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Nimet Kanji, right, in 9 Parts of Desire, The Maggie Tree. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

War can be survived (humans are extraordinarily resilient). But the experience can never be un-experienced.

You’ll be carrying that thought with you out of the theatre when you see 9 Parts of Desire, the remarkable documentary/play The Maggie Tree has brought to the Varscona stage.

9 Parts of Desire is a nine-character testimonial of oppression, brutality and carnage in a haunting, and haunted, part of the world. It was created by the Iraqi-American actor Heather Raffo from a decades’ worth of interviews of Iraqi women of every age and perspective after the first Gulf War, and it debuted in 2003, at the time of the second.

So you’re bound to wonder, in advance, whether this is art as artifact. But you don’t need special heat-seeking sensors to feel the stepped-up topicality in a week when America is bombing Syria. Reality is competitive that way. 

9 Parts of Desire remains a gutsy choice for a Canadian collective 2017, to be sure, as The Maggie Tree seems to have realized in both casting the production and the ancillary program of panel discussions about “diversity in theatre,” accessibility, and the ownership of stories.

No, there aren’t nine Iraqi actors in Vanessa Sabourin’s production. There is, however, a carefully deliberate assortment of ethnic backgrounds and colours (including one white, one black, and one aboriginal performer), amongst the actors and onstage musicians. And the production is staged physically by Sabourin to suggest that, in this country of immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous cultures — where the word “multi-cultural” is as watered down as “fusion” in the culinary industry — oppression is a shared residue, part of a Canadian’s baggage, a connective tissue to something ancient.   

As a woman steps forward, to deliver a monologue, the group onstage watches, and folds the woman sympathetically back into the group tableau when it ends, no matter what perspective she’s expressed. The movement and pattern of survivors  onstage implies a kind of shared female experience of the brutalized that’s more powerful than political differences.

“Underneath my country there is no paradise of martyrs; there is only water,” says the professional mourner (Christine Frederick) who offers a kind of invocation to the dead at the outset as she drops old shoes, “worn soles,” into the river. 

Alison Yanota has designed and lit in an eerie glow a kind of cave that turns out to be the burned-out hollow of a building, with rebar hanging from the ceiling.

The monologues seem variable in the quality of the writing. But they do have a cumulative impact, in committed performances by Sabourin’s cast. Nadien Chu delivers a scorcher as a London-educated doctor who’s returned to her home in Iraq, appalled by the horrifying birth defects and cancers she sees in her patients.

One fierce old cosmopolite ex-Commie (Patricia Darbasie), drinking scotch in London, muses on the ironies of history as she details the horrific three-decade savagery of the Saddam Hussein regime. That “American-supported blood bath” made her, “against all my beliefs,” a supporter of the war in Iraq. But look where that disastrous invasion led? as she points out sadly. “I don’t believe any more in revolution.”

A Bedouin woman (engagingly played by Nimet Kanji) searches for peace and joy in her love life, in a checkered marital history that includes a lot of fleeing.

The youngest character, a fretful teenager (Rebecca John) housebound since the American invasion, yearns for American pop music, identifies bombs by the sound, and collects bullets as bling. The oldest (Alison Wells) is a street peddler, a survivor of 23 revolutions, who is rueful about the objects looted from museums, but sells them anyway. “I have to eat.”  

The most conflicted, and therefore dramatic, character is the artist Layal (Amena Shehab), a worldly, self-loathing collaborator who paints official Saddam and co portraits, but resists the dehumanizing force of the regime by painting nudes.

Alison Wells in 9 Parts of Desire, The Maggie Tree. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s even an American (Nicole St. Martin), disintegrating with emotional anxiety about her Iraqi family half a world away. “I should go to the gymn!” she interrupts her own anti-war commentary. “People work out to the war. On three channels.”

But perhaps the most affecting portrait, in a performance of eerie quiet by Natasha Prasad, is the caretaker at the Amiriya shelter, bombed by the Americans in 1991. It’s a mass Iraqi grave, full of ghosts, she tells us, pointing to walls embedded with the hair and skin of the “vaporized.” She has taken the name of her young daughter as a kind of continuity beyond the grave. 

The dead are not lost. That’s what haunting means. And the haunted are among us in this country.

REVIEW

9 Parts of Desire

Theatre: The Maggie Tree in association with Theatre of the New Heart

Written by: Heather Raffo

Directed by: Vanessa Sabourin

Starring: Amena Shehab, Nicole St. Martin, Nadien Chu, Rebecca John, Alison Wells, Christine Frederick, Nimet Kanji, Patricia Darbase, Natasha Prasad

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through April 15

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

Peter and the Starcatcher, at the Citadel. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“To have faith is to have wings,” declares says the earnest little smarty-pants Molly (Andrea Rankin) to a gaggle of skeptical onlookers in Peter and the Starcatcher.

Faith, that is to say, in the theatre and the way it gets airlift from your imagination. And then, by golly, doesn’t our Molly float inches up off the deck of the ship? “Satisfied?!” she says smugly to the ragged onlookers. They are.

And so are we. This gravity-defying coup owes something to the transformation of a visible plank into a make-shift teeter totter thanks to human intervention. Faith and improvised wings get to the heart of this giddy, scrambling high-seas adventure, an epic with a mock-epic spirit.

The faith in cheap-theatre wit burns bright in the spirited James MacDonald’s Citadel production currently getting playful in every corner and aisle of the Maclab Theatre. A certain hectic, frantic, scrambly quality is built into this kind of physical storytelling, and this production doesn’t fall short in that department. There are stretches, though, where the “wings” seem to flapping awfully hard to get us through an adventure that tells us at the outset that “nothing lasts forever” but starts to make you wonder about that by mid-Act II.   

Not, I hasten to add, that this points to a lack of bright ideas, possibly the reverse: overload in that cargo. And not because the performances from MacDonald’s cast, which assembles some of Edmonton’s brightest comedic talents, aren’t inspiration-studded.Possibly the production hasn’t yet quite found its sea-legs, or a rhythm that is forward and adrenalized without being just a wee bit relentless.

But there’s this: At the centre is a bravura performance of riotous and riveting, not to say show-stealing, hilarity from Farren Timoteo as the pirate king Black Stache, who will lose an appendage and gain an eternal following in what we’ll call the sequel (three guesses…) More of the Stache later.

Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Rick Elice’s cleverly intricate 2011 play, fashioned from the 2004 Dave Barry/ Ridley Pearson kids book, is designed as a backstory to the famous skirmishes in Neverland set forth by J.M. Barrie. And a big part of the fun of Peter and the Starcatcher is the way we gradually spot characters we’ve known forever from Peter Pan emerging,  in their formative years, from sly hints and loops in the storytelling. So when the cast of 12, assembling on the bare stage, tell us at the outset that “everything ends,” they are starting the story that will end at the beginning of Peter Pan.

The once-upon-a-time is this: a Victorian sea voyage, two ships, a mix-up of two trunks identical “in their trunk-ness,” a cargo of orphan boys bound for slavery, a contraband treasure of life-transforming “starstuff” too dangerous to let fall into the wrong hands. Ah, and speaking of hands, did I mention the pirates? Everyone washes up on a mysterious tropical isle ruled by a size-large croc where the inhabitants speak entirely in vocabulary borrowed from Italian menus.

Oscar Derkx as Boy and Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The most despondent orphan, Boy (Oscar Derkx), who “hates, hates HATES grownups,” will reclaim his lost boyhood and get a proper name and a home in the course of events. But before that, he’ll rise to an occasion that includes a mighty sea battle, a shipwreck, two high-contrast sea captains (Clinton Carew, Ryan Parker), a number of eccentric island cannibals, and (did I mention?) pirates. Ah yes, and the discovery of the opposite sex, bedtime stories, and the notion of family.

Peter and the Starcatcher is an enjoyable jumble of theatrical forms, and MacDonald’s production savours that. It’s part-musical comedy, with a live score and sound effects provided by musical director Erik Mortimer and Nich Davies. It’s part-pantomime, with all the shameless punning, mouldy  jokes, double-entendres, and blithe insertion of topical anachronisms that designation implies. You’ll hear a wispy reference to Crazy For You float by; there’s a cameo from another Citadel hit.

Garett Ross is droll as the panto Dame, Molly’s exasperated, tart-tongued nanny Mrs. Bumbrake. Addicted to alliteration, she’s been around the poop deck a few times, as they say, and she isn’t above a little slap-and-tickle on the side from a romantic old salt Alf (Glenn Nelson). “If you touch a hair on her legs …” the latter valiantly warns their pirate captors.  

It’s part-music hall and part-fantasy epic. The Act II opener, a chorus line of fish-turned mermaids, with fantastical bosom support from costume designer Megan Koshka, is a bit of both. And so is Koshka’s set, framed as an old-fashioned Victorian theatre, slightly askew, as if it’s lost its moorings and might end up slipping off a pier into the sea. It gets exactly the right kind of period melodrama lighting from Narda McCarroll. 

It’s part coming-of-age comedy, witness wistful scenes between Peter and Molly, as one captures a childhood he never had, and the other starts to grow out of hers and move on. And the show even makes fun of its own storyteller theatre roots when Molly objects to the orphan boys’ improvised version of Sleeping Beauty. They have, she notes briskly, “abused the concept of the theatre collective.” Everyone’s a critic, eh?

Anyhow, some scenes are more fun than others. I loved Molly’s expedition through the depths of the ship, chamber after chamber, created entirely by human agency: ensemble members hold up slatted all-purpose planks as doors, which open on a variety of amusing tableaux vivant and slam shut. The Act II encounter with the Mollusks and their leader, Fighting Prawn (Stephanie Wolfe), and the fun of their language (“cannelloni! lasagne!”), on the other hand, doesn’t get much comic traction.

As the Boy, a naif made sullen by privation, Derkx turns in a performance that charts, delightfully, the birth and tentative growth of amazement about the world and its wonders. As the wiseacre of his two orphan companions — the one obsessed by being The Leader — Richard Lee Hsi is particularly amusing in his adult tone. 

Rankin captures Molly’s competitive streak — “it isn’t a contest, but if it was I’d win” — and the way her certainties about her superior skills and knowledge are always getting undermined by the human factor. Molly has a slightly preposterous upper-class accent, and an air of noblesse oblige that will make you smile, in a performance smartly created from the friction between pompous, and rueful.

Back to the Stache and his “one for all and all for me!” piratical mantra. A production that can sometimes seem cluttered finds its comic starstuff treasure in Timoteo’s hysterical performance, well worth the price of admission. Vainglorious but craven, a self-dramatizing, self-enchanted Mrs. Malaprop of the high seas, Black Stache ignites the stage whenever he’s on it (matches provided by Peter Fernandes’s helpful Smee). 

Instantly exasperated whenever anyone else gets a stage Moment — “enough of this non-versation!” — Black Stache pursues the  treasure with flamboyant showbiz charm and a daffy but elegant store of contemporary references. Alas, it is “as elusive as a Philip Glass opera.”

The hand-severing scene in which Black Stache assures his eternal future as Peter Pan’s eternal arch-enemy Captain Hook is a riot. “I have a whole armada of possibilities at my former fingertips.” Timoteo doesn’t just negotiate the role, he embraces it and catapults off it.  And the whole enterprise springs forward.

“You sound older already,” says the eternal boy formerly known as Boy, accusingly, to Molly near the end. The rest of us, though, feel younger when Black Stache assures us he’ll be back, “just when you least expect it, there’ll I’ll be, The Stache, right under yer nose.”

REVIEW

Peter and the Starcatcher

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: James MacDonald

Starring: Oscar Derkx, Andrea Rankin, Farren Timoteo, Peter Fernandes, Doug Mertz, Garett Ross, Glenn Nelson, Richard Lee Hsi, Ryan Parker, Clinton Carew, Stephanie Wolfe, Morgan Yamada

Running: through April 23

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.ca

Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, Studio Theatre production. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A sense of absurdity hangs over the group portrait in constant motion in Colleen Murphy’s Bright Burning, currently trashing a beautiful set on the Timms Centre stage.

A kid (Jake Tkaczyk) comes down a marble staircase lugging a grandfather clock.“Can’t take that on the LRT,” another kid notes. “We’ll get a taxi,” says a third. They aren’t kidding — well, not exactly.

Later, amid the jumble of 24-carat vibrators, TV monitors, candelabra and cases of vintage wine that the awestruck looters score, they will actually consider the possibility of dismantling a Bosendorfer grand piano. 

Any gang invasion in which the participants arrive on the bus and play dress-up feels somehow doomed in advance. Which is exactly what the new play — commissioned from the award-winning playwright specially for the 12 actors of the U of A’s graduating BFA actors — explores: the futility of upward mobility for the working poor.

They are foul-mouthed and dangerous, the six hopped-up kids who arrive at a suburban Edmonton mansion to score enough stuff to pay a drug debt. For Jan Selman’s production, designer Robert Shannon, Lee Livingstone and LLARS Design create and light a classic double-staircase architecture, opulently finished and topped by an abstract chandelier, which figures in the action and is not a reference to a certain well-known musical.

Beyond paying off Fleur (Jaimi Reese), the hard-ass dealer who shows up with the stoned-out girlfriend she pimps out (Chayla Day), their dreams are modest. Lou (Alex Dawkins), who works as a shlepper in a vet clinic, wants to buy a dog. Ari (Jordan Buhat) thinks of buying a guitar case “with my new wealth portfolio” and buying his sick mom jewellery from the shopping channel. Emily (Sarah Ormandy), a chatterbox savant with a photographic memory for arcane information and no self-editing mechanism, wants to create art cards.

But the insight of Murphy’s play is that, modesty notwithstanding, their dreams are outlandish, absurd, unattainable, lost in the vast unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor. They are scrambling outsiders. And they’re looking in with a combination of wonder, and mounting rage.

As Selman’s mesmerizingly hyperactive, hard-driving, sensory-overload production discloses, their exclusion isn’t a discovery for the characters. It’s re-discovery of something they knew all along, a sort of sinking feeling about invisibility speeded up into a frantic high. Bright Burning, incidentally, is a rarity, a play that contains meth, but isn’t really about drugs.

Selman’s actors attack, and convincingly, Murphy’s staccato bursts of overlapping dialogue, non sequiturs, tangents, and furious fragments. It’s often very funny: Philip Geller gets (and deserves) big laughs as a deadpan pizza delivery guy with anxiety issues, who arrives in the midst of the chaos. “I can’t stay here it’s too stressful,” he says. With bleak hilarity, the most menacing of the characters, J the dealer’s enforcer (Jacob Holloway), offers advice from his “suicide prevention group.”

Bright Burning has the feel of a black comedy teetering on the edge of something tragic. The only pause, for example, isn’t really a pause at all; it’s fast and furious playtime in the boat — really! — they’ve dragged from the garage into the mansion. It’s an absurd, and somehow touching, image. Where would you like to sail? the landlocked ask each other to imagine, abandoning hostilities temporarily to play, like kids, with the idea of possibility.

The arrival of the owner’s daughters, Ruby (Emily Howard) and her kid sister Sam (Emma Houghton) ups the stakes. The former will argue that entitlement cuts both ways, that being rich isn’t a choice and that, in any case, wealth doesn’t cause poverty. The American playwright Wallace Shawn, in The Fever, would beg to differ; his protagonist is shaken to the core by the thought that his own privilege is actually underwritten by poverty.

Sam, the little rich kid in this crowd, has a certain amusing clarity: self-interest. “Yeah, steal anything you want but leave us with our lives and our futures because I’m going to camp today for two weeks.”

The texture of the production, and its performances, feel full. And Murphy expertly structures the play so that characters gradually emerge from the group portrait to be dimensional individuals, each with slight variations in speediness. 

Cast of Bright Burning by Colleen Murphy, a Studio Theatre production. Photo by Ed Ellis.

It’s one of those plays that tests the inevitability of its storytelling with a horrifying ending that would seem outlandish — if there hadn’t been the play first. It’s a structure, an escalation, that requires duration, and repetition. And both begin to seem a little over-extended and relentless late in the production — which is to say you start to notice them. The performances, though, anchored by Dawkins as Lou and Ormandy as the fatally visionary Emily, remain fierce, committed, and fresh.  

And a play custom-made for its youthful actors, that began with entrances in the dark, ends with exits in the dark.

REVIEW

Bright Burning

Theatre: Studio Theatre

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Jan Selman

Starring: Alex Dawkins, Marc Ludwig, Sarah J. Culkin, Sarah Ormandy Jake Tkaczyk, Jordan Buhat, Jaimi Reese, Jacob Holloway, Chayla Day, Philip Geller, Emily Howard, Emma Houghton

Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, U of A, 112th St. and 87th Ave.

Running: through April 8

Tickets: 780-492-2495, ualberta.ca/artshows