Igniting connections: a review of Ubuntu at the Citadel

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A son dreams nightly of his father. That’s how it starts.

But what sets Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project on its zigzag course through two time periods 30 years apart is an inspired perpetual motion scene, high-speed and word-free. It flings Jabba (Andile Nebulane), the young man, through the whizzing madhouse Cape Town restaurant where he works and out across the world — through airports, trains, buses, and passport control and pat-downs — to Canada in search of the elusive mystery man Philani (Mbulelo Grootboom) who haunts him.   

This knock-out kinetic scene is staged by director Daryl Cloran in a dazzling criss-cross of diagonals on the Citadel’s Maclab stage, against a cunning wall (designer: Lorenzo Savoini) constructed entirely of suitcases with secret revolving doors, niches, closets.

It’s a signal of what can happen when two theatrical traditions meet. And that is actually the provenance of this fascinating 2009 Theatrefront show, created collectively by Cloran and a cast of South African and Canadian actors in Toronto and at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town.

With its clash of generations and cultures, past and present, what Ubuntu conjures is a mystery of identity only resolvable by embracing the idea that we’re all interconnected, through time and space. We don’t start fresh and autonomously; we cannot escape either our ancestors or the ripple effects we set in motion. And as the play’s university genetics professor character Michael (David Jansen) tells his students, we have roots in common anyhow since our origins are African.

The title, “ubuntu,” is a South African word that means roughly “I am because you are.” And the plot is a series of accumulating coincidences, small and large improbabilities that turn out to prove the point. Which means, I guess, they aren’t coincidences at all.

Anyhow, in the present, the rocketing arrival in Canada of Jabba, clutching a suitcase and a single Polaroid photo as a clue, is stopped cold — as cold as the weather — by his frosty reception. The professor who appears in the photo with his dad denies and stonewalls. The professor’s daughter Libby (Erin McGrath) who works in the library where Jabba tries to search the archives, is hostile. 

Andile Nebulane, Erin McGrath in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

 Counterpoint the past: Philani had arrived in Toronto 30 years ago to study microbiology. He gets a part-time job in the library, thanks to the professor, and sends money back every month to his little son in South Africa. It’s in the library the student from far away meets an anxious, sweetly nerdy grad student, Sarah (Tracey Power), who’s into the migratory patterns of birds, with a specialty in mating calls. And they fall in love.

As son and father the two South African actors, both magnetic, have an intensity and physical explosiveness about them that ignites the stage. And it happens in both the movement/dance outbursts, inspired by South African practice, and the more verbal scenes (mostly in English, sometimes in Xhosi) that are more traditional in Canadian theatre. Director Cloran marries them theatrically in a way that makes the former natural, inevitable eruptions of the latter. In this he is materially assisted by Gerald King’s lighting and Christian Barry’s sound design. 

Mbulelo Grootboom in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

 The charged chemistry of Grootboom and Power as Philani and Sarah makes for two scenes that are among the most memorable and moving of the production. In the first, their attraction becomes dance. Later, as Philani retreats into a dark depression, the tension between them erupts into a wrenching physical struggle for a chair. Power’s beautiful performance charts Sarah’s gradual emergence from the carapace of the tentative and fearful into moments of rapture — and beyond.

Nebulane turns frustration and rage into a kind of physical electricity. And McGrath, assigned a character less realized by the play, is nonetheless always convincing as Libby.

Michael’s obstructionism and truculence is crucial to the plot; everything relies on it. But I have to admit I never did really understand why a genetics professor who speaks to the unified origins of mankind in Africa, is so dead set against revealing his own personal connection to that thought. I guess that’s the good ol’ Canadian theatre embedded in Ubuntu: there has to be a family secret and it has to be pried out of characters gradually, over time, kicking and screaming. Having said that, I must add that Jansen commits himself gamely.

In any case, Michael gets to say something to another character that resonates powerfully. It’s something you take out of the theatre and keep in your pocket for later: “You belong to a lot of people. Don’t make that a bad thing….”

Belonging to a common humanity is what Ubuntu, both in the making and performing, is all about. In that, it’s vivid, it’s startling, and it’s eloquent. 

REVIEW

Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project

Theatre: Citadel/ Prairie Theatre Exchange

Created by: D. Cloran, M. Grootboom, D. Hay, D. Jansen, H. Lewis, M. Monteith, A. Nebulane

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mbulelo Grootboom, Andile Nebulane, Tracey Power, David Jansen, Erin McGrath

Running: through Oct. 22

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Catalyst Presents: Onegin, the Vancouver hit rock musical coming our way!

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Onegin, Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A unusual love story, in which one of our most inventive theatre companies falls, hard, for an inventive show — and makes advances:    

Catalyst Theatre has fallen in love with Onegin, a much-awarded  original Canadian indie rock musical fashioned from the Tchaikovsky opera and the Pushkin poem. Not only that, Catalyst is bringing it to audiences here Jan. 17 to 28 on their home stage, the Maclab Theatre at the Citadel — for a radically accessible/ you-snooze-you-lose introductory price of 17 bucks.

Onegin is the work of Ariel Gladstone and Veda Hille, the team behind the quirky travelling hit musical Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata (seen at the Citadel Club in 2014).

The Arts Club production of Onegin that caught the eye of Catalyst artistic director Jonathan Christenson in its premiere run in Vancouver, May 2016, has been widely praised for its irreverent, highly theatrical re-invention of classic literature in a re-imagined musical form. Which is, after all, something that Catalyst does with unusual pizzaz and  expertise too (witness Hunchback, Nevermore, Frankenstein, and others). Onegin scooped up an unprecedented 10 Jessie Awards in Vancouver, and ran in Toronto this past May. 

Christenson says he particularly remembers one of the songs Onegin sang: “’Amuse me, surprise me, shake me … try and wake me’  And at the performance I saw the entire production was doing just that for the audience!’”  You can hear the soundtrack on Veda Hille’s website: vedahille.com.

The presentation run announced Thursday, starring Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, introduces a new initiative, Catalyst Presents, designed to bring exciting indie work to town in coming seasons. More on this later; stay tuned. 

Meanwhile, Onegin tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Soul royalty at the Mayfield: a review of Soul Sistas

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Soul Sistas, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Holy smoke! Or as we say in the prairies, Holeeeee! If you haven’t seen the audacious concert show currently running — also dancing, jumping, rocking — at the Mayfield, you’re missing out (as I discovered just this week). Soul Sistas is a rare chance for Edmonton to experience bona fide soul: sexy star performances from a couple of startling talents backed up by Van Wilmott’s  crack seven-piece band and expert back-up musicians.

As you’ll learn in Soul Sistas, assembled and annotated by the mystery team of Will Marks and Kevin Michaels, what the remarkable careers of soul icons Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner have in common is a point of origin in gospel, and the African-American church. Ah, and Tennessee.

Aretha, though, grew up blue-blood in the family of a celebrity Memphis preacher who played Scrabble with Martin Luther King. Tina, the adoptive name of one Anna Mae Bullock, grew up dirt poor in Nutbush, Tenn., This backwoods town lends its singular name to Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits, as you’ll discover in a production number of high-octane brio and snazzy choreography (by Christine Bandelow) in the course of Act II.

Even though this is “in the spirit of…” and not some “legends”-type impersonation extravaganza, the casting challenges of Soul Sistas, as you’ll glean, are daunting. Especially in the case of soul queen Aretha , it’s the voice, a soulful coloratura of unparalleled agility. As Aretha’s admiring sister (Antonette Rudder) puts it, it’s the voice that delivers “the most intense R&B in history….” Tara Jackson, startlingly, evokes the singer’s legendary vocal gymnastics with impressive authority, in a powerhouse performance that’s all her own.

Tina Turner’s story, from a hard-scrabble childhood to a career tied to and thwarted, temporarily, by the notoriously sleazy and thuggish Ike (Matt Nethersole), seems to have distinct chapters, as signalled by hair size and colour. The soul remains; enter the rock star with the explosive non-stop physical energy onstage enters. Triple-threat Tiffany Deriveau delivers a sexy, magnetic performance, a veritable perpetual motion machine who doesn’t just occupy the stage but rampages through it dancing. And smiling: a workout of epic proportions.

The script isn’t long on biographical zeal, for which we should probably be thankful. Yay Atlantic Records, boo Columbia Records, that sort of thing. In each act, members of the ensemble — Aretha’s sister, a Tina back-up singer — steps forward to volley  some simple, sometimes goofy, narrative fragments. And there’s video footage (and a non-stop succession of wigs) to conjure and the evolution of the stars through space and time.

But mainly, the songs just keep coming. Chain of Fools, Rock Steady, Natural Woman, Rocket 88, What’s Love Got To Do With It, Simply The Best….

That river is deep and the mountain high.

REVIEW

Soul Sistas

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written and compiled by: Will Marks and Kevin Michaels

Staged by: Christian Goutsis

Starring: Tara Jackson, Tiffany Deriveau, Jameela McNeil, Matt Nethersole, Atonette Rudder, Malinda Carroll

Running: through Oct. 29

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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A horror show from history: Dead Centre of Town is back to haunt the Fort

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Vincent Fortier in Dead Centre of Town. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s the chilly season when the veil between the present and the past is at its thinnest. And this, my friends, is a haunted place.

Catch The Keys Productions is once again leading us on an expedition to exhume Edmonton’s long-buried stories on location. Dead Centre of Town, at the 1920 Johnny J. Jones Midway in Fort Edmonton Edmonton Park starting Friday (the 13th, surely no coincidence), is the 10th anniversary edition of original creations — researched and custom-made for a site  where our ghosts linger and our dark collective secrets lie composting.

A decade ago, Megan Dart and her sister Beth were living across the street from The Globe, a bar on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 109th St. “It was the site of one of the first mortuaries in Edmonton,” says Dart who discovered it was surrounded by coffin-building and embalming establishments during the First World War. In the macabre local lingo of the time, that corner was “the dead centre of town.”

“We knew the manager of the Globe,” says Dart. “She said ‘we’ll give you the bar for one night and see how it goes.”

A fateful offer: an Edmonton theatre tradition was born that Halloween night. Dead Centre of Town started, modestly, with two technicians, a $500 budget, and a cast of five, a couple of whom (Adam Keefe for one) are still with the annual ventures into Edmonton’s surprisingly strange and lurid past. “150 people showed up, so it was technically sold out!” says Dart.

“I look back it now, at how quickly we put it together, honestly just a couple of weeks. And I go back to the script and see something I wouldn’t share with anybody!” Dart laughs. “Site-specific, yes,” she laughs, “though we didn’t have the word for it. We just knew we didn’t have the money to rent a theatre!”

She remembers that as soon as that experimental first show ended at the Globe, “people were out on the dance floor, in their Halloween costumes, drinking Jaeger shots.”

Since that darkly festive debut Catch The Keys has specialized in immersive, site-specific theatre that, as Dart puts it, “offers something immediate to put the audience inside the experience.” Dead Centre of Town has sent shivers up the collective spine with horror stories — true ones and urban lore —  in such ghostly locations as abandoned trainstations, nightclubs that were once vaudeville houses, tinsmith shops-turned-theatres, the long derelict upper floors above the Whyte Avenue cafe Block 1912. And for the last three years, Dead Centre has unleashed its dark vision at Fort Edmonton, “Edmonton’s only living museum,”  on the banks of the river.

One year we followed characters along 1885 Street, in and out of the schoolhouse, the saloon, and other buildings. “We ran three km. of cable that year,” Dart recalls of the extreme technical challenges for scary lighting and sound off the grid.

One year we found ourselves in the Selkirk Hotel. One year we went into the fort itself and, to an eerie soundtrack of coyotes, met such horrifying characters as the first man hanged in Edmonton who had cannibalized his wife and seven others while under thrall to a demonic spirit.

Adam Keefe and William Mitchell in Dead Centre of Town. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

This year, prepare to be unnerved, and possibly out-and-out terrified, 40 at a time, in the skeletal circus midway at Fort Edmonton Park. Beth Dart directs a cast of 15 in “a series of vignettes and short scenes inspired by true history,” as playwright Megan puts it. “We’ve been dreaming of that midway ever since we started coming down to the park.”

“Amazing how many characters met their end in untimely and unsavoury ways,” Dart says cheerfully. “Edmonton was a bustling city between 1918 and 1926,” and rich in horror story potential, she’s found. Ten years of research into a civic history few of us know have unearthed a startling vein of the weird, the violent, the morbidly fascinating, as she says. “Edmonton was a rebellious young frontier town. So much happened here, a rich Indigenous history, the fur trade, the railroad….”

Inspired by this year’s midway setting, “we’ve married each story to a circus act,” Dart says of the 2017 edition. “You’ll see an aerialist, a snake charmer, an escape artist….”

We’ll meet Filumena Lossandro, the only woman ever hanged in Alberta (heroine of John Estacio’s opera of that name). We’ll be on hand for the strange disappearance of teacher Felicia Graham. One of Dart’s own favourite stories, a real winner, is the 1926 arrival in town of the Sells Floto Circus. “As they set up, 14 elephants got loose and stampeded down Jasper Avenue,” Dart explains, with delight. “Eight of the 14 were captured immediately; the rest kept going, led by the smallest elephant Mad Mary…. They rampaged through town till she ran out of steam.”

“Our acting company doesn’t shy away from a challenge,” laughs Dart. “We’ve thrown some wild ones at them this year! And the run is  34 shows, two a night (7 and 9 p.m.), outside in the elements and within the grasp of the audience…. We’re the Iron Man of theatre!”

PREVIEW

Dead Centre of Town X

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions

Written by: Megan Dart

Directed by: Beth Dart

Where: Fort Edmonton Park, Johnny J. Jones Midway

Running: Friday through Oct. 31 except Mondays, 7 and 9 p.m.

Tickets: fortedmontonpark.ca

  

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Embracing the other: Ubuntu’s cross-cultural journey at the Citadel

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andile Nebulane in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that opens on the Citadel’s Maclab stage Thursday wasn’t born, like other plays, in a story, a character, an image.

Ubuntu would end up with all of the above, unspooling in dance, movement, music, and dialogue in both English and Xhosa. But  “we started with nothing. Nothing but a desire for connection,” says Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran of the origins of the play he co-created with Canadian and South African actors. Ubuntu borrows its name from a South African word that’s a veritable ode to human interconnectedness. Rough translation: “I am because you are.”

Like its creators, its characters, and its cast, Ubuntu has a pedigree that spans continents. And a history that goes back a decade and a half, to the moment Cloran went to Cape Town to bring the Baxter Theatre Centre there, in person, a cross-cultural proposition.

Who was the Daryl Cloran of 2004? He and a bunch of his Queen’s University theatre school pals, as the man says with a smile, “had moved to Toronto to make it big and start a company…. At first you do plays with your friends. But as it evolved we wanted Theatrefront to be a company that didn’t have a building but (instead) worked internationally. So we started to build partnerships.”

One was a collaboration with Bosnian artists that became Return: The Sarajevo Project, which garnered a name in innovation (and a cluster of Dora Award nominations) in its Toronto premiere a few years later.

Meanwhile, Cloran had contacted Mannie Manim at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, a notably tri-cultural city with large black African, Afrikaans and Muslim populations. “He’d been the artistic director at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, the first theatre there to have black and white actors onstage together,” says Cloran. “We reached out to companies that had an interesting performance style, theatre that was a voice for social change, theatre that was more than just entertainment….”

So it came to pass that Canadian and South African actors found themselves together, scriptless but game, in a rehearsal room in Toronto.  For Mbulelo Grootboom, a South African actor/co-creator who’s been in every incarnation, workshop, and touring production of Ubuntu, the attraction was “different cultures; how we’re similar, how we’re different: the interconnections.”

Andile Nebulane and Mbulelo Grootboom in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

His cast-mate and fellow creator Andile Nebulane, another original member of the Ubuntu creative team, echoes the thought. “It’s the excitement of waiting to see what’s going to come out when we co-operate and collectively create, starting with a blank page. You don’t know what to prep; you just get there first day, you have this bunch of creatives in a room, and the aim is to end up with a play!”

What happened, grins director Cloran, was a study in cultural  contrasts. Canadians hauled out pen and paper, and prepared to take notes. “These guys start dancing, moving,” he says affectionately of the South Africans. “They get up!” 

Grootboom and Nebulane laugh. “Africans are, naturally, physically expressive people,” says the former. “Canadians come from the head first, then the body will follow.”

“For me personally,” says Nebulane (whose English, incidentally, is excellent, with a poetic flair), “it’s rooted in a language barrier. You’re in a room, and you have to make sense in English, which is my third language. I know exactly what I want to express, but I cannot explain in words. So, let’s do it!”

“Our characters came from that, from improv,” he says. And so did the story. The narrative, Cloran explains, happens in two time periods, 30 years apart. “A young South African’s father left him when he was a year old. Now that he’s 30 the son comes to Canada to find his father. And when he gets here, the mystery surrounding his father’s departure starts to unravel.”

“It becomes very much about identity and belonging and family, our connections to each other across the globe, the idea of ubuntu that a person is a person through other persons, how much people are entwined in each other’s lives….”

Andile Nebulane and Eric Goulem in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

Grootboom, who plays the father Philani, says the character “came from the body first,” and from “personal experience” of a fractured family that is the dramatic engine of Ubuntu. “You don’t have a script so you have to tap on yourself…. And it’s a universal thing: we all have dysfunctional families. We all have our baggage, our skeletons….”

“At one point we had seven hours of material,” says Nebulane, who plays the son Jabba, whose quest for a long-lost father takes him across the world. “You have to be truthful, and not precious, about your creativity. A lot was stripped away. So you can’t be saying ‘Oh no! It took me 20 minutes to create this monologue and now it’s gone!’”

Time has passed since Ubuntu premiered at Tarragon in 2009. Cloran has a tangible reminder of that: “Our now nine-year-old son was six months old when we did it; we have a picture of him sitting on one of the suitcases of the set….”

In 2012, while Cloran was artistic director of Kamloops’ Western Canada Theatre, Ubuntu toured the West. Except for Grootboom and Nebulane, other members of the original collective, including Cloran’s actor wife Holly Lewis, have come, left for other projects, returned, left again. One of the originals, David Jansen, is back for the Edmonton production. 

Tracey Power and Mbulelo Grootboom in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

“Partly because of the strength of the African performers, this is a very physical show. For the first 20 minutes, there’s almost no dialogue. There’s a lot of movement and the scenes that do have dialogue are entirely in Xhosa. So it (invites) very physical storytelling…. Watching it now in rehearsal, I’m struck by how layered it’s become over the years, how many great ideas we discovered as we began to know each other, each other’s beliefs and ways of telling a story.”

For Nebulane, the cross-cultural collaboration that created Ubuntu is inseparable from its point. “The process of making the play actually IS the play. How it was created is exactly what the play is talking about.”

And it’s not as if its insights into the immigrant experience have been dulled by time. Au contraire. “What’s happening in the world is so painful,” sighs M. “The fear of the other, the unknown: the play explores that…. Because America is the most powerful system in the world, whatever happens there trickles down through the world….” 

“I don’t see Ubuntu aging,” says Nebulane. “This is a play of a lifetime. Any time, anywhere, anyone can relate.. It’s about breaking walls and the bubbles that people are living in. Sometimes I’m backstage, listening for my cue. And I think ‘Wow! How did we come up with THAT?’”

PREVIEW

Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project

Theatre: Citadel/ Prairie Theatre Exchange

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mbulelo Grootboom, Andile Nebulane, Erin McMcGrath, Tracey Power, David Jansen

Running: through Oct. 22

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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The sounds of silence: What It Is brings The Aliens to the Roxy

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Chris W. Cook, Michael Vetsch, Evan Hall in The Aliens. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sunday crack of noon on a harsh fall day. Four guys, slightly bleary and hoping coffee will change that, are sitting around talking in a chilly theatre.   

The director and cast of The Aliens, verbal high-achievers all, are getting themselves ready for a day rehearsing a piece where, as the playwright’s stage directions indicate up front, “at least a third — if not half — is silence.”

The play is Annie Baker’s The Aliens. And the three characters in this funny, minutely observant 2010 breakthrough play by the much-awarded young American playwright — a couple of 30-ish guys and later a 17-year-old high school kid hanging out behind a small-town coffee shop — probably don’t speak a single complete sentence before trailing off into pauses that, as prescribed, “should be at least three full seconds long.” With “silences that should last from five to 10 seconds” with further extensions as needed.

This has taken some getting used to, say the three actors in Taylor Chadwick’s What It Is production opening in Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series Thursday.

“You say something, you wait for 30 seconds, you say something again,” grins Chris W. Cook. He plays KJ, who seems to have been hanging out behind the coffee shop with his friend Jasper ever since they didn’t graduate from college. “It doesn’t seem like it should work. But it makes sense; it just takes a while to get it into your body just how much of it is communicated without speaking….”

Evan Hall, who plays Jasper, laughs in sympathy, along with Michael Vetsch, who plays the kid Evan (a double-Evan confusion that has led to Chadwick regularly mixing up acting and character names). “Living through those! Onstage 10 seconds  feels like an eternity…. so uncomfortable, so awkward until you’e done it a few times. I’d start to hold my breath….

Director Chadwick, who has a comradely rapport with his trio of rising Edmonton stars, nods vigorously. “A lot of waiting! A lot of laughter comes from that…. They’re just staring at each other. And we’re making people watch!” (laughter from all).

Chris W. Cook, Michael Vetsch, Evan Hall in The Aliens. Photo by dbphotographics.

“In rehearsals we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what’s really going on. In some of the scenes, especially later on, the silences say more (than the words) about the questions being asked.”

Cook, who partners with Chadwick in the What It Is arts podcasts (and has appeared in Chadwick’s revival of the raucous black comedy Nighthawk Rules), cites the stage directions at the top of Act II which indicate that KJ “sits by himself, thinking. He sits by himself for a long time. This should be at least 20 seconds. Finally he says ‘If P then Q’.”

“Usually you take 90 per cent of the stage directions and keep 10. Just the opposite here…. When we’ve struggled, and then gone back to the stage directions, we’re, like ‘let’s try this! Why did we try anything else?’”

Chadwick, Theatre Network’s marketing director, says “Annie Baker has created such a strong map of how to get through the play — the stage directions, the punctation, the costumes, what the set looks like, all very specific!” After an early read-through he remembers telling the actors “guys, if we don’t fuck this up, it’s going to be pretty great. All the pieces are there….”

Chris W. Cook in The Aliens. Photo by db photographics.

Chadwick muses on his choice of this mysteriously engaging play, with its smart but inarticulate, stalled characters. “It really spoke to me: it’s a play about working through tough parts of your life. And it’s also about discovery, about characters who fail and succeed. And it doesn’t put any judgment on them…. It’s about loneliness.  It’s a snapshot of life. Characters are never talking about one thing; they’re talking about several different things….”

“When I read the play I saw opportunities for actors to work on something really rich. And I wanted to challenge myself…. I just knew I was interested in finding out what was at the core of it.” 

Says Hall, “there’s a reason people keep doing this play about three white men, in a world’s that’s trying to move away and diversify from that. There’s something universally engaging.”

Cook grew up in Camrose, a town roughly the size of Baker’s fictional Vermont town of Shirley (for which she’s created a startlingly detailed history elsewhere). And he had an instant glimmer of recognition. “So many things in common,” Cook says. “I know so many people who are just like this…. I could go back to town and it’d be ‘hey, man!’: the same people would still be hanging out in the same spot….”

Evan, the awkward coffee shop employee who stumbles on the KJ/Jasper scene as he takes the recycle out back, is “in a constant state of humiliation,” as the play memorably describes him. “There are aspects of him I can find within myself,” grins Vetsch, a 2014 MacEwan grad who caught Chadwick’s eye in Nextfest productions. I remember times when I was lonely, or I didn’t quite fit in. These guys are a new experience for him. It shifts everything….”

“My breakthrough day with Jasper,” says Hall, “was the day I realized how desperately he needs other people. These are three people who aren’t just (casual) friends or guys who hang out. They need each other; they don’t have someone else….”

Cook echoes the thought. In a play laced with original songs — KJ and Jasper have been in a band — and a chunk of Jasper’s Bukowski-esque novel, “it’s about people wanting to be heard,” he thinks. “From the outside, their lives seem to be going nowhere. But both of them are creating things they need to put out there,”  even if the audience is only each other.

Hall, who made his directing debut this past Fringe with A Quiet Place (and appeared in Gruesome Playground Injuries), had to learn the guitar, pretty much from scratch, for The Aliens. “I wouldn’t say I play the guitar,” he demurs modestly. “I play a particular song.”

The Frogmen is a strange rhyme-laden offering. “It’s catchy; the other ones aren’t and I sing them a cappella. They’re so interesting, so lyrically rich. They don’t make sense all the time but you can make sense of them. One is math equations….”

Learning fragmentary lines interlaced with lengthy silences hasn’t been as arduous as you might predict. The four agree on that, though they add that being together makes things a lot easier than solitary practice at home. “A lot of the learning has come from doing scenes over and over, just listening to each other. And it’s come really naturally,” says Chadwick.

“All the silences are so charged with the thoughts of the characters that trying to run lines without fully feeling through the moments is hard,” says Vetch. After a certain interval, at least at first, the actorly instinct is that someone’s forgotten a line. “And it’s no no no,” laughs Vetsch. “I’m supposed to wait this long!”

“The thoughts feel full,” says Hall. “It has a natural flow,” says Cook. “It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever got to work on. And it’s so simple. It’s her writing that turns it into something more.”

Chadwick smiles. “Let’s just let it breathe and come naturally.”

PREVIEW

The Aliens

Theatre: What It Is Productions

Written by: Annie Baker

Directed by: Taylor Chadwick

Starring: Chris W. Cook, Evan Hall, Michael Vetch

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Oct. 22

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatre network.ca

   

    

    

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Openers and finales: an exciting weekend to be thankful for theatre

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Chown and Bahareh Yaraghi in Shakespeare in Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s Thanksgiving, and the perfect moment to consider — in person — the bounty of Edmonton theatre. C’mon, you can’t eat turkey ALL weekend.

In the Citadel’s splendidly entertaining, beautifully staged season-opener, we get to go backstage in a theatre town where rival companies are trolling for new scripts, and a young up-and-comer playwright with a bad case of writer’s block is having a hell of a time making a bunch of conflicting deadlines.

The town in London in the 1590s. The playwright is one William Shakespeare, whose creative fire is ignited when he falls in love, and writes Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare In Love, a fine launch for the artistic directorship of Daryl Cloran, is a play-with-a-play that’s a love letter to theatre itself. The last performances are this weekend, before the Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production leaves town and graces Winnipeg with its jokes and romantic chemistry. And a dog. Give yourself a big, lush, funny treat! (here’s my 12thnight.ca review of Shakespeare in Love).

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

At Teatro La Quindicina, the finale of the company’s summer season at the Varscona (through Octd. 14) is the captivating Shocker’s Delight!, a strange and wonderful ode to friendship, loyalty, and what it means to grow up and launch yourself into the big wide world. Stewart Lemoine’s 1993 comedy is here revived with a terrific young cast — Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens an Richard Lee Hsi — who capture unerringly the combination of breezy and anxious that animates this  funny, heartbreaking coming-of-age piece. Have a look at my 12thnight.ca review of Shocker’s Delight.

Other possibilities:

Cory Christensen, Christine Lesiak, Fortuitous Endings…. Photo of 2015 production by Marc J. Chalifoux.

 

Toy Guns Dance Theatre, specialists in playful, highly theatrical mergers of dance and theatre, launches a full season of shows with a revival of  Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk Wrapped In A Barbecue Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard. You have to admit, it’s a title that conjures (and redefines relationship angst). 12thnight. ca talked to creator/ choreographer/ director/ company artistic director Jake Hastey. The show runs through Saturday at the Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Soul Sistas, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

I haven’t seen it yet. But I hear that Tara Jackson and Tiffany Deriveau really rock it as Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner in Soul Sistas at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre (through Oct. 29).

Rapid Fire Walk With Me. Photo by Andrew Paul.

And here’s an idea that will invade the edge of your consciousness, and possibly haunt your dreams. Rapid Fire Theatre launches a series of David Lynch-style improvs Saturday nights in October at Zeidler Hall. Idyllic small town, dark secrets, future that’s really the past…. I talked to Paul Blinov about Rapid Fire Walk With Me.

 

 

 

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What dark secrets lurk under the small town idyll? Rapid Fire Walk With Me improvises a mystery series a la David Lynch

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Rapid Fire Walk With Me. Photo by Andrew Paul.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Through the darkness of future past/ the magician longs to see/ one chants out between two worlds/ fire walk with me….“

In the 1992 David Lynch horror film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — a prequel to the celebrated television series that unnerved us all — worlds, realities?, intersect and collide in mystifying ways. And so do the past, present, and future.

The surreal Lynchian vision is the inspiration for Rapid Fire Walk With Me, an improv series that runs every Saturday night in October (starting this very Saturday) at Rapid Fire Theatre’s Zeidler Hall headquarters in the Citadel.

It’s the brainchild of Paul Blinov, one of the company’s elite Chimprov improvisers, and two of his Rapid Fire cohorts Bob L’Heureux and Tara Koett. Says Blinov, “we tried it out at the Bonfire Festival,” Rapid Fire’s annual repository for “”our weirdest ideas.” 

Here’s the Blinov proposition: Improvisers, who create storylines on the spot from cues, have a natural affinity to the playful illogic of surrealism. “Our interest in playing with ideas of surreal” led the Blinov trio to the creator of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. He is, after all, a master of “getting the pieces of a narrative and putting them together in the wrong order.” In many ways, Lynch’s free-associative story-spinning and imagery, unhinged from the linear, sits with uncanny ease in the world of improv, Blinov has found.

“At heart David Lynch is an improviser!”

It’s no accident, Blinov argues, that favoured Lynch settings are “small idyllic towns with dark secrets … a stable structure to depart from, a veneer of the normal peeled back to unearth darkness and strangeness.” Maybe that’s why Lynch movies retain a spontaneous feel, Blinov muses, “the sense of assembling a mystery as they go … with some narrative satisfaction at the end.”

Blinov cites a Lynch anecdote about seeing a bare-branched tree in the small-town backyard of his boyhood — and suddenly realizing it was swarming with ants everywhere. “Super-normal surfaces that turn out to be super-strange….”  In Lynch’s book Catching The Big Fish, an exploration of creativity through meditation, the auteur argues that “you have to go deep to let yourself find the big fish,” as Blinov puts it. In filming Twin Peaks, the character of the evil Bob was improvised in an instant: catching a glimpse of a  make-up man in a mirror and opting spontaneously to include this non-actor in the narrative. 

As a model for long-form improv, it’s tricky, Blinov says happily.  “The narrative isn’t A to B, pieces of information are in the wrong order, or withheld; it’s the journey rather than (the arrival) at B….” He argues, though, that all improv grapples, moment to moment, with “what turns out to be a red herring.”

Since his graduation from Theatresports to long-form Chimprov initiatives, Blinov, a Fort McMurray native who arrived here to go to the U of A, has been part of such experimental ventures as The Imagineers, Gossamer Obsessions (with Amy Shostak) and Sneak Peek (with Rapid Fire artistic director Matt Schuurman and others). In the latter, the improvisers show up with a movie trailer each, the audience chooses, and they improvise the entire movie.

With this new venture, improvising à la Lynch, the marriage of scary-dark and funny is a tricky one, concedes Blinov, “There’s something inherently funny in watching people have to stick to their guns. Or abandon their guns!” And the unexpectedness factor increases exponentially with a large-cast show. For the Saturday series this month, a company of 14 performers will yield a weekly ensemble of seven, depending on availability.

For the Bonfire outing of Rapid Fire Walk With Me, earlier this year, “anyone (in the company) could sign up,” says Blinov, an 11-year improv veteran who divides his time between teaching improv workshops and a job at the Art Gallery of Alberta launching spontaneous conversations about visual art with the public experiencing it there. 

Some improvisers who signed on for the Lynchian experiment at Bonfire were, like Blinov, knowledgeable David Lynch aficionados. Some were only sketchily acquainted with the sacred canon. “We got everyone in a room and watched clips from across film and TV, to get the feel of the tone. ‘These are the touchstones’.”

“They occupy their own territory,” Blinov says of the Lynch oeuvre.  “Whatever made them powerful still lands….” Rapid Fire Walk With Me isn’t a copy or a parody; it’s not to Lynch what Hitchcock homages are to that great men. “We have to create our own authentic world…. It’s not just cherry pie and solving a mystery.”

For the evening’s cue each week, “we’ll ask the audience for an image from a dream or nightmare.” After that there’s just no telling where the narrative may go, in what strange byways it may linger, what “detours” it may take, what minor characters may find themselves on the narrative engine. Blinov uses the word “exciting” to describe what more timid souls might be inclined to call nerve-wracking.

“I always feel nervous when I go onstage. It’s about using nerves to your advantage!”

PREVIEW

Rapid Fire Walk With Me]

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Created by: Paul Blinov, Bob L’Heureux, Tara Koett

Where: Zeidler Hall, Citadel Theatre

Running: Saturdays in October, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

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The reigning monarch of the long title is back with a dance theatre season: Toy Guns’s Jake Hastey

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Cory Christensen, Christine Lesiak, Fortuitous Endings…. Photo of 2015 production by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls. 12thnight.ca

The titles of are a tip-off. They float through the air, free-associating in a long, whimsical, adventurous accumulations. They’re not shackled by mere practical considerations. They’re ample, to say the least. 

The titles of Toys Guns Dance Theatre productions are like the shows themselves that way. Welcome to the mind of Toy Guns director/choreographer/resident muse Jake Hastey.

Hastey opens his new season — Toy Guns’ first full-length season — Thursday at the Westbury Theatre with Fortuitous Endings: What To Do when You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard. Theatre audiences caught a debut glimpse of that intriguingly named piece at Workshop West’s 2015 Canoe Festival.

Hastey’s cast of 10 is divided equally among bona fide actors (Chris Bullough, Christine Lesiak, Corben Kushneryk among them) and professional dancers from across the country. “Two acts, full length, huge conclusion. Thousands of props!”: Hastey laughs a little ruefully — but only a little. He’s in his element.

The innovative dance theatre company Hastey founded, which made its debut in a 2013 workshop of Bright Lights Cold Water, made a startling entrance at the Fringe in 2014 with a pair of  original offerings. Red Wine, French Toast, and the Best Sex You’ve Ever Had was a playful, high-spirited exploration of romantic attraction, an inventive series of couplings and uncouplings. Propylene Glycol, Maltodextrin, Retinol Palmitate, And Other Words I Don’t Understand, Like Love had a typical Hastey sense of scale: it featured 11 actor/dancers, an opera singer, a storyteller, and 300 pillows (not to mention its own pillow sponsor). Typically, Hastey and co devised such promotional gambits as join-in pillow fights outside the Fringe box office.  

Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard — a title with its own come-hither array of narrative possibilities — is, says Hastey, “the artists’ favourite” among his Toy Guns show. Why? “This one reached a different maturity and depth,” he muses. “An intensity, a cohesiveness of vision, I think…. It was so resonant with the audience from the start.”

“In the others, the visuals take centre stage…. This one really highlights the performers. The base level for every one of them is so high!”

Photoof 2015 production of Fortuitous Endings…. by Marc J. Chalifoux.

“At its core,” says the ebullient dance theatre auteur, “it’s got a five-couple narrative going through relationships…. Intimacy and (as per the title) endings,” in an intricate weave of journeys that he’s been working on, in one way or another, since 2010. His original inspiration, he’s said, was a sadder-but-wiser personal relationship arc experience. 

As often happens in Hastey productions, the audience and the performance engage with each other in unusual ways. Sometimes they’re site-specific (the “pillow show” has been done in mattress shops); sometimes Toy Guns shows have extrapolated from the props. This time the audience will find soft balls Velcro-ed under their seats, ready to be thrown at the stage in propitious moments. And there’s always live music; for Fortuitous Endings it’s the work of Must Be Tuesday.

It’s taken Hastey six years to broker the grants and venues, and to develop the ensemble he needs for an entire season of his large-cast work. This upcoming debut season also includes a January debut for Hastey’s mask show What Colour (Color) Is Your Dress? which follows a young woman into the afterlife. In March, the company revives Propylene Glycol…. 

PREVIEW

Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard

Theatre: Toy Guns Dance Theatre

Created and directed by: Jake Hastey

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Saturday

Tickets: toygunstheatre.com

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A funny and wistful season finale at Teatro La Quindicina: Shocker’s Delight!, a review

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Piatocha and Ben Stevens in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m concerned about our ability to function outside the academic world,” says Julia, a ballroom dance major at the University of Continental North America, to her childhood friend Markus, who’s in philosophy.

The college pals are on the eve of graduation into the big wide world where life begins, and choices have to be made. Four years of college education have buffed their analytical skills. And, as Stewart Lemoine’s sad and funny 1993 coming-of-age comedy Shocker’s Delight! reveals, in its strangely resonant way, applying them to something as unmapped, unknowable, and bruisable as the human heart … well, it can produce the most startling and painful results.

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

The word Julia tosses off, brightly, in this lovely Teatro La Quindicina season finale revival, is “unfathomable.” We are, she says, “floating over unfathomable depths.” And she’s right. One of the many things Ron Pederson’s production gets so hilariously and heartbreakingly right is the disconcerting discovery, by all three ‘50s characters, that in the laboratory of real life, syllogisms backfire, philosophical deductions go on detours, and  metaphors have a way of returning to haunt you. Life is both simpler and more complicated than you think when you’re thinking.

All three characters? The third is a passerby. Rory (Richard Lee Hsi) is a golf major, hailed randomly by Marcus — mainly because there is no reason not to — as he and Julia banter, wittily, about whether the logical next step for her is to look for a husband. Rory has no reason to reject Julia; he doesn’t even know her. And for his part Marcus dismisses the idea of marrying Julia himself,. “I’ve known you too long…. I’d be your husband and you’d have no friends left at all.”

Stevens and Piatocha have a very amusing and natural buddy chemistry, full of whimsy, as a bickering couple of long standing. “Do you think my single-mindedness limits my prospects?” Julia demands.

This playful experiment in intellectual clarity ends up in something emotionally fraught and chaotic: a love triangle. Tears will be shed. A calamity involving a golf ball will interpose itself. Panic will be unleashed; accommodations will be made after intermission.

This is comic sparkle with slivers. And there’s consolation to be found in art, the elegant simplicity of Biedermeier furniture (Marcus’s chief consolation), or dance (Rory talks about the “grace” of harmonious partnerships), or the Schubert piano music that wafts through the piece.

Hell, or even golf. In one scene, Rory addresses, as a formal college presentation, the pressing question of which is more important to the success of a golf swing? The grip or the stance? And he opts for the one that doesn’t change, that gives you a fixed point from which to be creative. You’ll need to hold that thought. 

Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens, Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

   

Pederson, who played Marcus himself in a 2004 revival of Shocker’s Delight!, has assembled a captivating trio of young actors. Piatocha is a delight as the impulsive, alert, quick-witted romantic heroine, forthright in all matters but discombobulated by the waywardness of her own heart.

There are perfectly judged performances, too, from Stevens as her sassy pal Markus whose devolution into confusion will break your heart; and Hsi as the baffled but bemused Rory, the third party co-opted by the others, scrambling to keep up, and in the end standing up with grace and fortitude to the competing claims of love and friendship.

Together these actors negotiate the extreme oddities of the structure: the formal extended academic “lectures” that happen from time to time and play against Lemoine’s amusingly offhand dialogue and sweet romantic moments. The essay — remember those? — is the way college kids are schooled to grapple with meaning — in a way that’s absurd and kind of admirably serious.

The play is affectionate about that, as Pederson’s spirited, playful but unforced production reveals; the weight of it seems just right. As do Matthew Alan Currie’s romantic lighting, the grave outsized academic pillars of Chantel Fortin’s set, and the fun of Leona Brausen’s ‘50s costumes.

“The prospect of regret makes the future seem like a bit of a pain, doesn’t it?” ponders Marcus. That’s the wistfulness of the view from the graduation threshold. Rory on the other hand argues that “there’s a future in everything….” And this season finale lets you stand with characters there, musing on the what’s next and the might-have-been.

REVIEW

Shocker’s Delight!

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Ron Pederson

Starring: Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens, Richard Lee Hsi

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 14

Tickets: teatroq.com

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