REVIEW: Foster Child Play, Review by Aurora Stewart de Peña

Foster Child Play

Written by Alex Napier

Directed by Philip McKee

Presented by Island School

Composer: Katie Stelmanis

Featuring: Nika Mistruzzi, Jackie Rowland, Vanessa Dunn

Presented at Hub 14

Playing:

August 11th 8:00 PM

August 12th 8:00 PM

August 13th 8:00 PM

August 14th 8:00 PM

August 15th 2:00 PM

Of course this play features my beloved lady love Nika Mistruzzi. It was also assembled by treasured acquaintances Alex Napier (writer) and Philip McKee (director). The highly regarded Vanessa Dunn plays opposite the Neek-ster and Exciting New Young Person Jackie Rowland plays opposite everybody.

So I lean on an extreme bias. It’s okay; one of the reasons I’m friends with these people is because I think they’re smart and talented.

Alex Napier has written a play that my mother would say an actor could “lean up against”. It’s strong and layered, funny and sad. Two young room mates living in a stylishly beige world fall in friend-love over the irreparable damage caused to them by their mothers. In an attempt to create a new and functional unit, Alice (played by Mistruzzi in a pink dress) invites a 17 year old foster child named Tallulah (played by Rowland in hightop sneakers) to come and live in their downtown apartment. Sheila (played by Dunn in pleated shorts) is cautious about the whole situation.

Family damage is at the heart of Foster Child Play. It’s something that most of us have. We can generally look up and find cracks in the ceilings of our childhood homes. These days many of us opt to start over, leaving our families and making new ones out of friends, people we choose for ourselves.To overwrite the past and create a shining present is the challenge Napier gives her characters. Alice goes about rearing Tallulah (mostly already reared as a hair swishing 17 year old) in the most loving, graceful and unintentionally absurd way she knows how, idealizing her brokenness while showering her with immature affection.

Alice, as characterized by Mistruzzi, is a haphazard optimist. She is volatile and excitable, but her foil, Dunn’s Sheila, seems to me to be not so much a pessimist as a realist.* Sheila sees that Tallulah, who seethes with animosity for her but glows inwardly for Alice, is not the innocent country girl with invisible flowers in her hair, but is instead a sexually deviant attention seeking teenager in need of a lot more help than either one of them can give.

Under McKee’s direction, Napier’s carefully chosen words are endowed with the complexity and thoughtfulness with which they were written. Indeed, both writer and director are very good listeners. The very specific, halting, think-while-you-talk pattern of Toronto Girl dialect is perfectly captured and honoured, so much so that conversation over drinks afterwards was a bit self conscious. McKee has made a world that’s tense and vibrant, the lives of the characters unravel with a stately and mysterious progress; a crack, and then another crack, and then another, and then the roof caves in. The audience can see it coming, but that makes it all the more gripping.

Watching these women fall apart together, watching them break and then pick themselves up without successfully dusting off is both upsetting and hilarious. What makes Foster Child Play. so engaging to watch is seeing how hard everyone is trying. Though I’ll bet people will think this is absurdist, it’s very relatable. We’re all working through something, sorting through our pasts. Sometimes it’s extreme, funny and heartbreaking all at the same time.

*It’s been recently brought to my attention that I might be a nihilistic pessimist.

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FRINGE TORONTO: 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls, Review by Evan Webber

36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls

Written and Directed by Aurora Stewart de Peña
Presented by Birdtown and Swanville

Featuring: Rebecca Applebaum, Lauren Bride, Jolene De Voe, Sochi Fried, Cara Gee, Julia Lederer, Donna Maloney, Laura McCoy, Nika Mistruzzi, Monique Moses, Liz Peterson, Aurora Stewart de Peña, and Nicole Stamp.

Presented at Bread and Circus. 299 August Avenue

Playing:

Wednesday July 15th midnight
Friday July 17th at 6:30pm

Writer/director Aurora Stewart de Peña's 36 Little Plays About Hopeless Girls is about additive sadness and small choices that appear hardly to be choices at all. If you’re a person, you’ll probably like it. Instead of landing on the planet of sadness, 36 Little Plays stays in orbit above its thematic centre. It keeps lightly to the clouds, but its endless flight, while not exposing the interior, surveys much of the dark territory below.

At times the writing is biting and familiar, at other times it sounds like bad TV and in rare (quite rare) moments it actually is really, really bad. Like most popular satire, it only ever fails when it betrays how it secretly endorses or even craves the power it means to ridicule. Stewart de Peña deserves real credit for both noticing and trying to resolve this problem. Her solution: applying the principle of excess. Like most principles it would work better if it were more rigorously upheld in the quality of the performance – the changing state of the performer’s bodies, for instance – but it’s still a sound conceptual solution.

So the show is piled on methodically: a voice-over is followed by a scene, followed by a dance which is followed by another voice-over and in every situation the performers (almost too many to keep track of) seem to have been left to determine the style of the show entirely on their own. The clash of their idiomatic verdicts, which range from the melodramatic to the fearful, the trembling, the all-to-real, and the awkward, are what deliver the essential conflict of the show: not only do the people in this play not know how to solve their problems, they don’t even know how to be in their problems.

In the final moments, the hopeless girls are sleeping like abused domestics in some Dickensian hell, and one dreams of a creature entirely unlike her who comes from another world. It just so happens to be the same person as the only multi-cast performer in the show who’s also played the singing orphan, the bisexual, the pretentious artist, the one who smells bad, the one who is perpetually abused and excluded from the world the rest of the characters inhabit . It’s a gesture towards a possible reconciliation of difference, maybe even the emergence of self-awareness. It seems unlikely though, that the girls will be able to escape the crushing gravity of their own girlhood.

Is it worth mentioning the many similarities between this play and the text of Rainer Fassbinder’s 1971 play Blood On The Cat’s Neck in which a beautiful extraterrestrial woman-creature, (a blonde model look-alike) appears in the midst of a group of grimy, post-war West Germans? (I wasn’t born in time to see Blood On The Cat’s Neck, but this only makes the similarities even more eerie.) Needless to say, when Fassbinder’s hopeless girls and boys end their evening together, they really end it. His English translator Denis Calandra paraphrases Fassbinder’s preliminary notes from a film of the same period thus: ‘Fassbinder said he wanted to allow his audience, without any help from him, to make the choice between a short, fulfilled life, or a longer existence, which would for the most part be “alienated” and “lived outside a fully conscious state.’

Given the rest of the work, the sudden, ambiguous optimism at the end of 36 Little Plays rings uncomfortably like something written as if reassure the people whose lives it’s just been so methodically dissecting, namely: us; the performers; the playwright. This can be diagnosed as a structural problem: the play trades on a classical form but it cuts off at the climax. True to itself, the play offers anything but an obvious ending. But for ourselves, and of the creator, we can’t help wonder: if not a classical conclusion, what, exactly, happens next? Read more!

Double Double Land Land, Allison, Sarah and I By Aurora Stewart de Peña

I had a really high fever when I saw Double Double Land Land at Gallery TPW. I almost didn't go, even though the venue is a pebble's throw from my front door. I was going to stay home and watch Dynasty, which I have been watching in such a marathon style that I had a dream about Krystle Carrington (Beautiful, extraordinary hair, and a good person deep down inside) last night.

However, I'm pleased to report that I was able to leave the very exciting world of fictional Denver's fictional early 80s oil boom long enough to drag myself the required 1/2 block to the performance space, passing a conservative looking wedding reception at neighbouring X-Space on the way in.

The gallery was packed, and cast member Nika Mistruzzi had warned me not to sit in the front unless I wanted to be hit with set pieces. I didn't. I saw my friends Allison and Sarah, and they had a seat close to them. They were both wearing rainbow striped shirts. I had on a black dress and grey shoes.

I am really glad I saw this play. Really glad. Multi- disciplinary artist Jon McCurley's latest collaborative effort is a huge success; Laura McCoy's plush, kaleidoscope set, consisting of large, primary coloured geometric shapes, is kept on the move by the crew, who run it back and forth across the stage. Nikki Woolsey's cartoon costumes, which include a giant, soft ATM and a yellow traffic arrow, and McCurley's sharp writing, reminiscent of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth or Harry Nilsson's The Point, make this worthy of the very best fevered hallucination.

Double Double Land is a city where everything is terrible; its motto is "A Bad Place to Be, A nice Place to Leave". The citizens know it's terrible and so does the Town's mayor (played hopelessly well by Lauren Bride). A representative from the illustrious next town over Tuba City (Amy Lam, superior in a sweater onesie) comes to the town with suggestions of improvement. Double Double Land's Minister of Tourism builds an attraction based on the town's horrible reputation: a giant spring that launches you right out of town.

The cast was strong and confident. All gave grounded, shameless performances while happily yelling at/ tossing props and set pieces to an engaged and excitable audience.

McCurley does nothing to hide the artifice that is necessary in making a play. The costumes are obviously costumes, and not meant to represent a character's natural attire. This is exemplified by Nika Mistruzzi's giant fabric nose (Mistruzzi plays the role of Mrs. Nose), which occasionally falls off as she yells "My nose is so big! My nose is so big!" which, as is true as much of the play, would have seemed at home in McCurley's inky series of comics.

The soundscape, by musician Matt Smith (Nifty, Awesome) includes an occasional infant's squall or other uninvited sound. Rather than lulling me into the world of the play, it drew me out, and made me look for the cat I heard or the glass that broke. It was a bit uncomfortable, and it worked perfectly.

As Lauren Bride, the Mayor of Double Double Land, delivers her final impassioned monologue decreeing all kinds of amazing new things for Double Double Land, I heard a the sound of glass shattering (not in the soundscape), shouts and whoops coming from the front of the gallery. Franco from the Theatre Centre, who had warned us to expect noise from next door as there was a reception, got up to see what was wrong. The door guy got up and followed.

"As if they didn't lock the door, that's so stupid…" I thought, watching Bride try to retain her concentration through the last bit of her speech. Suddenly I was looking at the entire wedding party from next door. On the stage. Bride, groom, mom, dad and several well wishers throwing confetti and drinking champagne, and they were looking at me, and we, the entire audience, were looking at them in stunned silence. Bride (Lauren), shocked, turned to stare. Dave Clarke, still in costume came from backstage, looking angry and confrontational, Glen Macaulay, also still in costume, came from backstage looking alarmed.

I tapped Allison on the shoulder. "Is this really happening?"

"I think so." She said.

The wedding party, who must have felt as though they were in a fish tank, seemed surprised that nobody in the audience wanted to share in their celebration of love. They were unceremoniously usherered out by the Door Guy. The cast, looking a bit defeated, shuffled off. Set Designer Laura McCoy and Crew member Wes Allen came out with large brooms and swept away the broken glass, confetti and other debris left by the invading wedding party. The show was over.

"What just happened?" Allison asked me.

"I'm not really sure." I said.

"I think it was a set up." Said Sarah.

"Nooooooooo!" I said.

"Seriously?" Asked Allison.

"Yeah, I mean, who has their wedding a X-Space on a Tuesday night in January?"

That hadn't even occurred to me.

"Yeah, look," Sarah continued. "There they are." And she pointed to the wedding party, laughing and talking with Jon and the rest of the cast. It was part of the show. I couldn't believe that guy! The most believable part of the whole show had been staged.

"I've gotta go," I said, remembering that I was still sick. "I'm going to watch Dynasty." Read more!