Thomas Buan in Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh?, Clevername Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? (Stage 18, FOH PRO Stage, Grindstone Venues)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title alone of this play from Clevername Theatre of Minneapolis stops you in your tracks, with its sheer head-on bravado and disaster potential.

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What can this be? A parody of Edward Albee’s lacerating ‘60s relationship drama that rocked the post-war theatre world? A joke perhaps a couple of notches too goofy? No, and no. Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? might be the most surprising show at the Fringe, and one of the most memorably clever.

Alexander Gerchak’s play isn’t a spoof. Amazing as this sounds, it is actually a version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — with the insights, the one-upmanship, the relationship exfoliation, the humiliation gamesmanship that make the Albee a shattering experience.

Stephanie Johnson and Thomas Buan in Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh? Clevername Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Winnie (Thomas Buan) and Piglet (Stephanie Johnson) return home from a Hundred Acre Wood party, in warring mode. She’s invited a younger new couple, the upwardly mobile Christopher (Nick Hill) and brittle Hunny (Victoria Jones) over for more (and more) drinks. And the sniping and undercutting begin, along with the warning “not to talk about the Boy.”

Winnie, “a bear of very little brain” as his partner is fond of pointing out, is a writer of stories that have long since ceased to impress her. In his fuzzy brown cardigan, he has the slightly worn air of someone who’s taken his share of slings and arrows. And Piglet, flirtatious and hostile in equal measure, is dishing them out, along with condensed milk cocktails (the hard stuff). “Don’t mind the old fuzzball,” she cheerily advises the guests, who are finding the bickering awkward.

And so the ritual humiliation begins. “A real man is made of more than stuffing.” Let’s play Pork the Pig, Pooh suggests. Or Pin The Tail On The Donkey.

If you know the Albee play, you’ll be fascinated to see how this version is fashioned in parallel to the A.A. Milne stories, and feels dangerous in an Albee way. If you don’t, you’ll appreciate the artful way it takes us to insights about the famous Pooh stories, and “the Boy,” Christopher Robin, who will get sent off to elementary school in another dimension than the Hundred Acre Wood. If the Albee is about the high cost of life-sustaining illusions, the version in the Hundred Acre Wood is, in its own original way, a play about the end of childhood.

Did I expect to laugh, and be moved? Nope. But both happened. And I’m still thinking about it.