The Tudor period: heads of state in wigs. 2 Queens & A Joker: A Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Cheryl Jameson, Vance Avery, Madelaine Knight in 2 Queens & A Joker. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2 Queens & A Joker (Stage 17, The Roxy on Gateway)

It’s been a while (OK, a decade) since Guys in Disguise, those flamboyant cultural historians, applied themselves to the Tudor period, famous for its strong women and its wigs. It’s perfect for them. As they point out in the billing for 2 Queens & A Joker, “we are a company who know a thing or two about Queens.”

At the centre of the play by Trevor Schmidt, Nick Green and Darrin Hagen — a riotous never-say-when concoction of rhyming couplets, coupling puns and dirty double-entendres — is the storied enmity between Elizabeth I (the virgin queen) and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots (the slut queen). It’s narrated by beleaguered go-between Don Chute the Messenger who somehow got written out of history.

In the original production the warring queens were played (with certain reverential drag echoes of Bette and Joan) by Schmidt himself and Nick Green. And Don Chute the Messenger by a woman, Maralyn Ryan. With this new Schmidt production Guys in Disguise salutes the age of (more) attention to gender parity. This time, in a kind of double-reverse drag,  the upstaging queens are played by women — Madelaine Knight as snarly Good Queen Bess and Cheryl Jameson as her more languid and sultry cousin Mary. They both deliver funny, flamboyant haute-camp drag queenly performances.

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Amusingly Knight opts for a nasal cracker-jack-box vocal delivery, staccato but whiney, that locates Bess the I somewhere between Bette’s place, Jersey, and the south Bronx. She’s easily bored, whatevaaah!, with a short attention span.  When she finally gets crowned (“patience is a virgin”), she does feel a certain obligation to say something memorable. “Awesome! Rule Britannia!” 

Jameson, who flings herself into sexy diagonals, has a low come-hither prom queen purr — and an air of smirky, unfazable self-regard. “Where is Scotland anyhow?”  She periodically reads from her poetic oeuvre: “My Men My Lovers Part 3. A poem by Mary Stuart.”

Ah, and there’s Vance Avery in a well-cut dinner jacket and silver Lothario ‘do that seems to propel him forward toward the microphone, a bit like Tony Bennet at Top of the Rock.  

It’s a (high)camp-out in the Renaissance. The actors, and the costumes, are fun to watch.  Relax and enjoy the inebriating excess, a veritable triple-martini of a show. And there’s no spot-quiz next period.  

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The appropriation dance: Whiteface. A Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Lady Vanessa Cardona and Todd Houseman in Whiteface. Photo supplied.

Whiteface (Stage 4, Academy at King Edward)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Is there a way out? Does anybody know a way out?” The masked figures trapped onstage are increasingly frantic. No suggestions are forthcoming.

Masks are the chief theatrical device, and the powerful prevailing metaphor, of Whiteface. It’s a vivid and scathing exploration of cultural identity and its appropriation created by, and starring, Todd Houseman and Lady Vanessa Cardona. 

At the back of the stage is a row of hollow-eyed masks on spikes, some scarred, some grotesque, some decoratively framed with feathers or hair — and all of them white-faced. And, despite our self-consoling talk of multi-cultural inclusivity, reconciliation, and healing, that’s how it is in our world, Whiteface tells us.

It’s a stinging rebuttal of our complacent self-assurance that we’ve entered a brave new post-colonial world. As the show reveals, in its highly charged movement sequences, masks have a kind of two-way power, and high price tag for those who wear them. The physical dynamic of Whiteface is the compulsion to put put them on — to find an acceptable “white-ified” version of self — and the wrenching struggle to remove them.

Both Houseman and Lady Vanessa are inventive and powerful dancers (assisted by a striking soundscore), and the scenes of wrestling with masks — and choreography of appropriation — are the heart of the piece. And when the masks, layers of them at times, are finally peeled off, the faces of the performers themselves (House is Indigenous, Cardona is a Colombian refugee), are painted white.

Whiteface. Photo supplied.

The dance sequences are interwoven with satirical scenes that target white attitudes — for their self-consoling jargon and patronizing smugness, their insatiable appetite to claim ownership.  “You are so brown…. I love your skin…. I wish I had your complexion. If we had children they’d be SO cute!”

The white refrain: “Are you hungry? Starving!”

The success of these is more variable. Some nail that cadence in a recognizable, and hence wincingly funny, way (like the smart, bantering argument about cultural appreciation vs. appropriation); some are near-misses and could use a tune-up.

It’s not, nor was it intended to be, a subtle show.  The strong suit of Whiteface is its theatricality in physicalizing a tragedy that has polished its contours and changed make-up, so to speak, but continues to unfold. A gutsy and gut-wrenching show that cuts to the chase. 

  

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Experiment with this one: For Science! A guest Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Lesiak in For Science!. Photo supplied.

For Science! (Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre)

There’s pretty big fun in this big science show via playwright Christine Lesiak.

As we walk in, with dance-mix classics on the box (there is a link near the joy-induced finale of the show), the lab-coated Professor (Lesiak) and her Lab Assistant (Anna Pratch) are perusing the audience, carefully taking notes.

In due time, audience members rush to the stage to assist the two with their research. Basically, we’re talking about updated (not so-) Stupid Human Pet Tricks vignettes as eager (!) patrons perform their assigned duties.

You’ve got your demonstration of the Destructive Explosive Reflex, as a small volunteer set on a red disk blows up a yellow balloon with a bicycle pump. Or say, the Tactile Dilemma Disposition, as another patron does a number on a sheet of bubblewrap. And many, many others.

Perhaps a few too many, before multiple folks rush down to perform music on found objects via backscreen visual prompts – much like the (serious) Robert Minden Ensemble or many casts of Stomp! (sans prompts) used to do. It’s a hoot to watch it happen.

It seemed as if the large opening night crowd might have been packed with friends, given the zeal, intensity and skill (and non-stop laffs) of many of the lab participants. That said, Lesiak – who is not only a winning clown but an actual physicist – has enlivened the scientific method considerably. My research indicates you’ll like it.

– Alan Kellogg

 

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Shopping at Barbra’s place: Buyer & Cellar. A Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Gregory Caswell in Buyer and Cellar. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Buyer & Cellar, Stage 10 (Acacia Hall)

It can’t possibly be true. And yet it is.

Yes, Barbra Streisand, mega-star celebrity and über-shopper, does have an entire mall in her basement. That’s the bizarre, open-for-satire, real-life proposition of this funny, whimsical fantasy spun from preposterous truth.

You can see the documentary evidence with your own two eyes in the hard-cover tome that Alex More (the puckishly charming Gregory Caswell) is waving at us, gleefully, at the outset of Jonathan Tolins’s Off-Broadway solo hit Buyer & Cellar. I checked. On amazon.ca you can snap up My Passion For Design, Barbra’s 2010 coffee table ode to her own exquisite taste (published by Viking) for as little as $54.26, with more deluxe editions at $139.06 (“only 1 left in stock – order soon”).

“Remember, this the part that’s real!” says Alex of the subterranean array of quaint faux-19th century shops under Barbra’s vast Malibu estate where she keeps her stuff: a tribute to  “decades of fame, fortune, and unbridled acquisition.”

The not-real part, extrapolated in witty fashion, is that even if it has but a sole customer (“the lady of the house”), a pretend mall cries out for a pretend sales clerk. Alex, our narrator, is the out-of-work gay L.A. actor, who lands a job minding the stores. And the fun of Buyer & Cellar is the seductive way Alex draws us into his incremental encounters with celebrity stardom — from play-acting with “Sadie” (as his employer wants to be called at first) to the illusion of friendship.    

In Barbara Mah’s production, Caswell is impressively dexterous as Alex who, like the play he’s in, develops a certain unexpected sympathy for his multi-talented imperious celebrity employer, despite her grotesque consumption habits. As for Barbra’s secret dream to play Mama Rose, let’s just not go there. He conjures a gallery of characters, notably his choleric failed-screenwriter boyfriend Barry, who offers a withering running commentary on everything Streisand, including her legion of gay disciples. 

And as for the grande dame herself, Caswell wisely doesn’t go where too many have gone before: she’s not an impersonation, just a husky voice with some New Yawk in the accent.

There’s a sadder but wiser tone that filters through the acid hilarity in this odd, light piece, and Caswell doesn’t shortchange it. Our relationship with celebrity is a queasy one, and Buyer & Cellar is smart about that. Lightweight, and something more. 

(As seen at a preview)

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The trouper, the angel, and the mantra: the show must go on!

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Linda Grass, Sue Huff in The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If there ever was a dramatic testimonial to theatre as a collaborative art form, in the grand odds-against “show must go on” tradition, it’s got to be the back story of The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, premiering against all probability at the Fringe Friday (Stage 1 (Old Strathcona Public Library). Catastrophe, suspense, resourcefulness, and generosity are all involved. Also, painkillers.

The play, by David Cheoros and Linda Wood Edwards — of MAA & PAA Theatre and Northern Sabbatical Productions respectively — reimagines a fascinating piece of our history. In Big Valley, AB, 1921, an entrpreneurial madame (Sue Huff) starts a brothel. An upright Christian woman (Linda Grass) runs a local boarding house. And, fictionalized by the play, the former  strikes up an unlikely friendship with the latter.  The brothel burned to the ground on Dec. 26, 1921 and although no charges were laid, the speculation is that townspeople were responsible.

Which brings us to the terrible events of the beginning of August 2018 when Huff developed a scary mysterious ailment, with paralyzing instant-rheumatoid arthritis-type symptoms, and was rushed to Emergency. This crisis was discovered to be Reiter’s Syndrome, a rare condition which most people have never even heard of. And, as Huff says, “for a week I was completely incapacitated, on heavy pain meds and anti inflammatories, and feeling worse by the day. Although the cast and crew were amazing and supportive (rewrites, adjustments, even working out alternate blocking where I never leave a chair)…I was really wondering if I could do the show.” 

Sweethearts of the 49th by Andrea House, Stardust Players. Photo supplied.

Enter Andrea House. She’s the strikingly multi-talented actor/ playwright/ singer-songwriter who created Sweethearts of the 49th, premiering at the Fringe (Stage 39, CKUA Performance Space), with House’s daughter Etta in the cast. And House is also in the cast of The Soldier’s Tale, the adventurous Alberta premiere of the multi-disciplinary collaboration between C.F. Ramuz and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. And she’s also a gifted (and very busy) acupuncturist.

Linda Grass and Sue Huff in The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921. Photo supplied.

“And she does house calls!” says Huff. “In between her own Fringe rehearsals, a full-time job and kids, she found time to come to my house and suss out the mess I was in! In addition to providing  treatment, she  also pinpointed that the underlying gastro infection which triggered the syndrome was still active. She confirmed my hunch that many of the side effects I was experiencing were due to the opioids and basically turned the whole boat around for me…. Andrea was able to do what no one else has: sort through the myriad of symptoms and find the epicentre. She was also able to restore my faith that I will get better (Reiter’s Syndrome can take up to a year to resolve completely).”

House told her, “You will do the show. You will probably have a limp and need a cane, but we will get you there!” 

By Aug. 5, Huff reports that “we did the photo shoot for our show today at my house and with a lot of help and patience, I was able to sit in chair for 45 minutes!! We did all the pics from the waist up, so the knee wasn’t visible. Watching me come down the stairs, on my butt, at a snail’s pace was a sight and there were lots of nervous jokes about having me inch on stage this way.”

Things have gotten slowly better. “The show must go on”  has become “the show will go on (dammit)!” The production has been completely re-blocked so Huff can play Madame Hastings from a chair. “Lots of Fringe love!” says Huff, who describes her character as “a wonderful mixture of bravado and insecurities … smart, funny, manipulative, shrewd, and at times petty and petulant.”  

 

 

 

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Random thoughts and suggestions on Fringe opening day

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Mark Meer, Mark Meer, Mark Meer, Mark and Mark Meer in One Man Walking Dead. Photo by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the ongoing quest to devise a fruitful plan of attack for seeing Fringe shows, one long-time theatre administrator I knew eliminated pre-festival anxiety (and also 99 per cent of her theatre-going activity) by her strict policy of only seeing shows from New Brunswick. I do not recommend this. 

I’ve known people to seek out Fringe shows with the most lurid come-hither titles (a risky method). Or the most wilfully baffling, like Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life or Bushtits, Shih Tzus & Private Dicks: All’s Fur in Love & Noir. Or an antidote to the above, like the phlegmatically-named Good Improv by an Edmonton company called … Good Improv.  It’s billed, incidentally, as an “original fusion of raw Hip Hop and improvised Sketch Comedy.”

Some Fringe-goers let themselves be won over by fanciful or enigmatic theatre company names (2018 contenders include Soul Pancakes, Cursive Writing, Complaint Department, Clutch At Your Pearls Productions, Squirrel Suit Productions). One of my fellow reviewers of yore deliberately sought out the shows with the most warnings. He would have been all over a show All Proceeds Go to: It’s plastered with warnings about “violence, cartoonish violence, nudity, sexual content, sexual violence, death, adult content, language, eating disorder, body image, drugs, alcohol, religious content, political content, gunshots.”

At Fringe time, it’s perfectly OK to survey strangers: servers, baristas, street guitarists, pedestrians jaywalking, your acupuncturist or yoga instructor — and best of all, the hip and discerning guys working the Strathcona parking lot. 

12thnight.ca has posted a selection of promising possibilities for your consideration: have a peek at those to get yourself started: click here. Here are some other thoughts: 

•The loneliness of the long-distance soloist: As you’ll have noticed by now, the Fringe is a magnet for performers who populate the stage single-handedly. (Sometimes you want to call it brave, sometimes crazy, sometimes both).   

It’s possible that Charles Ross’s One Man Lord of the Rings, back again this year, has set the bar for narrative complications (he also does a solo Pride and Prejudice and Stranger Things).

The virtuosity index goes right off the grid, however, with the riotous prospect of One Man Walking Dead, “a one-man parody of the zombie TV series spawned by the zombie comic book.” In this enterprise, Mark Meer, who’s one of the country’s great improvisers, and celebrated as Commander Shepard in Bioware’s Mass Effect series, attacks (ha!) a scripted show, one he co-wrote with T.J. Dawe. “One man. Eight seasons. Many zombies.”

T.J. Dawe in A Canadian Bartender at Butlins. Photo supplied.

•The art of the storyteller. The Fringe has attracted some of the continent’s most dexterous. T.J. Dawe, who’s done (and contributed to) more Fringe shows than you’ve had green onion cakes, is one. He’s rueful, funny, and smart. In honour of its 15th anniversary Dawe has revived A Canadian Bartender at Butlin’s, among his best.

Another is New Yorker Martin Dockery, a master at the unspooling shaggy dog structure of storytelling. He’s bringing Delirium to our Fringe. Which sounds like a match.

A  third is the Australian Jon Bennett (see below), the reigning monarch of the domesticated Power Point.

• It’s an unpredictable world out there in the 227-show universe of the Fringe. Hey, even the number of shows can change: two weeks ago, there were 228. I noticed the return of an assortment of Fringe hits I’ve seen and enjoyed in previous Fringe editions And here are four shows of that ilk. Will they be even brighter? Tighter? More fully developed? Maybe (after all, the Fringe is a chance to  to test out and improve bright ideas). 

Kitt & Jane: An Interactive Survival Guide To The Near-Post-Apocalyptic Future. Apocalyptic visions don’t come funnier, or more poignant. What do our earthly prospects look like to the young? In this 2014 production from Victoria’s SNAFU, two earnest 14-year-olds imbued with educators’ zeal kidnap a school assembly in order to take charge of our fates. They have an hour to train us how to survive the (very) imminent, and inevitable, cosmic catastrophe.

Jon Bennett: How I Learned To Hug and Jon Bennett: Fire In The Meth Lab. The manically comic Australian performer Jon Bennett, a masterful storyteller and memoirist in the shaggy dog tradition — applies his unique style to matters of romance and family dysfunction. He’s a riveting performer with a rarefied appetite for personal embarrassment and capacity for outrage. He incorporates a hilarious selection of home photos into his free-wheeling Power Points, and his audience participation skills are sophisticated enough to be easeful.

Stéphanie Morin-Robert in Blindside. Photo by Tristan Brand.

 Blindside. Stephanie Morin-Robert’s charmer of a memoir has been here a couple of times, most recently last summer. If you still haven’t seen it, you should. It’s a uniquely graceful, unsentimental, and funny tribute to human resilience — a recollection of a childhood in which she lost her left eye to cancer at age two. She’ll demonstrate (really): it’s that kind of show.

•Making it up. It’s an improv-rich town. There are virtuoso performers here, and they regularly improvise entire musicals (The 11 O’Clock Number), or intense dramatic encounters between humans and programmed robots (Human Machine: Artificial Intelligence Improvisation), or plays set in the ante-bellum South (Big Ol’ Show).

Kory Mathewson and Julian Faid in TEDxRFT. Photo by Aaron Pedersen

The apotheosis of improv dexterity has got to be TedxRFT. Two brainiac Rapid Fire Theatre stars, Julian Faid and Kory Mathewson will actually improvise an entire TED Talk from a subject suggested by the audience and slides they’ve never seen. Clearly this can’t be possible, which makes it an irresistible proposition.  

•Taking a risk: Take your cue from Fringe artists who are stepping outside their chosen turf to try something new. Mike Delamont, for example, the highly engaging comic performer who stars in the hit God Is A Scottish Drag Queen (he has an all-new instalment this year), is adventurous that way. Maybe Baby, in which he co-stars with his wife Chantelle Delamont is billed as a “comedy/drama” and chronicles their struggle to be parents. 

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Great moments in history … on balconies. Heather D. Swain stays home for her new Fringe show. A Fringe preview.

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Heather D. Swain in From The Balcony. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One evening two summers ago the veteran Fringe and Street artist Heather D. Swain was sitting on her Strathcona balcony having a cocktail with friends, watching The People go by. And that’s when it came to her.

“This would be a perfect venue for a Fringe show!”

Extrapolation followed. “Wouldn’t it be cool if I never left a prop at home when I went to rehearsal? Wouldn’t it be cool if I didn’t have to rent a venue to do a Fringe show?”

Swain’s apartment in the only two-storey on the block has housed a succession of artists — theatrical, visual, culinary — in its time. The much-beloved late stage manager Cheryl Millikin once lived there; so did the painter John Freeman. “It had that energy around it,” says Swain. She and her artist friiends all call her balcony “the Juliet balcony” actually knowing that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet doesn’t mention one thing about locating the famous balcony scene on a balcony.

Anyhow, Swain’s bright idea was planted in the summer of 2016. And it had a bonus: the following summer would the 25th anniversary of her arrival in Edmonton from her home town of Toronto (she prefers to call it “Ontario” to avert latent hostility). “I came here in 1992 to do a Fringe show,” she laughs. “I got here in March with five grand, and my money had to last till the Fringe.” Hmmm. Five months of rent to pay before the Fringe opening night of One Morning I Realized I Was Licking The Kitchen Floor:  a comic look at depression. It would be touch-and-go.

“I quickly found out that this is the best English-language theatre community I know in the country.” She never left. 

In the end, the stars didn’t line up at last summer’s Fringe for Swain’s anniversary theme.  It would have to wait till the 2018 edition of the summer festivities.

The choice of venue was inspired. But “what the heck would the show be?” 1992, incidentally, was another first, too.  That was the year the Fringe launched its own bright idea, BYOVs (bring-your-own-venues) for shows that just couldn’t be contained in any of the dozen officially appointed Fringe venues. To qualify, artists had to demonstrate that their show was “site-specific,” that it resonated with and gained by a particular non-traditional venue. Those days are long gone. All you need these days for a BYOV is $550 bucks to be part of the box office and program, a locale willing to put up with you, and a lot of energy. 

So, inspired by the original BYOV spirit, Swain, who’s afraid of heights, started research into balconies for the show that would happen on her own.“The power to sway people’s choices, the beauty, the romance of the balcony,” as she says of the thrust of From The Balcony. “Think of the iconic moments in history that happened on balconies: I couldn’t get them all in. Hitler, the Queen, the Pope, Eva Peron….

Her landlord stepped up. When he was interviewing prospective tenants for the first floor apartment under Swain’s he told them “if you’re not OK with having a Fringe show on the balcony above and people standing in front of your deck, and not being able to use your regular door during the Fringe, you can’t move in!” The four university students who live were cool with all of the above. 

So the audience, a maximum of 54, stands in the yard at 2 p.m. daily (a time chosen for sun placement and lighting), shoulder to shoulder, looking up. “I stop twice during the show so they can do the neck exercises my physiotherapist recommended,” Swain says.  “My greatest fear is that it’s seem like I’ve set up my own standing ovation.”

When the show is done, the star closes the sliding balcony door, and steps back into the green room, which magically turns back into her living room. “Then I go into the kitchen, open the fridge, and pour myself a glass of prosecco.”   

From The Balcony opens Friday at 2 p.m. on Stage 34, “260 steps west of the Fringe box office” and runs every day through Aug. 26. Tickets are “$13 with neck brace, $12 without neck brace.”

 

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When worlds collide: Chris Bullough is feeling the reverb in his new Rig Pig Fantasia. A Fringe preview

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

 

Michael Anderson and Dave Horak in Rig Pig Fantasia, Wishbone Theatre. Photo by Laura O’Connor.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“ Here I am,” sighs Chris Bullough wincing slightly over his de-caf last week. “An artist. My artistic career funded by oil. Questioning the ethics of oil production and use.” 

His new play Rig Pig Fantasia, which premieres Friday at the Fringe in a Wishbone Theatre production, is fuelled (so to speak) by that kind of tension. And Bullough is feeling it; even his mop of red hair seems slightly askew. “I feel the hypocrisy of it as I drive around.”

Being conflicted  (and the spirit of full-disclosure) seem built into the Bullough talent. It’s given Edmonton audiences an array of boldly original performances (Richard III for one), and an assortment of new plays and experimental creations (Or The Whale among others) since he graduated from the U of A, first  as an actor, then a director, then a co-founder of a theatre company, Wishbone, with fellow actor/director Michael Peng.   

For one thing, Fort McMurray is Bullough’s home turf; that’s where he grew up, until he came to the big city to study theatre. “I feel such a love, a loyalty, to that community,” says Bullough of a place embedded into the boreal forest that was attacked by the terrible fire of 2016. “I’m both haunted and fascinated by that ancient forest; I’d flip into it on my bike on my way home from school….”

His parents arrived with five-year-old Bullough and his little brother from Thunder Bay, “driven by the downturn of the late 70s early 80s,” fully intending to return to Ontario to build a house. “And we never did.”

“It was an incredibly cosmopolitan and welcoming community,” he says of Fort McMurray. “People from all over the world orphaned by economic circumstances found themselves in that boreal world together…. And in a way, you could choose your family. With people there it was ‘what do you need?’”

The love of the arts? That’s where his was nurtured! “An incredible community theatre…. My drama teacher is still a mentor to this day!”

“And all this nature! In the springtime people would gather to watch the river ice break up, an incredible thing. The northern lights. And the boreal forest in the middle of it all, so dark, dense, mysterious….” Fort McMurray was “a fort in the woods.”

Those ideas found their way into Bullough’s experimental Or The Whale, an imaginative fantasia inspired by Melville’s Moby-Dick which premiered at Studio Theatre in 2016 — a rare collaboration between the U of A drama department and an indie theatre. 

Bullough and his Wishbone partner Peng (who’s in Rig Pig Fantasia, along with Dave Horak, Laura Raboud, Michael Anderson, DJ Creeasian) lit on a connection “between the whale oil of New England and the oil we take from the ground.” 

“We tried to splice them together,” says Bullough. He grins. In the end, he thinks, their ingenious allegory had to cede to the power of Moby-Dick’s universal story: the  human quest for meaning in the face of our mysterious existence and death.

Or The Whale “was the spiritual awakening of Rig Pig Fantasia!” declares Bullough, who came at acting via improv, sketch comedy, and clowning. One of his characters “discovers in himself a latent love of dance,” a sort of grown-up Fort McMurray Billy Elliott. “He’s buried it, though. He’d taken lessons as a kid but only because it was good for hockey.” 

Then “he falls for an artist,” one who believes in art as an agent for social justice, and everything changes. “She opens a world to him. And he starts trying to bring two worlds together. Are they oil and water? That’s the question.”

Dave Horak, Michael Anderson in Rig Pig Fantasia. Photo by Navras Kamal.

“Industry vs. environment: why can’t we just come together and figure it out? If we’re the intelligent hard-working creative people we claim to be, we should be able to…. But it’s a chasm,” sighs Bullough. “How do we change in ways that don’t polarize us? I’m wrestling with it, and my own hypocrisy, even as I’m putting on this play!”

“It’s so incredibly loaded! Anything that seems to threaten my ability to take care of myself and my family, well…. But we all know we need to stop using fossil fuel. We do. We know it though we desperately want to believe otherwise, that we’re not responsible for global warming.. When you have kids and you see environmental regulations being dismantled ….” He trails off.

“The Fringe is a good place to explore this, to start a conversation about how to move forward,” thinks Bullough, who seems to be an explorer by temperament (his next project, already in progress, is a collaboration with an alternative magician). “I’m trying to let the piece be what it wants to be, to let the characters come alive and own it.”

He quotes fellow theatre artist Ron Pederson, who said to the crowd on Sterling night in June as he accepted an award that “in theatre we’re in the transportation industry!” Says Bullough, “I loved that! Exactly! Taking people on a journey!”

What theatre teaches is “the silent power of an image…. The forest, that sky, those stars!”

Rig Pig Fantasia runs Aug. 17 to 26 , on Fringe Stage 1, the Westbury Theatre.

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A tale of two Fringe directors. Chapter 2: Michael Bradley

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

 

James Hamilton in WASP. Photo supplied.

Bevin Dooley and Ben Proulx in Walk. Photo by Ian Scott.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A cultural theory: There’s a kind of crazy total-immersion charge about the Fringe that’s a magnet to Edmonton theatre artists. It explains why veteran Edmonton theatre pros — Bradley Moss, Trevor Schmidt, Darrin Hagen, Dave Horak, Collin Doyle, Kate Ryan, Cat Walsh, Chris Bullough, Stewart Lemoine, the list goes on… — are still up for doing the Edmonton Fringe after so many summers of kissing summer holidays goodbye. And it explains why up-and-comers are keen to be there too, in a big way. 

We meet two directors — young but with startlingly hefty and adventurous credits already — each making their Fringe debuts with not one, but two high-contrast productions. Both Michael Bradley and Suzie Martin entered the world of theatre via acting; both are recent U of A directing grads.

Director Michael Bradley. Photo supplied.

This Fringe Michael Bradley ricochets between realism and a crazier, more playful version of “reality.”

Some days the Kingston native who arrived here from the working actor’s life in Toronto, directs rehearsals for a serious new drama, Liane Faulder’s Walk, in which a Canadian soldier and his family struggle to recover themselves and their equilibrium after he loses his legs in Afghanistan. On alternate days, he’s in another theatrical universe altogether: reclaiming Steve Martin’s quirky  dark-hued satire WASP, which targets ‘50s suburbia and all its white middle-class capitalist privilege. 

Bradley, an artist of the exploratory stripe whose work includes theatre creation and research, has U of A directing credits that include his own adaptations of Hamlet and Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea. A workshop to investigate power and gender in Richard III is upcoming, in the fall. 

There was a personal resonance for Bradley in Walk, which marks the playwriting debut of veteran journalist Faulder (she fashioned it from her non-fiction book The Long Walk Home): the world of the soldier. “I come from a family of soldiers and retired soldiers,” Bradley says. His grandfather was a soldier. His father served in Afghanistan, the regiment sergeant major at the base. there. His brother-in-law is a soldier; he and Bradley’s dad were in Afghanistan at the same time in 2006.

The military life “is an important part of the Canada of now,” muses Bradley. “But it doesn’t seem to be part of our arts conversations.… In America, it’s part of the conversation all the time.”

The lives of soldiers, fraught as they are, come wrapped in a carapace of secrets. “They’re a mysterious group of people,” says Bradley. As he points out, his father would have known, and well, every soldier who was injured or killed in his time there. “It just doesn’t come up that much…. The play has been a way of getting to know the people I know, from another avenue.”

He’s “very conscious” of Walk’s exploration of “how veterans are when they come home. I like this play for that…. Fictionalizing (the true-life story of amputee soldier Paul Franklin in Faulder’s journalistic book) gives us a more complicated relationship with the characters.”

Casting came with its own challenges, of course. Faulder and Bradley launched an international campaign to find an amputee actor. Theatre has a history of know-how in faking it. “But for me, it was important to present something so truthful with no layer of theatrical artifice,” says Bradley. And in the end, he thinks, “it’s not about amputation any more, or even PTSD. It’s about a family….”

Joelle Préfontaine and Ben Proulx in Walk. Photo by Ian Scott.

After casting the net widely, he and the playwright settled on an actor who was not  a double-amputee. Ben Proulx, who comes to live theatre from the world of stand-up comedy (with occasional forays into television) lost one of his legs to childhood cancer at three. So Faulder re-worked the Walk story to embrace a soldier who’s lost one leg and is in grave danger of losing the other to critical injury.  

And there’s been a gender adjustment. In Bradley’s production, the soldier’s fellow Afghanistan vet is played by a female, actor, Bevin Dooley, a playwright/ dramaturg herself. It’s “a wonderful way to acknowledge female presence in military life,” says Bradley. We can be more nuanced in our storytelling….”

As for WASP, a 1995 Steve Martin play of the absurdist stripe discovered by Bradley’s actor wife Nicole St. Martin a decade ago, Bradley is fascinated by its currency, the way it captures “the creepy nostalgia” of Trumpian America for the storied ‘50s when America allegedly was great and middle-class white privilege had legs.  “It speaks about the strange sense of disenfranchisement from the inside.”

“People! This is not real! What is this thing you think you remember? It’s nostalgia for an illusion. It’s dark and getting darker.”

Walk runs Fri. through Aug. 26 at Fringe stage 17, The Roxy on Gateway. WASP runs Thurs. through August 26 at Fringe stage 5, King Edward Elementary School.

 

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A tale of two Fringe directors. Chapter 1: Suzie Martin

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Cat Walsh and Lora Brovold in Fetch. Photo supplied.

 

Sarah Ormandy, Robert Benz, Cat Walsh, Cody Porter in Tragedy: A Tragedy. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A cultural theory: There’s a kind of crazy total-immersion charge about the Fringe that’s a magnet to Edmonton theatre artists. It explains why veteran Edmonton theatre pros — Bradley Moss, Darrin Hagen, Dave Horak, Trevor Schmidt, Collin Doyle, Kate Ryan, Cat Walsh, Chris Bullough, Stewart Lemoine, the list goes on… — are still up for doing the Edmonton Fringe after so many summers of kissing summer holidays goodbye. And it explains why up-and-comers are keen to be there too, in a big way. 

In two companion 12thnight.ca posts, meet two directors — young but with startlingly hefty and adventurous credits already — each making Fringe debuts with not one but two high-contrast productions. Both Michael Bradley and Suzie Martin entered the world of theatre via acting. Both are recent U of A directing grads who came here from Somewhere Else, fell in love with the theatre scene here, and moved. And both are artists we’ll be watching in seasons to come. 

There is nothing remotely conventional about either of the plays Suzie Martin is directing at this year’s Fringe. 

By day she rehearses Tragedy: A Tragedy, a comedy by the elusive American playwright Will Eno. She’s been eager to do it for … years. A local broadcast news team intrepidly steps up to cover a disaster: The sun has set and may never rise again. By night, it’s Fetch, a new play by Cat Walsh (Do This In Memory Of Me, The Laws of Thermodynamics) an intricate two-hander in which one version of a woman confronts another with duelling stories. 

Director Suzie Martin. Photo supplied.

Martin, who arrived at the U of A from her home town of Winnipeg where she trained as an actor (and has done every kind of theatre job including admin and stage management), finds the 2001 Eno comedy bristling with an eerie renewed topicality these days. “After the American election in 2016, it really resonated with that feeling the world is ending,” she says. “It felt like everything was over. And here we are in this world now. Still. How can this be? The world continued. We’re living in the Trump era and — even if the world is getting meaner and more insular — we haven’t ceased to be!”

Intriguingly, “the style is quite a merger,” says Martin, who seems to have made something of a specialty of strange fusions. Witness her production last season of Small Matters Productions’ physical theatre comedy Over Her Dead Body, starring the legendary clown guru Jan Henderson.

Tragedy: A Tragedy, Blarney Productions. Photo by Mat Simpson

On one hand, she says, Tragedy: A Tragedy is “a media satire about the vapidity of the 24-hour news cycle” where “investigative” reporters armed with mere scraps of real information inflate them gravely into news. In the play, the characters communicate (and miscommunicate) only through earphones.

“But underneath all that, framing it in a way, is the tradition of absurdism, of Beckett,” says Martin. “What do you do if language breaks? If it’s an empty shell? If God is dead, and what we look to as our anchor points aren’t there?…. We used to look to the fourth estate for that!”

“Who do we look to for answers when it’s dark and we’re scared? Mythologies are about that.” In Canada “we’re next-door neighbours of a crazy myth-making machine. We’re close by, but they’re not our myths.”

Tragedy: A Tragedy “is not meant to be just a parody of the news media: that’s what’s brilliant about it,” Martin thinks. “There’s the very funny comedy of that…. But then you realize there’s a real desire and commitment of these (media) people to do their job.” She laughs.  “I think of it as an existentialist bedtime lullaby disguised as a parody of the news.”

Cat Walsh and Lora Brovold in Fetch, Interloper Theatre. Photo supplied.

Fetch, by Cat Walsh (who plays the broadcast team’s legal counsel in Tragedy: A Tragedy), breathed public air in a reading at the 2017 SkirtsAfire  Festival.  “Two versions of one woman telling a story in tandem … it’s all about possible and alternate worlds,” says Martin of a black comedy inspired by the famous Schrodinger’s Cat “thought experiment” in which really smart people can prove, using (or misusing?) quantum science, that a cat in a box is both alive and dead.  

So, Fetch gives us two women, both named Hannah Morgan, and “two monologues intercut with joining scenes.” Says Martin, “we meet them in a room that’s a mirror image of itself.” The spirit of competition — “No I am the real Hannah Morgan — is alive and kicking. And, as the title obliquely promises, there’s a dog. “A quantum dog,” amends Martin. “Fun, in a dark, slightly creepy, way.”  

It isn’t the first time Martin has explored possible alternate universes in the theatre. Martin’s directing resumé, which has everything from Shakespeare to Pinter, opera to The Gas Heart by the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, includes Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear (her master’s degree production). The off-centre play about a couple in free-fall, which looks like poetry on the page, has unmistakeable affinities to Tragedy: A Tragedy. “I would say both are concerned with what Don DeLillo describes in his 1977 novel Players as an attempt to ‘organize the emptiness’. And I think its safe to say those preoccupations are up my aesthetic and philosophical alley at this point!  

Meanwhile she’s enjoying the free-floating “strangeness” of her Fringe productions, and adjusting to the uncertainties of the freelance director’s life. “I have had the great fortune to direct six shows and assist on four across two provinces in the last two years,  as well as teaching at both the U of A and the (Citadel’s) Foote School…. I am getting used to living my life with only the next few months in view.”  

Tragedy: A Tragedy runs Aug. 16 to 25 at Fringe Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre. Fetch runs Aug. 17 to 26 at Fringe Stage 28, The Playhouse.

 

 

 

 

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