The Emergency Monologues
by Morgan Jones Phillips
Directed by Evalyn Parry
Presented by Drinking Well
Featuring Morgan Jones Phillips
Morgan Jones Phillips is big and friendly and tells funny and horrifying true stories from his work as a paramedic, and he has all the unnerving, loquacious energy of the shell-shocked. The night I saw the show he informed us that he had just worked his third nightshift in a row. He was almost falling over, and was entirely winning. Though Phillips is the only human performer in the show, it would be a mistake to say that he is the star of The Emergency Monologues. That honour undeniably goes to ‘The Wheel of Misfortune’ which is prop, hero, villain, plot device, and rickety emblem of human frailty all rolled up into one.
It’s a brilliantly simple form. Phillips spins the wheel, he reads out the random selection and then has to talk about the indicated story, code-word or moral. Then he does it again, and the show literally revolves around the wheel, so always the tales of wisdom and idiocy he expresses are punctuated by the melodramatics of a roulette game. It’s inevitable that the random playlist yields less than perfect results, but that’s pleasingly intentional. The formal constraint is compelling and thematic in its own right, but by offering the possibility that we might hear a story that’s never been told, or that Phillips might be forced into an even more uncomfortable position as speaker as he shifts quickly from the comic to the irredeemably dark, it also makes a witty comment on the show’s own avowedly populist form. It shows us ourselves.
At the end of it, of course, he tell us the message, which is that Toronto needs more ambulances on the road lest the Wheel of Misfortune grow even larger. Sometimes Phillips's desire for a funny story, or his simple exhaustion undoes some of the beautiful tension of this show. It’s also possible that he’s too good a storyteller, that he’d rather make us laugh than give us the space to live uncomfortably with the material. But this is a brand-new work (I hope that this production marks a point of departure rather than arrival) and the fact that I could imagine what it could be doesn’t change what it is. As such, The Emergency Monologues is a piece of intelligent agit-prop. Successful agit-prop too, because, there is no suspect or problematic ideology on display here. (Unless you think publicly-funded health-care is suspect or problematic, and even you might have your mind changed). It mobilizes us instantly against that intractable foe: plain, dumb luck, Dame Fortuna herself – and not alone, not by ourselves, as the title might suggest, but freely, eagerly, and together.
Fri Aug 15 6:00pm
Sat Aug 16 10:00pm
Sun Aug 17 6:00pm
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The Emergency Monologues at Summerworks by Evan Webber
Fewer Emergencies and Singhski at Summerworks by Evan Webber
Fewer Emergencies
by Martin Crimp
Directed by Brendan Healy
Presented by Mitch
Featuring Ken Mackenzie, Vahid Rahbani, Erin Shields, Andrew Pifko
Singhski is Chad Dembski and Rebecca Singh
Maybe the good Pastor's shadow is still covering our bright city, or maybe it's the start of the monsoon season, but I’m still feeling sublime Evil around every corner at SummerWorks. The text of Martin Crimp’s very funny Fewer Emergencies is provocative not so much because of its story of suburban desperation and violence, but for the way it dismantles itself, leaving only people and their hopes as the possible source of the contagious violence they must confront. Thanks to director Brendan Healy, these are people on stage, and its their double nature as performer/characters (particularly in the immensely composed Vahid Rabhani) that makes this show so worth seeing. As characters, their hope is for a more meaningful life; as actors they hope just as palpably for a deeper logic, for a more complete story. In the end, what the performer/ characters (and finally, we the audience) are looking for is a judgement, and this is the Evil in Fewer Emergencies: there isn’t any. Instead, there’s a cautious mapping of the territory of hope, where the golden key dangles always out of reach and the car gets overturned again and again, where the contingency of our happiness is as absolute, and as final, as our ability to do something about it.
Meanwhile, the territory of hope gets driven over by a sparkler-mounted electric monster-truck in Singhski, part of the Performance Gallery series at the Gladstone. In just under ten minutes, Rebecca Singh and Chad Dembski simply, effortlessly, even childishly show us how ‘Things used to be better’, while nimbly keeping themselves clear of the black hole of nostalgia. In doing so, they manage to renew our faith in the power of strangeness. It’s hard to say what you’ll find when you go, because the set-list of their performance (which is likely to include ‘internet poetry’ and Sun-Ra-inspired costumage) is mutable. Though it's sure to stay essentially, refreshingly, weird.
Fewer Emergencies plays at the Factory Studio Theatre
Tue Aug 12 6:00pm
Wed Aug 13 6:00pm
Thu Aug 14 10:00pm
Sat Aug 16 4:00pm
Singhski is being presented as part of the Performance Gallery at the Gladstone Hotel
Every night 7:00-9:00pm
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The Pastor Phelps Project at Summerworks by Evan Webber
The Pastor Phelps Project: a fundamentalist cabaret
By Alistair Newton and the members of Ecce Homo
Directed by Alistair Newton
Musical Direction by Daniel Rutzen
Presented by Ecce Homo
Featuring Matthew Armet, Andrew Bathory, Adam Bolton, Raffaele Ciampaglia, Andrea Kwan, Evalyn Parry, Kaitlyn Regehr, Chy Ryan Spain, Kristine Steffansson, Carey William Wass
It could not begin better: outside, people hold signs and placards, repeating other people’s gestures, grimly attentive, ready for anything; and then we sneak into the luxe, faux-bordello interior of the Cameron House, which is all abuzz with rumours – ‘Apparently, Phelps has crossed the border… yes he’s on his way – and then we are ushered past the threshold and into the back of the Cameron, where we sit down in the fake foliage and the black velvet. It is our very own Heart of Darkness, and the real, live Kurtz is on his way! And then, music! The actors come out, and in a supremely ironic gesture, the whole world inverts, and what we see on the inside is exactly what is happening on the outside: people hold signs and placards, repeating other people’s gestures, grimly attentive, ready for anything…Director Alistair Newton pulls an immense amount of energy out of the cast who all play fast and loose and jump into the Bizarro-world with wonderful abandon. But inverting reality so completely like this can also lead to a general state of dizziness, and to a series of rather unsettling questions floating in the heads of the audience. When, for example, did this show actually begin? With Newton’s recent invitation to Phelps, published in Fab Magazine?
‘…You are so utterly loathsome, your ideas so mind-bendingly facile and your tactics so crassly ludicrous that you provide the perfect mirror to reflect the awesome stupidity of religious homophobia...’
Or with the reply from the Westboro Baptist Church?
‘…The Pastor Phelps Project is a tacky bit of filthy sodomite propaganda, with no literary merit and zero redeeming social value, masquerading as legitimate theatre. It is of the fags, by the fags, and for the fags…’
Certainly, the show started before it started In turn, the performance of the show itself feels like the emblem of a larger dialogue happening outside the theatre. This is (mostly) as it should be. Framing a bigger issue is something that theatre does, and the best achievement of Pastor Phelps is how it demonstrates the pleasure of this property through a style that is all beautiful, DIY cliché and sheer, skin-of-the-teeth exuberance.
The show-as-frame is so clear however, that we see the arguments inside it immediately. Pastor Phelps is not just an ironic name-calling session – that would reduce this show to a piece of fluff. Under the all mockery in the show is real fear; a more troubled, and more troubling, engagement with the notion of evil. It’s in the imagery and in the juxtaposition of texts; Phelps himself is not even a human, rather, he’s coin-operated nightmare puppet. (What currency activates him, we do not know, but it comes from the hand of an ‘innocent’ child.) He is beyond the pale. And if we laugh at him or his minions, it is not in recognition of his human frailty, but in the face of him as the enigma of evil itself.
In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Zizek writes about the enigma through the lens of the Holocaust, and I kept thinking about this while I was watching Pastor Phelps:
“Any attempt to locate [the Holocaust] in its context, to politicize it, is equivalent to the… negation of its uniqueness… However, this very depoliticization of the Holocaust, its elevation into the properly sublime Evil, the untouchable exception beyond the reach of ‘normal’ political discourse, can also be a political act of utter cynical manipulation, a political intervention aiming at legitimizing a certain kind of hierarchical political relation… at the expense of today’s radical political possibilities.'
This is what I was worried about.
Any performance that matters to people happens in the territory between the elevated sublime and the contextually politicized, and a little touch of evil can certainly build an atmosphere and help nose a story along. It’s hard work to avoid the consequent depoliticization-effect but it’s work well worth doing unless one wants to end up merely as Phelps’ liberal doppelganger; a Phelps-enabler, not by argument, but by attitude.
An example of a successful navigation of the obstacle: though there’s lots of genuinely sexy and disturbing moments, the most engaging and challenging parts in Pastor Phelps are the sections of verbatim text from the Tyra Banks Show (yes, there is a Tyra Banks Show, news to me) and from the on-camera meltdown of a Fox News anchor at one of Phelps’s deplorable funeral pickets. Both scenes are copied from television and staged with great restraint and sensitivity. And they stand out precisely because they do negate the uniqueness (they show us, instead, the banality) of evil: not only could this person be me; this person is me, and so deserves equal criticism and compassion.
*
Pastor Phelps is only one of a big handful of shows at this year’s SummerWorks that is explicitly dealing with fear, belief, and navigating the void of un-reason. (I count nine, including the One Reed show that I’m performing in, from the blurbs alone. I’m sure the number’s even higher.) Curatorial bias or unopposable Zeitgeist? Time, and a few more performances, may tell. Either way, it’s very exciting to see such a clear theme emerging in the festival programming. Hopefully it will lead to more, and better, conversations.
The Pastor Phelps Project plays:
Sat Aug 9 8:00pm
Sun Aug 10 3:00pm
Thu Aug 14 8:00pm
Fri Aug 15 8:00pm
Sat Aug 16 8:00pm
Sun Aug 17 3:00pm
Venue
The Cameron House
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Evan Webber's Fringe Wrap-up
So I posed myself this question, ‘What do people like?’ And gave myself the duration of the Fringe festival to answer it. After seeing a lot of Fringe shows there’s a pretty quick and easy list to throw together: hockey fans, beer drinking, waving prairie grasses, (all Canadiana must be lovingly held up and then skewered ironically); Torontonian up-tightness; other Fringe plays; otherness, generally; love stories; marriage stories; bartenders. So why am I optimistic?
Yes, these tropes can seem a little worn down, but like the very same bartender they are also only one part of a more elemental (and after seeing so many plays, necessary) transaction. So what leaves me feeling optimistic about the Fringe, and maybe even about theatre, has not so much to do with the kind of stories that I heard told or represented or shouted or sung. It has to do with the way that those stories were told, that is, in a profusion of forms.
From this angle, what people like (and what I like too) are performances in which the ambition to communicate is desperate and huge, shows that ask a lot. Shows that, even when skillfully executed, are precarious under the burden of huge imaginations. I think this is true because many of the best shows I saw were just celebrations of the signs of the need to communicate, big wrangles like Lupe: Undone or Die Roten Punkte – SUPER MUSIKANT (which was good in the theatre, but even better when the performers tried to sell their merch outside).
My Fringe-related optimism stems from the generosity of imagination that audiences demanded, which reflects an unmistakable desire to communicate – to learn something, but also to say something back. It might go a little like this: imagine big, performers, and ask much of us watchers and listeners, because the imagination that we demand of each other is what will make communication possible.
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Acis and Galatea at the Toronto Fringe Festival by Aurora de Pena
Acis and Galatea by George Frederic Handel
Libretto by John Gay and Alexander Pope
Presented by Classical Music Consort from Toronto/New York/London
Acis and Galatea, based on the story from Ovid’s Metamorphises, is a simple confident and innovative Baroque Masque by The Classical Music Consort. There is a feeling of constant movement, wind and water, as the pastoral is evoked not only in the video which projects on performers and backdrop alike, but in the fluid grace of the costume design and constant flux of the choreography.
Conductor Ashiq Aziz employs an ensemble of period instruments to recreate Handel’s composition, and the music shines. The singers embrace every Baroque vocal ornamentation; and the effect is wonderfully emotional and poignant, with the silver throated Rosie Coad (Galatea) making a stunning impression. She is present in voice and body, compelling to watch as well as to hear.
Aziz and director Patrick Young have accomplished something quite special in their relaxed and confident production. Opera, for the general North American population, is dead. This is due to its inability to change and reflect the world as the current generation sees it. Of course there are great and enduring works on universal human themes, but of these, many contemporary opera companies neglect to focus on those universal themes and instead concentrating effort on the preservation of the original art form, featuring corsets and large, heavy sets in giant theatres. Aziz and Young, however, make their production electric by stripping away those excesses and letting the work speak for itself. This is an intimate and excellent production, the right direction for the future of opera.
Read more!Bluebeard and Take it Back at the Toronto Fringe Festival by Evan Webber
Bluebeard by Pericles Snowdon
Presented by GromKat Productions, Toronto
and
Take it Back by Jodee Allen and Helen Simard
Presented by Solid State Breakdance, Montreal
The atmosphere at the Fringe Festival tent can feel closer to that of a Bruegel market scene than a strait-laced theatre festival. Producers sidle up like pickpockets to slip flyers into your hands. Actors sit gossiping in knots like farmers, with their wares – their flyers – arranged in front of them. Performance poets stand silent, beer in hand, wearing back-banners proclaiming the dazzling reviews their shows have garnered in distant cities. For all its craziness, this atmosphere also offers a kind of clarity, because, as a few moments of conversation with any of the above will confirm, what marks the value of a Fringe show is unambiguous; what matters is whether people like it.
Another way of saying this: Fringe artists are engaged primarily with a question about audience - what kinds of relationships can exist between performer and audience? And maybe another, more dangerous question: what do people actually like?
GromKat’s production of UK playwright Pericles Snowdon’s Bluebeard answers that people like a richly imagined Platonic parable dramatized as a post-apocalyptic Jacobean revenge tragedy. It’s an unusual pleasure to hear this kind of language spoken aloud, even if it must be in the King’s English, and the performers are unhurried and (for the most part) show great ease with the story’s uncertainties and logical cul-de-sacs. The production’s struggles are rather with the stakes of its own drama, and the ironies of the show’s fairytale aesthetic are skin deep compared to those in the script, which plays adroitly with our expectations. It’s only by the time we’re asked to choose between safety and certainty inside the castle and a life outside in the unknowable and violent ‘world without a heart’, that we’re we one step ahead of the characters. And this is only because we in the audience know that a kind of practical certainty is actually all too available in the world; what’s harder to find is Mistress Blue’s abundant imagination. If we want the characters to stay, it’s because we’d like to stay there too, for just a little longer.
Of this violent and unknowable world, Take it Back (by Montreal’s Solid State Breakdance) would simply like to know, how come people don’t dance together anymore? It’s an innocent question that hides a very thorny tangle of observations about gender, race, power, and the conversational qualities of dance. They might be a little biased (the title’s a hint), but their investigation is thorough, and their conclusions are charmingly related and occasionally – even unnervingly – thought provoking. For a show where couples dance to the Lindy Hop (among other things), Take it Back manages to stay remarkably light on nostalgia. Though there is a little self-conscious song-and-dance-ness to some of the more narrative moments, there are also moments of unadorned clarity, even joy. When the dancers really laugh, when they really fall, when they really flirt with us and each other, Take it Back cuts through its own problematics with a simpler and more radical statement, which has to do with why they’re dancing together, and why we’re there watching them: sure, abundant imagination is alright, but it’s other people that make things fun.
Bluebeard plays at the Tarragon Mainspace
Tues , July 8 @ 3:00 PM
Thu , July 10 @ Noon
Fri , July 11 @ 8:45 PM
Sun , July 13 @ 5:15 PM
Take It Back plays at the George Ignatieff
Thu , July 10 @ 7:30 PM
Fri , July 11 @ 12:30 PM
Sat , July 12 @ 11:00 PM
Sun , July 13 @ 4:30 PM
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Hung To Dry at the Toronto Fringe Festival by Aurora de Peña
Presented by RumRaisin Productions, Toronto
Though Hung to Dry can be appropriately described as hilarious by anyone’s high standards, the 60 minute show exceeds the expectations of the realm of Saturday Night Live era sketch comedy. Fresh, exciting and original writing and performance by Donna Maloney, Carly Spencer, and Peggy Harowitz is both dark and pop, allowing the audience to experience not only the big laughs, but also the slightly uncomfortable/relatable moments that make the laughter ache a little bit. The girls turn a critical eye toward life in the city and the culture that’s supposed to go with it. Carly Spencer’s rhyming poetic monologues (narrated by urban Canadian wildlife) are innovative and unexpected—Her poems as performances are so charming, appealing and unique that they could carry the show, but happily, they have lots of excellent company. Peggy Harowitz explores, with an empathetic but deeply skeptical eye , the life of a modern Russian email bride (“Your money is enough to buy me a new fur coat and hysterectomies for my Mother and my sister and my sister and my sister”) and Donna Maloney’s performance as an early 80’s sex therapist who plays by The Rules is cringe-worthy as well as hysterical. It is complex and self reflective humour in keeping with the Sedaris age.
Hung To Dry plays at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace
Mon , July 7 @ 4:00 PM
Tues , July 8 @ 5:00 PM
Thu , July 10 @ 2:45 PM
Sat , July 12 @ 6:15 PM
Sun , July 13 @ 5:45 PM