well to whoever designed the set and sourced the props (Co-Stage Manager's Anthony Liam Kerns and Erin Sandra Crowley?), as the look of Lawrence and Joanna's insular world enhances our own sense of entrapment in the dangerous space of their game-playing. A music box that Joanna winds at one point in the play to annoy Lawrence will come back at the end, an eerily perfect acoustic accompaniment to the play's denouement, and to end of childhood innocence more generally.

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Fringe Madness (2011 Version): Oh, That Wily Snake, Giant Invisible Robot, and Jesus in Montana

Martin Dockery's Oh, That Wily Snake is part modern relationship drama and part absurdist updating of the Adam and Eve story: with a 10-foot tall dish-washing Belgian as God, a brussel sprout substituting for the apple, and Aruba metaphorically standing in for all that is pleasurable and forbidden. I'm not sure if all the script's unexplained allusions and orthogonal shifts in direction and tone work, but Dockery, as Edmund, and co-star Vanessa Quesnelle, as Edith, handle them deftly, their overlapping dialogue delivered at lightning speed and with very believable sentiment. Quesnelle is especially affecting portraying the different--though no less coercive--roles thrust upon women by men.

Jayson MacDonald is a terrific physical actor and vocal chameleon who is as convincing as an excited six-year-old boy summarizing the plot of The Empire Strikes Back as he is as a seductive, cream-puff eating woman redounding on why she always gives to charity anonymously. Both characters are on display in MacDonald's beautifully written, hilarious, and deeply moving play Giant Invisible Robot, which tells the story of Russell, who forges a relationship with the robot of the title in order to deal with the trauma of childhood, and who insists, in dealing with the vicissitudes of adult relationships, in remaining loyal to the existence of his friend. With the aid of a few simple costume changes, a seemingly endless repertoire of sound effects and postures, a pair of flashing bicycle reflectors, and heaps of charisma, MacDonald succeeds in making us believe as well.

Barry Smith is familiar to Vancouver Fringe audiences from past critically lauded shows Every Job I've Ever Had, Baby Book and American Squatter. In Jesus in Montana Smith tells the story of how he rejected his Southern Baptist upbringing, only to later fall in with a Baha'i cult and place his faith in a convicted pedophile as the second coming of Jesus. Smith is a talented monologuist, who combines a storyteller's gift for narrative suspense with a stand-up's intuitive grasp of when to deliver the punch-line. But what elevates this work even further is the amazing multi-media slide show that accompanies Smith's words, and that incorporates photographs, old Super-8 movies, charts and graphs, and highlighted passages from the Bible to add visual texture to Smith's incredible story.

These three shows bring to an end my 2011 Fringe experience. I may yet get to a few Pick-of-the-Fringe holdovers, but if not I count what I've seen as one of the more rewarding festival experiences in a while (and not just because of the spectacular weather). There's still a whole week left of shows for those of you with freer schedules than my own, so do get out there and see something.

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Fringe Madness (2011 Version): Little Orange Man, The De Chardin Project, and Cabaret Terrarium

Ryan Gladstone recites, as one of his tales in Every Story Ever Told the unexpurgated version of Cinderella. Among other things Disney leaves out: the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to make their feet fit into the glass slipper and end up getting their eyes poked out by a pair of birds loyal to the heroine at the end of the story. These details provide a link to the extraordinary child savant, Kit, at the centre of Ingrid Hansen's Little Orange Man, about a hyperactive girl of Danish heritage whose greatest delight comes from reenacting the grisly folk tales told to her by her grandfather to the young preschool children adjacent her primary schoolyard. When she is banned from doing so any further by concerned parents aghast at the drawings their kids are suddenly bringing home, and when her beloved grandfather suddenly descends into a coma after falling down the stairs, Kit must call on the dream energy of the audience to channel the more vivid imaginations of her preschool friends and descend to the underworld, do battle with the evil slug-men, and rescue her grandfather. The piece is wildly theatrical (tickle trunks, hand and shadow puppets, musical numbers, and multiple movement and lighting effects abound) and Kit is totally believable as played by the charismatic Hansen--one half, with director Kathleen Greenfield, of SNAFU Dance Theatre. Kit may be lonely and have no friends her own age, but as she says, she prefers hanging out with her elderly grandpa and the young preschoolers because at least they still believe. The gift of this show (which Saturday afternoon's audience gave a standing ovation) is that through their extraordinary coups-de-théâtre (the celery sticks doubling as the evil slugs is my favourite), and the absolute sincerity of their story, Hansen and Greenfield also help us believe once again in the power of our own imaginations.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a Jesuit priest who also trained as a geologist (earning a Doctorate at the Sorbonne) and worked as a paleontologist in Egypt, France, and China, where he formed part of the international team that made the discovery of the early hominid Peking Man in 1929. While always remaining loyal to his vows, in his writings de Chardin openly challenged Church doctrine, including the idea of Original Sin, and treated the Biblical creation story as a metaphor, seeking to reconcile his work in evolutionary theory with his theological beliefs. However, he was never allowed to publish his theories in his lifetime, dying in relative obscurity in New York. Only with the posthumous publication of The Phenomenon of Man did Teilhard's ideas finally reach a wider audience. In so doing, his mystical reconciliation of science and spirituality--it's to de Chardin that we owe the epigram "Everything that rises must converge"--touched a chord with many seeking to find a basis for Christianity in the material world. In The De Chardin Project the folks at Quickening Theatre have taken the outline of Teilhard's life and turned it into a tremendously compelling hour of theatre. The writing (by Adam Seybold, who also plays Teilhard) is especially rich, and as voiced by Seybold and fellow creator Kate Fenton (who plays a number of roles and who also serves, along with director Ginette Mohr, as co-creator of the show) one feels in some sense inspirited by the words. At the same time, with just a few props and simple yet effective stage techniques, the material side of Teilhard's philosophy is brought to imaginative theatrical life. Both Seybold and Fenton have tremendous stage presence and chemistry, and as told by this company (winners of the 2009 "Cultchivating the Fringe" Award for Fish Face), you will indeed find your pulse quickening as you listen to de Chardin's story.

Accidental assassins turned cabaret artists, imaginary friends who turn out to be real, archaeologists who tell jokes, and hundreds of wooden frogs audience members get to stroke with sticks to camouflage their laughter: these are just some of the delights on offer in Richard Harrington and Chris Kauffman's Cabaret Terrarium. The show resurrects (as it were) the stars of Harrington and Kauffman's previous Fringe show, Hotel California, and features a hilarious rendition of The Eagles song. Gustave is an affectless Belgian singer-musician whose voice and sense of rhythm are as rusty as his little grey cells (to be fair, he has been encased in a block of ice). Nhar is his trusty pantomime sidekick. Together they enact an identity quest that, in its epic scope, is at once arctic and equatorial, amphibious and avian, physical and metaphysical. Great good fun.

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Fringe Madness (2011 Version): The Birdmann and Every Story Ever Told

It's that time of year again, and yesterday evening found me down on Granville Island for my first tastes of the annual banquet of theatre and performance that is the Vancouver International Fringe Festival. Usually the start of a new term doesn't allow me much opportunity for feasting on all the offerings. As it is this year I have had to cram all of my menu choices into this opening weekend, as the parentals arrive on Monday.

First up was The Birdmann, from the Australian writer/performer Trent Baumann. The piece is a combination of postmodern vaudeville, deadpan cabaret, conceptual stand-up, and a burlesque (quite literally) of magic, circus, and body arts--all laced with a message about anti-consumerism and environmentalism. Baumann may very well win the award for best hair of the Fringe, and if this show was a little heavy on the audience participation for my taste (always a Fringe trademark, I know--see below), Baumann's solicitations were never coercive and always accompanied by his winning and self-deprecating assurances that no one was exposing themselves to more potential embarrassment than himself.

Next, I went to see Festival superstar Ryan Gladstone's Every Story Ever Told, his 60 minute attempt at a redaction of the history of world narrative. Gladstone starts with capstone summaries of some classic works of literature and film. But after getting bogged down--hilariously--in acting out all four books of War and Peace and all six parts (who knew?) of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky film franchise, Gladstone realizes it might be better to take the common themes and structures of most stories and, with the aid of the audience, add to the pile by telling a new story. It's a risky move for a performer going from the tried and true (not to mention dutifully memorized and audio- and light-cued) to the unknown and wackily left-field suggestions of a hyper-kinetic audience. But Gladstone is a pro (all the reviewerati, including Colin Thomas, Peter Birnie, Jo Ledingham, and Jerry Wasserman were out in force), and he handled every suggestion--in our case a female trapeze artist with a prehensile tail battling her evil rivals, who are Siamese twins--with aplomb and amazing humour.

Three more shows are on tap today, so stay tuned for more reviews.

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Fringe Review 3: Biographies of the Dead and Dying

Nothing like a belated notice of the addition of nudity to get the punters out to a show. I had already decided on Andrew Templeton's "psychological ghost story," Biographies of the Dead and Dying, as one of my Fringe picks when I noticed advisories about its revised content starting to appear on the Fringe website and at the main ticket outlet on Granville Island. Then I noticed the updates about the show's remaining performances approaching sell-out status.

Which brings me to a short digression about a peeve I have with the Frequent Fringer pass, and the Festival's policy about reselling unclaimed tickets. For those of us who've bought a pass, there's no guarantee we'll get into our desired show, depending on how many advanced tickets have been sold, and how early or late we arrive at the door to get our card hole-punched. Last night I admit to cutting it close in getting to the Havana (Joanna and I were having a lovely meal at Me and Julio at the other end of Commercial and lost track of time). Initially when I presented my pass to the ticket person, I was told that the show was sold out. I was also told that despite the fact there were six unclaimed pre-sold tickets in front of this person, I could not use my pass to appropriate one (Festival policy, I was told). With the House Manager saying he had to close the theatre door and start the show, I told Joanna (who had bought a single ticket in advance) to go on without me. Then the House Manager came back and said he had counted 8 empty seats, and that I (and the one remaining customer behind me) could have one.

Now, logically speaking, in a Festival where all box office receipts go directly to the artists, why wouldn't you try to sell--or even re-sell--as many tickets as possible? Why ever in the theatre would you leave seats empty if people wanted to claim them, and pay good money to do so? I'll stop my rant now, but I do suggest Festival organizers rethink this policy for the coming years, especially in the wake of the collapse of other sources of funding. In these cutthroat times, one must be as mercenary as possible.

As for the show itself, I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to describe it. Part Henry James' The Turn of The Screw and Stephen King's The Shining, with a Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes writerly rivalry thrown in for good measure, the play focuses on blocked and alcoholic writer Alice (Heather Lindsay), who has written a successful chick-lit novel she now despises and is seeking material for a new book by renting a cabin on Vancouver Island said to be haunted by the ghost of its previous owner, Thomas, who committed suicide by blowing his brains out. This is related to Alice by the cabin's caretaker, Jack (Simon Driver), with whom Alice begins a torrid (and quasi-S/M) affair. The scenes between Jack and Alice (which involve myriad uses of an old washtub that serves as a key prop throughout the play) alternate with those between Alice and her husband, Jonathon (also played by Driver), a pretentious poet who belittles Alice's own writing, and her ghost project in particular. Alice also regularly speaks into a tape recorder to her unseen daughter, who may or may not be a figment of her imagination.

Needless to say, there's a lot going on here. But I'm still not quite sure what it all means. I think a connection is being made between ectoplasmic ghosts and ghost-writing (at one point when Alice is seeking to conjure a vision of Thomas, Jack suggests she try Yeatsian automatic writing). But as this gets mapped onto further explorations of the gendered division of creative labour and female "hysteria" (the stillborn child/novel), things get a little muddy and confusing. We're not helped by the fact that the play's largely horizontal plane of action is ill served by the Havana's awkward spatial layout. The combination of straining to see what's going on physically, and to understand how this relates to Alice's story mentally, proved very taxing indeed.

Still, the performances by Lindsay and Driver were fearless, and the relentless emotional intensity of the staging is more than enough to merit the sell-out crowds this show is deservedly attracting.

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Fringe Reviews 2: The Accident and Caberlesque!

Jonno Katz, from Melbourne, is a Fringe veteran and clearly a crowd favourite to judge by the sold-out and highly appreciative crowd that turned out for his latest solo turn, The Accident, at the Waterfront Theatre last night. It's a physical theatre piece about the relationship between two "orphaned" brothers--the younger, and more sensitive Sebastian, and the older, brutish Ray (whom Sebastian nevertheless adores)--and the woman, Emily, who quite literally comes between them. There's also a sub-plot about a conceptual art project, The Crapper, that goes horribly wrong.

Katz is a wonderfully engaging performer, and especially talented at physical and vocal mimicry. And he has heaps of energy as he bounds and slides and cartwheels and semi-breaks across the stage in his unique interpretive dance routines, which punctuate the monologues of his main characters. However, the story he tells in The Accident was not terribly compelling to me, in part because I found his characters to be such caricatures. Ray is too abusive, Sebastian too milquetoastish, and Emily too stereotypically girlish to be altogether believable, or to engage our sympathies in any meaningful way. Ray's breakdown and consequent display of vulnerability following the climactic accident of the title at Sebastian's gallery opening comes too little, too late for this particular viewer.

After The Accident I sprinted over to Performance Works to see B-Side Productions' Caberlesque! with my friend Joanna. The show, as its neologistic title hints, is a historical tour of the cabaret songs of 1930s Berlin, 1960s Amsterdam, and contemporary New York, punctuated by stunning burlesque performances by one Prairie Fire (we're given a chance to guess the number of jelly-beans on her dress before the start of the show), and held together by a suitably blue narrative, as told by fellow performers and torch singers Sugarpuss, Marina, and Max.

Earlier reviews of the show that I read suggested the two genres--cabaret and burlesque--didn't quite work together, and that the story arc that's supposed to hold them together is too disjointed. But Joanna and I felt that the show hung together wonderfully, not pretending to be anything more than a felt homage to its component forms. To this end, the performers (I wish I could mention them by other than their stage names, but there was no program) were uniformly excellent, with Sugarpuss, Marina, and Max all in exemplary voice as they belted out world-weary numbers by Weil and Brel, and with Prairie Fire putting on a technically accomplished and visually stunning display of her mastery of historical burlesque routines (a fan dance, various screen dances, a hilarious waltz with a randy puppet, and a mind-blowing dance with glowing whirly things on strings).

There are four shows of Caberlesque! remaining, all at tricky times (two in the very early evening today and Thursday, and too very late on Wednesday and Friday). If you can make it , you should definitely make a point of taking it in.

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First Fringe Reviews and Midsummer

So the 2009 Vancouver International Fringe Festival is well underway, and I saw my first shows yesterday. In the spirit of the Fringe's own economical ethos (short shows produced and staged quickly), I will try to post short Twitteresque thoughts on what I see.

murder, hope is a new solo work by Bellingham native Becky Poole that is ostensibly about brain disorders, with a particular focus on Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare form of aphasia that can cause afflicted children to suddenly lose the ability to express and understand language. I say ostensibly because the self-described "non-linear" piece also includes several Appalachian folk ballads about abused wives and avenging nurse-angels, as well as a disquisition on Batman's crime-fighting abilities and heroic status. Poole is an engaging and dynamic performer, and has an amazing singing voice (she's pretty talented on the musical saw as well), but her performance was stronger than the piece itself, with the various parts never quite adding up to a satisfying whole, and with what I found to be an over-use of an audio soundtrack focusing on one little boy, Devin, with the syndrome. Just as we get sucked acoustically into Devin's story, Poole pulls us visually in another direction via her own intense physical presence, or else the new use to which she puts one of her many props.

Matters Domestic is comprised of two new short two-handers by local playwright, author, and actor Barbara Ellison (full disclosure: Barbara is currently enrolled in a class of mine at SFU), and directed by local legend William B. Davis (best known as The Cigarette Man on The X-Files, but also a respected theatre actor, director and teacher in this city). Part of the delight of both pieces is slowly discovering the surprising twists in their plots and characters, so I don't want to reveal too much here. What I will say is that the first play, DNA, centres around high school senior Victoria's (Lesli Brownlee) revelation to her single mother, Amanda (Lisa Dahling), that she is pregnant. Amanda's reaction is far from what we might expect, and over the course of an intense but briskly paced 10 minutes, Ellison has fun reversing ageist stereotypes and overturning various maternal conventions. The second play, Download, is even harder to talk about without giving away the central surprising conceit of its plot. Suffice to say, the piece concerns a busy career woman's contracting of a man to be a helpmate to her around the house and a surrogate father to her busy teenage children, and what happens when the terms of that contract run up against the material realities of day-to-day life, not to mention matters of the heart. Again Ellison is asking provocative questions about normative conventions of parenthood and kinship relations, but in a way that creates an imagined future (the play is set, cannily, a year from now) that's all too believable. The writing is sharp and instantly recognizable and veteran actors William MacDonald and Nancy Sivak deliver superb performances.

Yesterday evening I also made my way over to the east side to see the last performance of the Traverse Theatre production of David Greig's Midsummer, which opened the newly renovated Historic Theatre at the Cultch last week. Greig is Scotland's leading contemporary playwright, and his work tends to be quite topically political (United Players staged an excellent production of his American Pilot a season or two ago). However, Midsummer, "a play with songs," as it is subtitled, is a rollicking romp of a comedy about two thirtysomething Edinburghers, lawyer Helena (Cora Bissett) and petty criminal Bob (Gordon McIntyre), whose drunken one-night stand turns--surprisingly for both of them--into something more meaningful. Briskly paced, the play is told largely in the third person, with the actors recounting Bob and Helena's story directly to the audience, pausing every so often to reenact a crucial scene, or to grab dual guitars and express themselves more meaningfully in song. The play doesn't pretend to be any deeper than its lonely-hearted main characters, but neither does it condescend to them or hold them up for ridicule, taking their loneliness to be real and heartfelt. It's therefore hard to resist the play's many charms, starting with Greig's deft writing and direction, and finishing with Bissett and McIntyre's completely complementary, wildly energetic, and near flawless performances. They are both so comfortable in their roles, and with each other on stage, that their relaxed banter, physicality, and occasional improvisations are infectious (one unscripted bit of hilarity that had actors and audience members alike in stitches last night occurred when one of the fake eyebrows that Helena had affixed to her forehead in her guise as a heavy after Bob--who has absconded with his boss's cash--kept falling off). The audience was roaring from the get-go, and when, later, various members are conscripted into becoming part of the action, all willingly played along.

Of course, another attraction of the evening was seeing the newly renovated theatre itself. It is, as all reports have so far conveyed, stunning. I got there late and so didn't have time to fully explore its amenities, as I had to rush to find a seat in the rapidly filling auditorium. I ended up in the balcony, which now has a main access hallway wrapping around it to afford better ease of access to the various sections. And while the sightlines up there are, overall, vastly improved, my one complaint is the height of the safety rail on each of the three rows, as it means for those of us not long of torso that we have to sit up incredibly straight (or else lean forward) in order to take in all of the action. Likely this has more to do with building codes than with aesthetics, and it's only a minor irritant, but I do long for theatre venues the world over to come up with a way to fix this irksome feature of most modern re-dos.

P.