REVIEW: 3 Plays About Toronto Theatre, Review by Aurora Stewart de Peña

Written and Directed by Bobby Del Rio

Presented by Del Rio and Jason Morneau

Featuring: Ryan Moleiro, Jessica Salgueiro, Jonathan Shatzky, Julie Tesolin, Bahia Watson, and K Trevor Wilson.

Playing September 17 through Oct 4, Tuesday to Saturday, 8pm. Sundays, 2:30pm.

Tickets $10, Sundays PWYC

Playing at 970 Queen St W, Unit 7

Ticket reservations: torontotheatretrilogy@gmail.com

Nobody does self-promotion quite like Bobby Del Rio. Back in 2004 I ended up on his email list and would get messages about every single page he wrote every other day or so. During the height of the Facebook / Myspace crossover I was getting up to four emails a day to inform me of his up-comings. If, some morning in the future, I get six emails, a tweet and an independent Sirius radio broadcast about his recently completed word jumble, I will think “Yes. This is the natural progression of things. Morning will turn to afternoon. Spring will turn to summer. I will grow old and stare fondly at grandchildren. All is as it should be."

Despite all of this dedicated self-promotion, I had never been to see a Bobby Del Rio play. This wasn't his fault. Before writing for this website, I mostly went to things done by people I knew or things my friend Norman got free tickets for. Everyone is always giving Norman tickets.

Del Rio has been keeping a blog detailing the process of Three Plays about Toronto Theatre. It was his goal to do the entire thing for no money. When I spoke to him on the phone he said he thought he might have been able to get some money for the production, but that it was a challenge that he wanted to rise to meet. Part of it was because his producer had said that he had always wanted to do a play in his apartment. Part of it was just to see if he could do it.

The space where the show is presented is pretty small, and you are no doubt about it, in somebody's kitchen. I like that. I'd like to see more of this kind of thing in general. Theatre creators are burdened with the idea that nothing is possible without lots and lots of money to make it good, so many potentially great things never see a stage. I think putting on plays in your kitchen is an accessible solution. Del Rio seems a bit self-conscious about it, though.

Three Plays about Toronto Theatre is not Toronto specific. If it were, I might think that Del Rio himself would be a character. It was so named, the author said, to give it a bit of a "hook". It is a series of three short comedies, about the world of performing, creating performance and the people who feel compelled to do the aforementioned. The dialogue is quick and witty and the actors are sincere and energetic.

That said, I'm unsure of why this had to be a play. Though Del Rio uses his apartment/theatre to effect, employing the open refrigerator as light source and the bathroom as a dressing room, it seems to me that this might have made a happier television show, despite the fact that it's about theatre. The actors are directed to be naturalistic, almost casual, and when they are big as is Ryan Moleiro, they have the heightened exuberance of Kramer sliding into Jerry's apartment. There are witty non sequiturs, and nothing gets overly physical. It is safe to say that Del Rio is a product of the Seinfeld generation.

This brings to murky light the idea that many young theatre creators are not particularly influenced by theatre. Often, we can't blame them. There is a lot of bad, expensive theatre to be seen. It also takes forever to write a play, and then when you're finished you frequently find yourself in the uncomfortable boat of having a completed script that stopped being relevant to you 3 years ago. We are used to aggressively contemporary media that reflects us back at ourselves only seconds after we've walked away from the mirror. Theatre can't be that. It moves too slowly. That is why so much lasting theatre, the plays we want to do over and over again, exist in a timeless vacuum, exploring the universal themes of humanity. But that can get awfully exhausting; sometimes you just want to sit down and watch something.

If we live in a generation that wants bountiful, relevant media, does that exclude theatre for all but the very patient? Maybe. Each new form of entertainment claims to be a replacement for the old one. Movies replaced theatre, television replaced movies, the internet replaced blah blah blah. That's how we are in North America. We want to think we're on a constant incline of innovation, disposing with the old and wholeheartedly consuming the new. That is not actually what we do. We just keep adding to what we already have, momentarily losing interest in the old thing, but eventually remembering how great it was and shuffling back, seeing how it can grow to suit our glossy modern needs.

While Del Rio's play/television hybrid is an expression of how theatre can grow, it doesn't strike me as particularly theatrical. But frequently it’s the overly theatrical that alienates an uninitiated audience. The conventions of performance, to which we cling in all of their antiquity because they’re indications of quality, seem strange in a society where staying calm and not getting overly emotional is valued above passion and fury. We love film in part because of its ability to capture all of the small and subtle moments, emotional indicators that we miss between each other. Actors in the theatre can imitate the style of actors in film, but without the close-ups, long shots and whatever else a film director uses to establish a feeling scape, all of the intimacy is lost.

People will like Three Plays about Toronto Theatre. It's funny. People will go and it will sell out. It is certainly entertaining, and Lord knows Del Rio will keep us abreast of how it all goes down ("you've got to pimp it" he said, when I asked him about his vigorous electronic promotion).

But should theatre, in an attempt to stay relevant, venture into the world of live television? Del Rio seems poised to walk the line. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: Greenland, Review by Evan Webber

Greenland

Written by Nicolas Billon
Directed by Ravi Jain
Presented by The Greenland Collective

Featuring Claire Calnan, Andrew Musselman

Presented at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace

Playing:

August 14th 10:00pm
August 15th 4:00pm

Looking to dramatize what is universal means wandering into ground that’s as treacherous as it is well-trodden. And here we find Greenland, Nicolas Billon’s suite for three. I like people telling stories, but the linked monologues-which-slowly-reveals-familial-tragedy form is, to put it mildly, well-known. Here, perhaps as on the famously mis-named island, we can see what is on the horizon long before it arrives. Under Ravi Jain’s subduing direction the actors spare us most of the treacly moments and do their best to charm and deflect. There is a pleasing sense of pause in the performances, and nice quiet. A supporting credit might go to a pair of ice-cubes tinkling in a rocks glass.

Billon, or his characters, are well-aware of the clichéd scientist-finding-god story. Instead his glaciologist character veers toward the more contemporary version – scientist-finding-gloom, and everything follows: things are melting, thawing, breaking up. And so, says Greenland, are we.

Using the language of scientific observation to forge airtight and immovable metaphors about the nature of humanity says nothing about science or people. It only makes a claim about the play itself, which is that because it links science and lived experience it must therefor be both rational and poetically true. For me this is an extremely problematic position; metaphor is an attempt to draw connections in the world that illuminate and affect both subjects, and lead to transformations in thought and in the world. Despite its obvious intentions, the connections Greenland makes are a static disservice. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: Windows, Review by Evan Webber

Windows

Written by Liz Peterson
Directed by Alex Wolfson
Presented by Ammo Factory

Featuring: Amy Bowles, Chad Dembski and Liz Peterson

Presented at Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace

Playing:

August 14th 4:30pm
August 15th 8:30pm

Ammo Factory works on staging depictions of what goes on in the mind, and the company wears its late-century New York experimental theatre influences on its sleeve as it does so. Here - as, reputedly, there - there’s much showy bigness, and much slowness, and an overwhelming sense of the not-quite conscious calculation behind human actions. At their heyday Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson et al were (still are, I imagine) ruthless in their determination to look only inside their own skulls, and famously dominated every element of their productions. Despite the family resemblance, Ammo Factory doesn’t work like this. I can't prove that they don’t share a mind, but writer, director and designer at least inhabit different bodies; here there are a bunch of heads being drilled open and examined. Vast gulfs of subjectivity spill out of each and split the earth and the network of spindly or stately bridges that get erected is what might be called the consensual reality the performance represents. Windows might be read as a parable of this bridge-building – a group, a family, arriving, not without struggle, at a unified vision of reality – and after watching the play, their vision seems disturbingly, improbably, sane.

This would surely make Windows very interesting, yes, but the family’s struggle also has improbable dramatic weight, and is funny and sad and understandable, which means it is pleasurable to watch. On that note, Passe Muraille’s droopy masking is a poor frame for the precisely flimsy set and costumes, which, like everything else here, refer to totalizing impulses with a healthy mixture of respect and mocking humour – a combination, incidentally, very much like familial love.

On the subject of familiarity (or, over-familiarity): possibly the best, and least understood, lesson of the old avant-garde autocrats concerns the use of boredom: boredom, like flash-paper, is a special effect, and like most special effects, the instructions might be summarized “go big or go home”. Sometimes we get hung out in between with long spools of text that merely muddy the event, instead of creating the big space for the the mental fireworks the weird, heady show has lit the fuse on. My complaint is the fact that we’re not allowed to be bored enough. We have things to consider. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: Say Nothing, Saw Wood, Review by Katherine Sanders

Say Nothing, Saw Wood

Written and Performed by Joel Thomas Hynes
Directed by Lois Brown
Presented by Resource Centre for the Arts Company

Presented at Factory Studio Theatre Studio

Playing:

Thursday August 13 8pm
Friday August 14 10pm
Sunday August 16 4pm

In researching this review, I googled Joel Thomas Hynes and found an interview on YouTube about one of his other works, the novel Right Away Monday. In the interview Hynes refers to drug and alcohol addiction, saying, “When you’re in it you can’t see where you are… you can’t get perspective on who you are.” Say Nothing Saw Wood is another story about a character who loses that perspective for one brief but fateful moment. Hynes makes no secret about having been there himself, in fact the program notes describe an incident in his youth which could have altered his future drastically. Hynes clearly has empathy for his characters, whom he describes in the YouTube interview as often having a deep but subconscious feeling of emptiness.

In Say Nothing, Saw Wood, Hynes plays the character Jude Traynor. He enters the theatre in the dark, with slow deliberate footsteps. The lights come up on a man who looks like he’s at the gallows. His hair hangs in strings over his glaring red eyes. His hands fixed at his belt loops, he stands and delivers. His expression rarely changes as he peels back the layers, recounting the story of how he came to brutally murder an old woman when he was 17. His relationship to the woman he killed and the circumstances around the crime I will leave for the reader to find out, suffice to say all will be revealed with impeccable timing.

The director is Lois Brown (who was shortlisted for the Siminovitch prize in 2004). In her program notes she describes her goal of winnowing everything out from the original 2007 production, directed by Charlie Tomlinson. She certainly achieves the simplicity and restraint she is going for with this remount. Hynes, as I say, stands in the same position throughout the show, hands in pockets or belt loops, using minimal gesture and only occasionally changes position on the stage. A large rectangle of white light is the main design element, and Hynes moves slowly from one corner to another as he illuminates different parts of the story. He never moves through the middle of the rectangle, but paces the outside, which mirrors the development of the story, in which he is always skirting around the grotesque act. You know if you’ve read the program that it’s about a murder, but he takes his time getting to it. When he does address the subject, the white rectangle vanishes to be replaced by a golden yellow spot in the dead centre of the stage and he stands dead in the centre of that. There are two parts of the show where this happens. Once in the middle, once at the end.

The creepy violence of this story washed over me in waves until at the end of the hour I was immersed. And that’s all I’m going to say. I don’t want to spoil for anyone the subtle potency of this expertly developed monologue. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: The Epic of Gilgamesh (up until the part when Enkidu dies), Review by Katherine Sanders

The Epic of Gilgamesh (up until the part when Enkidu dies)

Written by Erin Shields
Directed by Gideon Arthurs
Presented by Groundwater Productions

Featuring Frank Cox-O'Connell, Carlos Gonzalez-Vio, Ieva Lucs, Richard Lee, Lindsey Clark, and Lisa Karen Cox

Presented at Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace

Playing:

Thursday August 13 6:30pm
Saturday August 15 12:30pm
Sunday August 16 8:30pm

I know nothing about the story of Gilgamesh. It’s one of those pieces of literature like Beowulf that I recognize as being important, but have never taken the time to read myself. So I had no idea what to expect from this show, except for being somewhat familiar with the work of Erin Shields, Gideon Arthurs, and Frank Cox-O’Connell. I have to say that I was part of a privileged audience that saw this show under the coolest circumstances possible. Waiting to enter the theatre in a line-up that wrapped around the corner of the Theatre Passe Muraille building, while to the south the last of the days light was filling the sky. To the north, as we rounded the corner and entered the theatre, was the most ominous black cloud I’ve ever seen. We got inside just before the rain came, and then were treated to a performance of this play as it was meant to be seen – with a raging thunderstorm pounding the ceiling above us. Some of Gilgamesh’s lines were underscored by massive thunder-cracks. It was intense.

Thankfully, this is a production that holds its own against a raging storm. The design is simple, effective eye candy. The representation of the demon Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven are two examples where the designers (especially Lindsay Anne Black on costumes and set) did a lot with a little. The sound design, (this night collaborating with the sound of rain and thunder), was effective and unobtrusive. The lighting also made use of some basic but on-target techniques, such as headlamps for the chorus.

It’s appropriate that this show was presented at Theatre Passe Muraille, the birthplace of Toronto’s collective creation movement in the 70’s. The style of this piece very much reminded me of those times, even though I didn’t live through them. Although this is not a collective creation, the script is skillfully crafted by Erin Shields to resemble a play of the people, by the people, for the people. The use of Greek-style chorus and the eclectic updates in vocabulary and cultural references (at one point the characters share a bucket of KFC), combine to make this an earthy post-modern adaptation of an ancient text. A related side note: Paul Thompson, the founder of TPM, was in the audience the night I saw it, and I happened to notice him guffaw heartily at the line, “The Bull of Heaven is not a toy!”

Gideon Arthurs’ attentive direction keeps the action constantly roving around the space, and the pace urging forwards like a heartbeat. The performances are all of the calibre you would expect from such accomplished actors, whose commitment and energy drive the piece forward relentlessly towards its inevitable conclusion. The title spoiler, “(up until the part when Enkidu dies)” provides a framework for the audience to grasp the significance of the unfolding events, so that the play’s ending is timely and satisfying.

A masterfully crafted piece of theatre all around. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry and The Art of Catching Pigeons By Torchlight, Review by Evan Webber

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry

Written and Performed by Daniel Barrow
Presented at Theatre Passe Muraille, Main Space

Playing

August 9th 6:30pm
August 11th 8:30pm
August 14th 8:30pm
August 15th 2:30pm


The Art of Catching Pigeons By Torchlight

Written and Directed by Jordan Tannhill
Presented by Suburban Beast at Rolly's Garage, 124 Ossington Avenue

Featuring: Amelia Sargisson, Marika Schwandt, Tawiah M’carthy, and others.

Playing

August 9th 8:00pm
August 10th 6:00pm
August 11th 8:00pm
August 12th 8:00pm
August 13th 8:00pm
August 14th 8:00pm
August 15th 10:00pm
August 16th 8:00pm

In Daniel Barrow’s projection show Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, the Winnipeg-based artist “animates” his performance by manipulating skilfully wrought images on an overhead projector, while he softly intones the chilly story of an solitary garbage thief into the microphone. Barrow’s transparency illustrations are soft, the colours pillowy, and everything is cut with a shock of nausea. They have the stillness of a crime scene photo. Alone, they’re dead, but the overhead projector is the right medium for them; on the screen they vibrate slightly as if about to blast off into space; they get charged by what good puppeteers use to make puppets come to life. Watching them is worth the price of admission, even if the story they tell is a little confusing.

Weird, beautiful pictures notwithstanding, I’ve mostly loved Barrow’s work in the past for the way he situates himself in the audience, for the workmanlike quality with which he approaches performance, which gently acknowledges the pleasurable discipline of both making and seeing live art. But Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry departs from this relational position in a surprising way. Barrow is invisible to us, and we sit in the dark, and gone is the complex picture of a human storyteller, playing among his listeners with his modest but magically sufficient medium. Instead we get an authoritative voice in our heads. This weird, Wagnerian power-play highlights the rich detail of Barrow’s world, and it may offer the artist some measure of – what, control? Or maybe it’s just a move towards higher production values? But by removing the relational obstacle, and dispelling the charm of what is actually happening in the room (which is often a lot of scrambling for lose transparencies), what’s left is actually a rather typical story of tragic alienation and bloody doom. It’s thoughtful, cleverly written, beautifully aestheticized and cold as the clay. Absent the creator, render unseen the breathing, visible idiosyncrasy of the task imposed by the medium, and Barrow’s voice seems merely to say that communication is a lost cause, or an act of violence – and that art is just an attempt to gild the skull. Nestled in the dark of the theatre, I thought it possible that the voice I was hearing was just speaking to itself. Believe it, this is a cautionary tale.

Differently gilded is The Art of Catching Pigeons By Torchlight by Jordan Tannahill’s company Suburban Beast. Tannahill et al are doing something that isn’t easy: looking for a way to combine casual delivery (which is definitely the new normal) with the precision of verbatim text. The former remains elusive here, but under his direction, the company has nailed the latter in a series of precisely detailed character portraits. The subjects are people who work, or go about their business, at night. Simple as that. The portrayals are surprising and generous (and a touch old-fashioned) and the stories the company’s research has generated are compelling. But the production’s mixture of kitsch and studied coolness doesn’t sustain (the theatre is a blanket-fort; the “real” costumes over-composed) and by the end it washes out to reveal an uncritical sentimentality. This tacked-on emotionalism mostly neutralizes the proposal the work is making: that freedom of a kind exists in a conditional truce with the quotidian. More demonstrably: when people feel free, they say beautiful and interesting things. This is a good thing to remember, and thankfully, it still shines through in places. And if you can still believe ts while walking out of a blanket-fort onto Ossington Avenue on a Friday night, it must be at least a little bit true. Read more!

SUMMERWORKS: under the parrot/over tennessee, Review by Katherine Sanders

under the parrot/over tennessee

Written and Performed by Val Campbell and Gail Hanrahan
Directed by James Fagan Tait
Presented by Theatre in Exile, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace

Playing:

Sunday August 9 6pm
Tuesday August 11 8pm
Thursday August 13 6pm
Saturday August 15 2pm
Sunday August 16 6pm

The moment I started to enjoy under the parrot/over tennessee was about halfway through, when suddenly the two performers broke out of the Tennessee Williams characters that their clown characters were portraying and turned into themselves, the actors, the people - for one brief moment. It also elicited the most genuine laugh of the whole show.

From that point on, I allowed myself to go with them on this weird ride they were on. Two clown-type characters (they are not red-nose clowns), Ol’ Man (Gail Hanrahan) and L’il Boy (Val Campbell) find themselves sharing quarters, and as a way to pass the time Ol’ Man decides that they will act out scenes from Tennessee Williams plays. Simple premise – but why? That’s what I found myself asking most of the way through. Why did they decide to present Tennessee Williams in this way? Why are the clowns obsessed with Williams? Why are they there together? What is this place? So many unanswered questions. My cynical self was starting to think, “These are just a couple of middle-aged women who wanted to play some Tennessee Williams heroines.” And that’s fine – lots of people do vanity projects. But then why the clowns? Why not just do the plays?

That weird little moment in the middle when they both broke character (intentionally), was the one glimmer of truth that allowed me access to the show. I wish they would have done the whole show that way. And from then on, I let myself stop asking questions, and just listened. The passages from Williams were actually performed quite beautifully. Particularly by Hanrahan, who held the audience spell-bound by the end of the show.

Companies from out of town often have a difficult time getting an audience at Summerworks and I think that’s a shame. There are only four shows from outside of Toronto – four chances for us to prove that we’re not as insular and self-absorbed as the rest of the country seems to think. So please, at this year’s Summerworks, see a show from out of town. See a show that doesn’t have any of your friends in it. Let’s expand our horizons, shall we? Read more!