Fringe 2013 - Day 2

The Shape of a Girl (Chrysalis Theatre, SK)

The title is evocative. Part cute, part suggestive, possibly something you’d see in an advertising campaign. It takes a while to swing back to the intended meaning of the phrase: that peculiar and endlessly troubling circumstance when someone can lose her humanity at so young an age, to commit such terrible acts, all while maintaining the shape of a girl.

     The new Chrysalis Theatre production for this summer’s Fringe tackles Joan MacLeod’s acclaimed script about the grim realities of bullying. It is inspired by the 1997 case of a 14-year-old Victoria girl who was beaten and killed by two classmates while many others stood by and watched. Those present made a pact of silence, but still rumours got out. The Shape of a Girl was born out of that incident but has only gained relevance since then, with the Amanda Todd and Rehtaeah Parsons cases keeping discussion in the air about the cruelty of young people.

     This play takes a fictional story of a small Vancouver Island community where a seemingly ordinary group of girls find themselves twisted by a long-running game of malice, denigration, and passive witness. The one-woman show focuses on the story of Braidie, handmaiden to the Devil, in a sense. She recounts how her innocent childhood was transformed by social hierarchy and needless ostracism, how her best friend Adrianne became queen and arbitrator of her circle of classmates, pronouncing judgement as she saw fit and delighting in cruelty towards those she decreed were deserving of it. She recounts how one girl named Sophie, who never did anything wrong, became scorned and hated by everyone who knew her, simply because it was decided that she should be. And finally she recounts how she herself stood by and let it all happen, time and time again.

     U of S alumna Danielle Spilchen, in her first solo show, takes us on a profound and shocking emotional journey. Her ageless eyes shift seamlessly between hyperactive girlish enthusiasm and shell-shocked horror. She has a face which can shine halogen-bright or darken to a sullen smouldering, and throughout the course of the play she explores the whole range of expressions. The performance is a bit frenetic, unstuck in time, bouncing from one point to another, swirling around points of violence, then, as if approaching a black hole, it slows to a moment, a pause between heartbeats. Like the arresting bell sound effect that rang periodically, never failing to jolt me in my seat, Spilchen has the ability to snatch the audience out of one state and put them in another. She moulds the emotional experience, offering brief moments of levity then barrelling back into anguish.

     Onstage she is accompanied only by two stepladders. They stand grey and monolithic, one of them towering over her, the other much smaller. Before a single word is uttered, there is a power imbalance onstage, one ladder looking down on the other and Braidie wavering between them. At times she tries to climb, but there is always a painful sight when she does. The play is framed as a letter to her estranged brother, which lends a sense of longing and displacement to Braidie’s words. The sense of loneliness in her social circle becomes more pronounced as the play reaches to a close and Braidie becomes more vulnerable. Danielle Spilchen maintains such a degree of emotional availability that in her final tearful breakdown, it really is difficult to tell if she’s still acting.

     The one complaint I would lodge against the production is that it finishes with the director Louise Seidel offering a ten minute “talk-back” with the audience. I could tell that she planned this in anticipation of there being a lot of young people in the audience, and I grant that it may be a good way to temper their reaction to the dark resonance of the play. But in my predominantly adult audience, it came across as shallow, and all too reminiscent of those tired, pointless seminars I had to sit through in elementary school. The schoolyard saccharine approach Seidel took in contrast with the blunt reality of the play made me imagine ending Letter’s from the Apocalypse by addressing the audience and telling them to by energy efficient lightbulbs.

     The Shape of a Girl is an emotionally trying but very rewarding play, with an electrifying performance by Danielle Spilchen. It is not my custom to assign numerical ratings to plays, so I will just use words. Must see.

Money Don’t Grow on Trees (Neverending Highway Productions, SK)

Choose Your Own Adventure. I remember those books. I usually ended up getting eaten by a monster a couple times. I still used to marvel at their complexity, though. But I, along with six billion other people in the world, never imagined that the genre could be transplanted into live theatre. Fortunately, I am privileged above most of those six billion in that I know Graham Kent and have access to his machinations.

     Our homegrown Neverending Highway Productions, which last year tried out a radio drama, is venturing further into the fringes (get it?) of theatrical culture to try out something totally new. And so we have Money Don’t Grow on Trees, a ludicrous crime and caper story about lost love, lost money, and the bank robbery that brings it all together. The play is framed by a teenage girl, Penny, working on a creative writing assignment, but she sometimes needs help from the audience to decide which direction to take the story. The story she crafts is about down-on-his-luck low-life Frankie who conscripts his reformed friend Cid into pulling off one last heist, but it doesn’t take long for things to go off the rails.

     Even removed from the CYOA aspect, the play works well as a raucous comedy. Penny continually intrudes upon the narrative to puzzle over problems and assign characters catchphrases. The dynamic between Penny and her creations is a lovely tongue-and-cheek bit of meta-fiction. Grahame Kent is outstanding in his frantic, off-the-wall Frankie, combining slapstick humour with some Guy Ritchie-esque dark comedy; there is great chemistry between him and his straight man in Morgan Murray. Danielle Roy is a scene-stealer, their industry professional with a suitcase full of sexual tension. She is fun but steely. She has a commanding presence which allows her to bat around her co-stars. Jalisa Gonie as Penny is fun and always keeps the energy up. Then Lauren Younghusband as the ambiguously gendered Terry brings a wicked deadpan delivery to the latter half of the play.

     It is to Money’s credit that the script seems to have had a solid outline before the participatory elements were layered in, rather than relying on the gimmick to prop up everything else. It has a lot of strength as a comedy, and the CYOA element gives it a boost of uniqueness. But since the play committed to that form and made it the focus of its campaign, I have to admit it felt a little anemic. There is only one choice offered to the audience in the entire first half, and that only ends up affecting a single line of dialogue. While I can’t speak confidently based on my single viewing, I am left with the impression that most choices presented to the audience have very little bearing on the development of the plot; and on top of that, there is a tendency to have one option be so outrageous it is impossible for the audience not to pick it. But the play does have four guaranteed possible endings, and I’m confident the three I didn’t see are just as manic and action-packed as the one I did.

     Money Don’t Grow on Trees is a wicked and wacky crime comedy. While its choose-your-own-adventure format could have definitely been more ambitious, the play still stands strong on its own.

Stalled (Watermelon Heart Theatre, SK)

Poetry and bathrooms. Two things that bring unlikely people together. Stalled drops us into a unisex bathroom (*gasp*) at an unnamed seedy bar. Regulars at a weekly poetry night, dropping into the lavatory for a few moments, get tangled up in the intimate bits of each other’s lives, pushing together and pulling apart.

     To glance at this play on paper, one curious thing that stands out is the scope of its cast. Due to the brevity of commode interactions, Stalled relies on a parade of characters moving in and out to keep the action going. With a cast of four, each person onstage does duty as three or four characters. Costumes are minimal, but each character has some sort of detail or accessory to identify them; beyond that it’s down to good old fashioned acting and faith in the audience to keep everything straight. (For the most part it’s easy, though I admit I got turned around a couple times.) The rogues gallery includes a cynical bartender and her easy-going manager, a fracturing husband and wife, a grieving father and son, lesbian best friends, a few insecure romantics, a wounded nymphomaniac, and a predatory academic. As they bump and grind against each other’s lives they take the time to scrawl graffiti on the bathroom mirror, which becomes a poem itself.

     At its heart, Stalled appears to be a love letter to poetry – not surprising given playwright Shanda Stefanson’s regular presence at Lydia’s “Tonight It’s Poetry” (making the timing of this play all the more poignant). But that is hardly sufficient as a summation of the nature of this play. It traces the preposterous origins of poetry, weaving its way through our lives and relationships, bursting out at moments of high emotional intensity. The line scrawled at the end of each brief scene creates an icon, defining the character who wrote it at that particular moment, but shrouded in mystery as soon as the moment passes.

     The production is fairly complex for a fringe show. Two graffiti’d bathroom stalls stand prominently centre stage. It’s an impressive feat both to create those and to move them on and off stage with ease. The sleazy, dilapidated look about them, along with their incongruous sense of sturdiness, set the atmosphere right away. The set doesn’t lack for personality, but it is also strangely impassive, shielding the audience from the sight of sex, death, and everything in between. The interactive graffiti is captured by a projector off stage left, which starts out blank and gradually fills up with poetic scribbles, changing the colour of marker depending on the act of the play. It was a lovely technique (thankfully free of technical glitches) that bounces back the whole theme: we start out with a blank slate, seeing nothing but strangers; over time we get to see their dirty secrets and vulnerable moments, inundated with information, but never quite able to make complete sense of it.

     The cast of four has quite a lot to juggle, doing lightning fast character transitions. It’s tough, but they do well, falling into the erratic pace of the production gracefully. Some of the cast has less acting experience behind them, so there were a few rocky moments where the actor had trouble getting grounded in their character. But they still hit the notes they need to. Alyssa Bennett is enigmatic as ever, playing a more subtle game than the other actors, but that makes her outbursts all the more compelling, in her brief lesbian makeout scene and her bizarre “Preserve your sexy” rant. Isaac Bond is at his best as the suave and slightly cocky manager. He brings a lot of emotion to the part of a depressed teenager, but in the spare few minutes he has to develop the character, there is a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t quite land. Mike de Jong (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not Jared Beattie) has a bit of trouble getting his characters to resonate and ends up overshadowed by his stage partners much of the time; but he does have a good standout performance in his meatiest character, a cardigan-wearing lothario who, by the end, could make the audience burst out laughing without saying a word. Kelly McTaggart was a surprise for me. I have not seen her before but she does a knockout performance as the play’s most mysterious character, an emotionally damaged woman who tries and fails to seek solace in casual sexual encounters. Her final scene is gut-wrenching.

     Stalled manages to keep a lot of balls in the air at once. Its biggest drawback is being constrained to Fringe length; with another 15 or 20 minutes it could do a lot of wonderful things and avoid spiralling its storylines toward their tragic endings too quickly. But as it is, it packs a lot into its 55 minute runtime. The actors turn out at least one great performance each, but more importantly they can all work well together. The threads of people, poetry, and that likeliest of all unlikely meeting places wind together to create a powerful thematic statement that you don’t even realise is there, like graffiti on the wall.

Fringe 2013 - Day 1

And we're back, more or less. This blog hit a crisis a few months ago and never quite recovered. But if anything was going to kick me back into gear, it was going to be reviewing 11 plays in 9 days. Unfortunately, I've had a bit of a time getting my reviews to catch up to the Fringing I've been doing, so I'm coming in under the wire. "Day 1" in this case is actually last Thursday. Day 2 will be up within the hour. Day 3 this afternoon.

And now, without further ado,

Don't Panic (Dibley Theatre, SK)

     Do you notice how whenever someone says not to panic, it's always a situation where you should totally be panicking? Do you notice how when you have to tell someone else not to panic it's almost embarrassing because there's no reason for them to be panicking. Someone panics over something small and we say, "It's not the end of the world." But what if it really is the end of the world? Don't Panic blows this whole idea wide open.

     This inaugural Fringe show by Dibley Theatre Productions (a subsidiary of Amorous Waffles). Takes us to a dystopia. Everyone likes dystopias (except for the people living there, I guess). This particular dystopia happens some 20 years after a devastating war which left much of the world as a blasted wasteland. What remains is the shining Fatherland: an enclosed civilisation run by a seemingly omniscient figure called Father. Here, efficiency is valued above all else, and the society runs in such a way that clockwork would be fined for being too emotionally suggestive. One day, as a man and a woman await the beginning of their productive workdays, and unthinkable tragedy occurs: their bus is late. As they try to grapple with this horrific incident, they find that they must, fearfully and trepidatiously, talk to each other, and the results surprise them.

     Don't Panic starts out as an absurd (perhaps even absurdist) comedy. The first scene depends heavily on getting the point across to the audience what sort of world they have dropped into; it succeeds by the subtleties of the script and the expressions of its stars, Danielle Roy and Rohan Keenan. Talk of "collateral zones" and "The Department of Data" help to establish the kind of ruthlessly bureaucratic society it is, while the uneasy first words between the man and the woman make it clear just how staid and isolated they've become. Roy's look of terror and confusion when Keenan offers a meek "hello" sets the stage for everything that follows. The set is fairly involved for a Fringe show: bench, bus stop, emergency phone, and garbage can, all rigid and uniform, stamped with department names. The setpieces represent the dull immovability of the society, which becomes more pronounced as the characters become more active. Much of the humour in the early parts come from the moments between lines, when the two stars fumble around human interaction like a five-year-old trying to tie shoelaces.

     The script carries a tradition of sketch comedy, drawing from Monty Python, and a bit of classic SNL. The wacky comedy pulls some sharp satire of the insecurities of modern culture. We might laugh at the panic that sets in on our characters when the bus doesn't show up, but anyone who has had their internet go down can surely relate.

     The play reaches the point where a comedy sketch would reasonably wind down, but then it keeps going. The comedy ramps up as the characters move from panic to desperation to hopelessness, but then it turns darker, the satire graver. We delve further into the truth of this society. As the man and woman shed their fastidious outer layers, they are revealed to be tragic and vulnerable. Instead of laughing at the absurdity of their situation we eventually turn inward and start considering their questions for ourselves, like whether freedom from worry is worth sacrificing freedom of choice. Seeing their cogs break down raises the question of what cogs we trust completely in our regular lives.

     As with any two-hander, the success of the play is contingent on the chemistry of its two actors. Keenan is the slightly bumbling but good-hearted archivist who carries around a few subversive thoughts in his head that he has never had the chance to share before now. Roy is the shrewd and firm risk analyst with unyielding faith in the system until it breaks in front of her. The two grow, transform, entwine, and fracture repeatedly throughout the play. They connect impeccably, bouncing off each other with incredible energy. The script is almost as demanding as the Fatherland, requiring spot-on comedic timing and profound emotional availability. The actors make good with both. Keenan spends most of his stage time being vulnerable, always staying present with his stage partner. Roy steals the final scene with a performance that brings the audience to tears.

     And I can't forget about the music. From the oppressive semi-futurist pseudo-Jazz that plays over the first couple scenes (because it's Father's favourite song) to the Cold War retro songs by the Inkspots (which will be familiar to any Fallout fans in the audience), it creates an off-balanced feeling of yearning for a bygone era that is only getting further away.

     There are a lot of elements that make Don't Panic work. Just like in the Fatherland, if any of them had failed, it would have been a disaster, but none of them did. It was lively, hilarious, touching, and philosophical. If that's reason to panic, then go right ahead.

     Six out of five stars. WHAT NOW, CHARLTON?

   

Into the Woods

If you go into the woods today, you're in for a big surprise.

A few years after the success of Assassins, Greystone Theatre continues its love affair with Stephen Sondheim with this dazzling production of Into the Woods. But before I get into discussing the show, I have to mention how unprecedented its success has been. Selling out tickets a week before opening has never happened as long as I have been around this campus, and not, I'm told, since long before that. The flurry of ticket sales caught me so by surprise that I was not able to get tickets for both shows, so I will not get the chance to see the alternate cast. I regret this deeply, and I apologise to those actors I've missed.

Back to the show: Into the Woods is about a group of teenagers who embark on a fun-filled weekend in the wilderness, but little do they know their actions are being secretly manipulated by a clandestine agency whose mission is to.... Sorry. Got my note cards messed up.

Into the Woods is a piece of musical theatre based on a book by James Lapine and adapted by Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim. The story is a mash-up of several fairy tales, predominantly "Cinderella", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Rapunzel", and "Jack & the Beanstalk". These tales all swirl around each other, with the focal point of the play being a separate story involving a baker and his wife trying to lift a curse that prevents them from having children. An eccentric witch sends them on a fetch quest to retrieve four items, and in doing so come in contact with each of the four fairy tales. The first act progresses in this vein until each story gets its customary happy ending. But after intermission things take a bit of a turn.

The play is shaped by its music, and vice versa. There is little in the way of show-stopping numbers, but rather the music wraps tightly around the narrative. The two flow into each other so that there is never a moment of noticeable transition. For the music itself, it is a bit like soaking in a warm bath with a rather friendly python. The songs are rich and deep; they wash over you with a sense of warmth and comfort, but it also breaks into long sections of staccato rhythms and quick rhymes, occasionally pulsating with sustained notes so it gives the impression that the music is alive, slithering around us, coiling tightly and then letting go. It can become frenetic, with interludes that see all the characters cross rapidly across the stage one or two at a time, each one shouting out a single line and disappearing; it produces a dizzying effect that continues to build upon itself, spiralling upward like a great whirlwind, then sending us crashing back down.

This production has been helmed by Julia Jamison, who also directed 2010's Assassins. The production she pulls together is both grandiose and intimate. Into the Woods captures the orality central to the fairy tale culture and blends it with the visual spectacle. As with any musical, the story is told on three levels: spoken word, physicality, and music, and these levels have to operate around the movements of a lot of people. Kudos to those performers who were already triple-threats when rehearsal began, there were many music students without acting experience, and many drama students without music experience. In Jamison's hands the students were moulded, as the squishy bits of clay they are, into a solid ensemble who could carry the different elements in stride.

Jenna Maren's set design creates a very dark and forbidding depiction of the forest, savage and dangerous, but also magical. The thick, gnarled trees growing on either side of the stage are at first terrifying, but also evince a trace of wisdom and ancient power. Other set pieces may be moved off and on, but are generally kept at the centre of the stage, to give a sense of the tremendous strength of the forest. Human society is kept small, surrounded on all sides by the savage wilderness, and the many entrances and exits on the stage compound the labyrinthian feel of the woods. But as time goes on, as characters move in and out, they begin to enmesh themselves with the forest and create a sense of unity.

Jamison pulls together these sundry elements to create a show remarkably sparse in stops and starts. This didn't really hit me until I was asked what my favourite song was, and I realised how difficult it was for me to pick one. Aside from the darkly comical centrepiece "Agony" Into the Woods did not feel much like a collection of songs. Rather it seemed to have a continuous progression that occasionally twisted and turned back on itself but never felt like it was dividing itself into segments. Music and drama intertwine very naturally so the whole experience builds the same story. The same rule applies to the actors. With the many — and, at times, frantic — entrances and exits, the show maintains a fluid narrative, while also extending to us the sensation of being, like the characters, lost in the woods, uncertain of what we would see next.

The cast of characters is vast, and works in a harmonious rhythm. The principal actors (in the show I witnessed) all bring different energies but collaborate into an effective ensemble. Rohan Keenan is a touching Baker, with a similar sort of roiling intensity that he had in All My Sons, where it seems he wants to lash out in anger but doesn't understand where or how. In contrast Miranda Hughes is his devoted wife, annoyed at her husband's inept bravado, but driven and compassionate. Greystone Theatre mainstay Anna Seibel tackles Cinderella, giving the character less of a sugar&spice fairy tale attitude and more of a deep sense of yearning, as a woman who is struggling to learn what it means to be her own person. Robert Grier is a simple and loveable Jack, with a doe-eyed sense of innocence but also unerring determination. He adds his own comic touch with the exuberant progress reports on his adventures offstage. Joanna Munholland, after two years of patiently saying very little in her Greystone stage credits, shines in her central role as Little Red Riding Hood. She is flighty and bouncy in her movements, and she radiates a child-like curiosity. In the plays darker moments, she accesses a soft, fearful side, but nevertheless charges ahead with the grim determination of Arya Stark.

Chris Donlevy and Connor Brousseau, as our two dashing princes, steal the spotlight with their show-stopping number "Agony" (so I lied when I said there were no show-stopping numbers), a song which plays to a macho competition and merciless fairy tale satire. Their stern poise somehow plays earnestly while simultaneously parodying themselves. Donlevy plays double duty between Prince Charming and the Wolf, occupying both roles with tremendous gravitas, while turning some excellent moments of humour along the way. Torien Cafferata is the dapper narrator, who floats on and off the stage to order characters about. He is rigid and professorial, which adds to the humour of his sudden vulnerability when he is confronted by his own characters. Vernon Boldick and Colin Gibbings both give hilarious and energetic performances as Red Riding Hood's grandmother and the Mystery Man, respectively. There was generally great cohesion by all the cast, too numerous to mention individually. Michelle Todd was a curious addition as a professional actress in the otherwise student cast. She has a thunderous presence as the Witch, both eye-catching and heart-breaking. And of course, I'm sure all the actors I didn't see were terrific as well.

Fuelling the actors onstage was the live band, led by musical director Debra Buck. They operated behind a translucent scrim toward the back of the stage, where their music could waft outwards as if generated by the wood sprites. The small orchestra (and this is where the music students chastise me for misusing the word orchestra) kept the show brimming with vitality.

All told, this is a show where everything works. While it doesn't have the same edgy panache as Assassins, Into the Woods tells a remarkably complex story in a remarkably simple way (or perhaps vice versa). It takes something very familiar, then spins it around a bunch of times and paints it a crazy colour with a name like "aqua sunset". It is charming, energetic, and heartfelt, combining a pre-9/11 sense of wonder with a post-9/11 sense of disillusionment. Somewhere in the spiralling miasma of music and rhythm, person and place, madness and fantasy, you will land on a safe and inviting path ... into the woods.

The Science of Disconnection

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.

There were three words in particular that intrigued me about The Science of Disconnection months before I had the chance to see it: "very limited seating". What could be the reason for such a thing? What was happening to the Refinery's performing space that would restrict the audience size so much? I have to admit I was hoping to walk in there and find a working physics laboratory set up in the theatre (complete with Jacob's Ladder and Tesla Coil). But no, instead I was greeted by a quaint little tea room, blocked off by paper screens, and the intimate audience of 32 filed in and formed a circle around the edge. Almost like a story circle.

The play, penned by Canadian playwright David Belke, recounts the story of Austrian-born Jewish physicist Lise Meitner, celebrated as the "German Marie Curie" (according to Albert Einstein) and whose work was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission. We see her early days in Berlin, struggling for acceptance among the exclusively male intelligencia, her long-standing partnership with chemist Otto Hahn, her exodus from Germany in the shadow of the impending Holocaust, her secret labour to discover one of the most significant scientific advances in human history, and the succeeding lack of acknowledgement for it. The photograph of Meitner on the playbill shows her in the laboratory, stern, humourless, and darkly beautiful. Her eyes are heavy, loaded with a spinning cosm of knowledge, and their gaze pierces out through the picture, as if a challenge to anyone who looks at it, to tell them that her place is there and she will not be moved.

Taking on the role of Meitner is the charming, talented, starred-in-Velocity-and-is-therefore-better-than-other-people Jamie Lee Shebelski. She marches timidly out on stage (if one can indeed march timidly) armed with a small leather suitcase and a memory of old Berlin. She carries the one-woman show with grace and reserve. Other solo shows might require the actor to act out with utmost passion, bouncing to and fro around the stage, but this one required a lot of quiet ponderance and subtle anguish, which I think is more difficult to convey. She holds the audience's attention through gesture and stillness, enthusiasm and despair. The only slight waver was that some of her crosses to signify time transitions could have used more fluidity. Her performance is brave in both its intimacy and its sense of defiance. She is alone on the stage, just as Lise Meitner was in life, so closely surrounded by peers but not really among them.

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.

This is a memory play. Meitner does not simply give an account of her life, straightforward from one end to the other, but she rather flits around, unstuck in time and space, following the ebb and flow of a receding memory. In amongst the regular linear story, we return frequently to two focal points. The first is a café in Berlin, 1907, where her partnership with Otto Hahn began, although she has trouble capturing the exact details of the nebulous memory. The second is on a train fleeing Germany in 1938, where the stark details are all too clear and every time she revisits it she risks being trapped there, that time will rewrite itself and she will not escape. These two focal points capture both her romantic side and the grim nature of her reality.

The director's helm was manned by Will Brooks. I feel a bit of sympathy toward directors of solo shows, since their work is inevitably more invisible than with most other plays. I can't really speculate where his direction begins and ends with regards to Jamie Lee's performance, but from the blog I know that he pulled multiple duty as producer, publicist, and lighting and set designer. The stage aesthetic served the play very well with its unique sense of confinement making the audience part of Meitner's inner circle. A model of an atom sketched on the stage floor in what looks like charcoal stretches out to embrace the audience, while leaving Shebelski, for most of her stage time, fixed at the nucleus; the subtle trick reinforced Meitner's centrality, both to her own story and science in general, as well as makes a point the art of solo theatre, where one singular performer must have the gravitas to keep the audience from flitting away. The paper screens were used, with the help of some simple lighting effects, to display images throughout the play; they were basic and symbolic, like what you might find drawn on a blackboard. The audience plays three roles: Meitner's confidants, her students, and complicit with her judgemental peers. Establishing this balance requires the careful harmonisation of a lot of simple elements, and Brooks pulls it off.

Meitner was a strong woman who committed herself body and soul to her craft. Despite the great divide between the fine arts and nuclear physics, this is an actor's play in that it involves someone who struggled long and hard to do great work even among minimal recognition. At one point she remarks on her struggle, saying, "First it was [being a woman], then it was the ancestry of my grandparents: there will always be a reason to exclude me." While this may show a detachment from the realities of the Holocaust, it also develops a narrative of exclusion and mistreatment. Meitner had everything stacked against but somehow succeeded (she was the first woman ever admitted to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for science). Therefore, The Science of Disconnection is both a harsh examination of her marginalisation and a triumphant celebration of the fact that her story is being told. Shebelski captures this duality nowhere better than when she says, "The truth wants to be discovered." Shebelski grapples with Meitner's troubled mind, someone who can't help but see human interaction in atomic terms, as a series of connections and disconnections. Just as Meitner examined the interactions of the universe's smallest particles to unlock its largest secrets, Shebelski takes those small interactions and creates a profound image (and, thankfully, she does not end the play by staring dramatically at the audience and saying, "This is the science of disconnection.")

I mentioned a blog earlier. You can look back over the production of this play by visiting this blog at http://www.thescienceofdisconnection.com . The blog's content and existence are indicative of a greater trend with this play, that being that it's larger than itself. Putting on this production was an act of bravery by the RiverCity Ensemble Cooperative, and I say that mainly because the limited seating means a tremendous cut to potential revenues. So this was purely put on "for love of the game" as it were. Knowing all this I would hate to say anything bad about the play, so it's a good thing I don't have to. The Science of Disconnection is a remarkable piece of theatre showcasing human interaction's capacity for great creation and destruction, as well as the interplay between a single human narrative and the mysteries of the universe. I could go on for a lot longer, but I think I'll just trail off with Meitner's own words:

The evidence is clear. The proof is certain. The math is sound.

Comfort

I love intimate theatre. It is something that the Saskatoon drama scene has gotten very good at, between the Refinery, the Backstage Stage, and the Emrys Jones; so when I heard about this play going on in the basement of the Two Twenty, I had to be there.

For those of you who have been to the Two Twenty den, you know that it is an unassuming room with walls of varnished plywood, blandly rectangular and not suitable for any event too large or raucous. Yet it is comforting, with a cozy, homey feeling, and thus well suited to a play called Comfort. The stage was set up almost in a round, but not quite: it was where it was, while the audience nestled in wherever they could, seating areas shooting off at odd angles wherever there was space, packed so closely inward that on more than one occasion I had to consciously pull my feet inward to avoid tripping Heather Morrison and making the experience a bit too real. While we sat there on our rickety folding chairs in this atypical space, I couldn't help but think of those bowler-hatted individuals in the early nickelodea, crowding around the moving picture, terrified by the realness of what they saw. Like them, I too had a staggeringly real experience watching Comfort.

This play, produced by Know Tomorrow Theatre, comes from the mind of Gordon Portman, recent SPC dramaturg. It is about the inception and dissolution of a marriage, played in reverse order. Our two characters, Mike (Matthew Burgess) and Sara (Heather Morrison), begin the play on the morning after a torrid farewell, in the moments before Sara walks out the door, presumably forever. The second act takes us back to the night of drunken revelry that brought the two together in the first place. Woven in among these scenes are the threads of their painful backstories, both tragic but wildly different, which bind them together but also send them hurtling toward the point at which they can no longer coexist.

As with any intimate, relationship-based play, its success falls upon its two actors. Matt Burgess checks his Velocity privilege* at the door and delivers a remarkable, grounded performance. He has the job of being the play's anchor, remaining on stage for the entire duration while Morrison's entrances announce a scene transition. The character of Mike is at the most understated I've ever seen Burgess, morose and quietly bitter. He brilliantly toes the line of obsession. The sense of loss and anger he evinces at Sara's departure in the first half of the play is heart-breaking, but also laced with something darker; there is an aggressive sense of ownership lurking deep beneath his heartache. This becomes clearer later on when we see the broken position he was in at their first meeting, and how he has only achieved a sense of self-worth through her. Mike is emotionally distorted and can only find stability through a grand web of seemingly arbitrary routines and external constructs, and when he is forced to choose between Sara and everything else, these constructs and doomed to failure. Burgess plays at a variety of levels, running both hot and cold. He commands the stage in his moments of passion, but is at his strongest in the periods of quiet, where his internal tumult seeps out in small expressions.

Heather Morrison is more enchanting than I've ever seen her. I think the beauty is how well she plays on opposite ends of the spectrum. She has demonstrated her ability to tackle grim and heavy subject matter in plays like Dying City and East of Berlin, but in my experience I haven't caught much of her playful side onstage. In the early part of the play, Sara is sombre and implacable, resigned to the end of their relationship while Mike is still reeling through emotions. But tenderness and affection still bleed through. Her stage presence becomes more commanding in the second scene, where she spends most of her time staggering around while quite drunk. In the face of Burgess's reserve and timidity, Morrison is bold, vibrant, and fun; not to mention sexy. She fearlessly embodies the physicality of the role, keeping loose and limber, opposed to the stolidity she shows in the first scene. She takes in everything around her and digests her thoughts, but still delivers the performance as uninhibited and impulsive. Even in her smaller moments, she has complete control of the atmosphere. And did I mention sexy?

Portman's script is quite clean, but a little bit messy. The dialogue is elevated, with a poetic cadence. The exchanges flow smoothly, without those unfortunate bumps that happen in regular conversation. The profundity of the everyday moment is magnified, and despite the physical immediacy of the set, the dialogue provides a layer of separation between the actors and the audience, which helps to keep the experience balanced. But even though the structure of the language is so precisely trimmed, the words still drip with raw emotion. If I were to pick a complaint, however, it is that the elevation of the dialogue can at times run away from the rest of the play. Certain lines are loaded with so much poetic finesse that they shake off the emotional reality, and there is an apparent shift from dialogue that comes from the characters to dialogue that comes from the author.

Comfort is a nebulous concept. And Comfort explores all the ways in which we deceive ourselves into feeling comfortable from one day to the next, as well as those rare moments of genuine comfort that happen upon us unexpectedly. It is a difficult play to watch at times; I'm sure anyone can relate in some capacity to the dissolution of the relationship or the emotional fragility of the characters. It is a visceral experience, and despite the artistry of the dialogue, there is nothing dulling the effect of Mike and Sara's anguish. It is a beautiful and enchanting experience, but be prepared to feel...


Discomfort.


Thank you and good night.


*By which I mean, people involved with Velocity have a free pass to do anything ever.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

At some point as we venture down the long and winding road of theatre criticism, we inevitably approach the question of "What is a play?" Then, just as quickly, we grab another drink and forget about it. But then, maybe, we find ourselves in a situation where we can't run away from the question, and we have to consider what it actually means to be an audience member.

This is the question I grappled with when I attended White Rabbit, Red Rabbit on Saturday night. I am not certain  that what I saw was a play; it felt more like an open dialogue across space and time (on the other hand, perhaps that's precisely what a play is). In any case, whatever it was, I am glad I saw it.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, is the product of Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. I think it is important to note that the script has not been translated. It was written in English: a language with which Nassim admits to having some difficulty. It seems, therefore, that the play was always intended for an international audience, that it was a way of reaching out beyond the borders of the country that he, himself, could not leave.

At this point, I would typically write a summary of the play's plot. But in this case I can't. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't. This is not a play that tells a story from one point to another. As I said, it may not be a play at all. Most plays have directors, with casts, and effects, and rehearsal processes. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has one actor on a stage, with one script, sealed inside a manila envelope. Our actor opens the envelope and begins reading from the script for the first time. This much I knew about the play going into it, and I wondered what it would be like to sit through a cold-reading of a script. But as it turned out, this was not at all like an actor doing a cold-reading of a script.

The actor was not so much performing the script as he was talking to it. The script was, itself, a character in the play. And I don't mean the writer, though he was a character as well, although in a different way. The writer and the script both engaged with the actor on different levels; the actor then engaged with the audience, as an intermediary between them and either the script or the author (and sometimes just as himself). The actor is a prisoner of sorts. He is bound to do whatever the script tells him. Although no one there is actually forcing him to continue on, the words on the page prove inviolable, and the actor is at their mercy. This sense of utter submission is important, because at the centre of the stage are two glasses of water; one of them is poisoned; at the end of the night, the actor must drink from one of them.

On each of the three nights, a different actor took the stage: Pamela Haig Bartley, Joshua Beaudry, and Raymon Montalbetti. A dedicated reviewer would have gone to see each performance to get a fair and balanced grasp on the play, but as it was, I was only able to attend the closing night. Montalbetti brought an erratic kind of energy to the experience, at once quick at vibrant, then instantaneously transforming to so slow and sombre that time pauses on a single breath. He began with a preface to his performance, which was not so much an introduction as it was an intimate peek into his own process, calming the swirling emotions in the moments before he embarked on a completely unknown adventure. He absorbed all of his spatial relationships until finally, with a heavy breath, he could begin reading.

It was a bizarre experience when the play began, because I didn't really understand what the words on the page were doing. But it became clear soon enough the nature of this conversation taking place. I was not being invited to watch a play; I was being forced to bear witness to an unprecedented sequence of actions, spiralling toward a terrible end.

For both actors and audience members, we are always aware, on one level or another, that we are watching a play. I knew, of course, that Mr. Montalbetti was not really going to be poisoned in the moments before curtain. But that did not stop a culture of fear spreading as the play went on. Soleimanpour uses our trust in the illusory nature of theatre against us. There is a crawling, lingering sense of dread that the faith we place in the divide between theatre and reality will betray us, that those unseen figures producing the play may not have everyone's best interests at heart, that all of those things we don't believe will hurt us may turn in an instant, and we will not know what's coming.

As it turns out, none of the actors participating in the play wound up dead. So that's good news. But Soleimanpour's point has been made: our security only persists insofar as select people continue to operate in a way that protects us, as long as our safety does not stand in the way of their own. Because the most unsettling aspect of the play was how all of us in the audience were trapped there as spectators, unable or unwilling to interfere in the events onstage, even knowing that Montalbetti was not fully in control of his own performance. No matter what happened, all we could do was watch.

And now, I suppose, before I conclude this review, I should address the play's title. It calls back an old social experiment with a group of hungry rabbits kept locked in a cage. There is one carrot; the rabbit that gets the carrot is painted red. The white rabbits, furious at this imbalance in power, will attack the red rabbit in retribution. When this experimented is repeated enough, the carrot becomes irrelevant; regardless of whether there are carrots for everyone or no carrots at all, the red rabbit will always find itself the victim of the warren's rage.

What does this mean for us, for us civilised humans? I guess that's what White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was all about.

We the Artists, I the Critic

And we're back.

It's been a long slump, but I will be back in reviewing mode tonight with a new piece on Live Five's Girls Girls Girls. Then it will be time for me to revisit my draft of A History of Breathing which I never quite finished. I never really got the hang of this blogging thing, but I shall keep pressing onward for the time being.

I had the pleasure of being part of We the Artists last night, our second annual U of S Fine Arts cooperative gala. Last year I went  in an observational capacity to do an article for The Sheaf. This year I got the position of contributor (a bit of a stealth move on my part, given that I am no longer a student) by co-writing a sketch with my good friend "Emperor" Torien Cafferata.

There was a tremendous amount of talent on display from the students of our fine arts departments: drama, music, visual arts. I did not have a lot of time to peruse the artworks on display, but I did see some striking imagination. The dramatic and musical performances which ran the whole night were wonderful, though unfortunately they had to compete against the continuous murmur of the crowd. It's a bit disconcerting for someone to perform in an atmosphere such as this when you are used to a darkened theatre with an audience in rapt attention. The free-flow between the seating in front of the stage and the laid-back gala atmosphere of the gallery created a lot of friction that left some acts sadly under-appreciated. Plus, the generally terrible acoustics left even devoted spectators with an uphill struggle to take in the magic.

Difficulties notwithstanding, it was a good night. And the immense turnout of guests made me think that fine arts at U of S, besot with difficulties as they are, still have the power to move people. None of our university's senior administrators made an appearance, of course, but no matter. We will press on. I extend my thanks to those who made the night happen, including my former drama compatriots Toryn Adams and Chris Donlevy, and fellow Sheafie Samantha Braun.

The whole night made me think about what I'm doing here, in this blog. It seems to come back to the same principle. The arts are all around us. Even if I can't do anything else for them right now, I can at least talk about them, because they are, after all, worth talking about.