Two Persian poets walk into a bar: a legendary friendship reimagined in ‘Shams by Rumi’, a guest Fringe review by Fawnda Mithrush

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Shams by Rumi (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)

By Fawnda Mithrush 

Galal and his bestie Husam—a playwright and director respectively—arrive in Cairo to meet with producers. As Husam prepares for what he hopes is their big break, Galal gets distracted by pings from his phone and the prospect of a date with a mysterious “SH.”

The resulting meet-cute is set in an upscale Egyptian café, and on arrival SH turnsout to be Shams (the delightfully pragmatic Fatemeh Jelveh-Garan), a young woman visiting Cairo from Iran. Galal, played with lofty romanticism by Brijesh Nagarathinam, is initially challenged by Shams’ straightforwardness; he is surprised at his own ease in communicating with her in English, and she prods him to take poetic license with their story. The two decide to flee the café and embark on a journey that quickly churns into a surrealistic dervish through Tehran, Alexandria, and even Edmonton.

Playwright Moemen Gaafar’s reimagining of the historical relationship between Rumi and the wandering mystic Shams of Tabrizi is not quite a rom com; the contemporary Galal and Shams nod to the “two old Persian dudes” (who may or may not have been in love) as inspiration for their own wanderings across time and space. The pair here have a winsome chemistry, and their mutual spark is palpable as they gaze at whirling Sufi dancers and explore the scenery of eastern cities in classical verse.

At its core, the story examines intense friendships, and how their endings provoke a particular kind of grief. Rumi famously mourned Shams Tabrizi’s passing, and Galal falls prey to a similar sadness as he anticipates his separation from Shams. It’s the eventual remembering of his old friend Husam that shakes Galal out of his romantic stupor — and it’s in that essence of kindred connection that the two men finally find comfort.

 

 

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Goose and Consequences: Jack Becomes the Giant in The Beanstalk Market Crash, a guest Fringe Review from Fawnda Mithrush

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

The Beanstalk Market Crash, Mind of a Snail Puppet Co. at Fringe 2026. Photo supplied.

The Beanstalk Market Crash (Stage 13, SERVUS Credit Union Théatre at La Cité Francophone)

By Fawnda Mithrush, for 12thnight.ca

It begins with violence, remember? As the long-worn tale of Jack and his proverbial beanstalk famously ends  — with Jack kidnapping the goose and her golden egg, then chopping down the stalk to slay the sky-bound Giant — Jack handily gets away with his loot, and that’s where the seeds are planted for Mind of a Snail Puppet Co.’s brilliantly executed production of The Beanstalk Market Crash.

One hundred years after Jack’s initial plunder, his grandson Jack VonBeansprott III (Chloe Ziner) enjoys the lavish wealth built from generations of exploiting the still-captive goose and her sparkling progeny. He pitches to investors from a dining table that doubles as a miniature film set, which helps illustrate the environmental vastness of the BeanCorp legacy through real-time screen and camcorder choreography.

Fringe audiences may remember this award-winning duo from their 2018 holdover hit, Caws & Effect, which also employed strikingly simple yet emotive shadow puppetry and overhead projectors to tell another bird-y story. We won’t attempt to re-paint the ingenious scenery of flights and falls from the sky here; suffice to say that the images are as DIY and charming as they are impactful.

The result is stark, funny, and devastating all at once; as the Goose (Jessica Gabriel) evolves from a softly garbling cardboard figure into a real live person pleading with Jack for her freedom, Jack becomes so large that you could almost reach out and pick the plaque between his teeth.

The technical feats of the production are irresistibly clever; you get caught up marveling in their craft while being reminded that this old fairytale was criminally flawed from the start—Jack sprouted the stalk itself from stolen beans, after all.

It’s one of the most rewarding hours you could spend in a Fringe venue. If there are any tickets left, you’d best snag them up tout de suite.

 

 

 

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Ah, what to do with the family curse: gore (i want to disappear) from Tiny Bear Jaws. A Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown, Autumn Strom, Sarah Emslie, Kristen Padayas in gore (i want to disappear), Tiny Bear Jaws at Fringe 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

gore (i want to disappear), Stage 3, Nordic Studio Theatre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The opening gambit of Elena Belyea’s stunningly theatrical gore (i want to disappear) is happening when you enter the theatre. Four actors are marking out a light-up grid onstage in abrupt right angles: sudden rushes and sudden stops. The quartet, who never make eye contact, are together a kind of human perpetual motion machine, choreographed by the gods. Then their limbs begin to quiver, as if they’re standing on electrified ground.

Is that the curse that hangs over the House of Atreus in the Tiny Bear Jaws compelling account of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia? Is it the inheritance of the ancient Greece ground zero of grief, grudge, fury, and vengeance where gods and human generations mingle, and have at ‘er, on an un-level playing field?

What follows is a 75-minute version of The Oresteia which feels amazingly expansive not compressed, and the smallness of the superb cast counts, dramatically. All four actors are meaningfully double-cast. And they step forward together as the Chorus — in front of a bank of red-coloured energy drink bottles that are the blood supply for a story soaked in violence. “We’re the Furies, don’t fuck with us.”

Sarah Emslie, Autumn Strom, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kristen Padayas in ‘gore (i just want to disappear), Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

What follows — thanks to powerful performances by Sarah Emslie, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Autumn Strom, and Kristen Padayas — is a group portrait of a close but violently fractious modern “family.” And the non-binary kids  look for comfort and self-fulfilment in “chosen families” as they struggle to find themselves, in a frame that’s too tight. The House of Atreus makes your own dysfunctional family look like a sitcom picnic.

In a particularly fascinating double-assignment Padayas, who’s terrific in both roles, is both the matriarch Clytemnestra, a widow in a no-win situation with troublesome kids,  and the gay lover of her son Orestes (Brown). Orestes inherited the kingdom, and he feels cornered by expectation. “But what if I want to be a hockey player, or a farmer … or a bride?”

Brown also plays the family’s unwelcome lodger Cassandra the oracle, whose gift of prophecy is also a curse, since she’s doomed to never be believed, “gaslit for all eternity.” And Electra, the neglected trans daughter, is played in the formative stages of being a real force of nature, is played by Strom as a moody teenager. “Hey, Calliope is hosting an open-mic night in a cave. Wanna come?” Emslie has the tricky assignment of speaking for both parental and offspring generations simultaneously, as dad Agamemnon and the daughter the gods demand he kill. “A family is a group of people who love each other till it’s no longer convenient.” And then what do you do with your inheritance? That’s the question.

So, yes, gore (i want to disappear) grows outward, in a particularly contemporary non-binary way. And one of Belyea’s most impressive achievements — they’re a witty writer — is finding a language, and a cadence, that are both modern and somehow don’t lose the sense of ancient roots. And the fun — yup, it’s fun, too — is that the party continues in the afterlife. “I’m taking drum lessons….”

With lighting, music, and stagecraft to match. Highly recommended!

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Skit night in the court: PORK & BEANS: Attorneys at Law. a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

PORK & BEANS: Attorneys at Law (Stage 18, FOH Pro Stage at the Luther Centre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

PORK & BEANS: Attorneys at Law isn’t the first time the Edmonton musical theatre indie Top Bunk Theatre has gravitated to food as a setting and running gag for their original Fringe comedies — witness Soup & Hogan’s 16th Annual Hotdog Eating Contest in 2025, and  Sam’s Clam & Oyster Bar the Fringe before that.

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Here’s one to add to that oddball archive. The title characters in this scrambly musical by Sam Daly and Ethan Lang are two high-powered lawyers in ‘70s Chicago, city of encased meats. Augustus Pork (Daly) and Lucius Beans (Lang) were law school classmates at Harvard, and best friends bonded in that pork and beans mutual-need way. But by the time they’re facing off in “the trial of the century” — a star soft-ball celebrity (Aidan Laudersmith) has murdered his wife Chartreuse, or not — they’re had a falling out.

In between, the 10-actor production directed by Lauren Boyd assisted by Elizabeth Janzen) is a long flashback that reviews their ever more fractious relationship, and how they met when Beans was a legal beagle student in the Harvard debating society and Port was a Harvard janitor. And it’s crammed with deliberately bad accents, goofball jokes about the best wurst hotdogs, throw-away lines about food courts, food (as opposed to legal) courts , a veritable barrage of  puns. Pork gives the judge, straight out of G&S, a hand (yup, the  very one she somehow lost); there are trial recesses so she can get a shrimp taco.

If this is sounding to you like a satire of the law, forget it. It plays more like an over-extended SNL skit, or something dreamed up at law school skit night after the end of year kegger. The likeable and energetic cast throw themselves into the comedy slammer. But they’re up against sketchy sound. And the singing is variable too. The premise is promising. But at 60 minutes, time feels like it’s being served. That’s a verdict that was decisively not shared with the rest of the cheering jury in the house seats at the performance I saw.

  

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Back to Edmonton’s chaotic accidental riviera: Beach to the Future is the finale of the trilogy. A Fringe review.

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Beach To The Future: The Accidental Beach End Game (Stage 18, FOH Pro Stage at the Luther Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a kind of lunatic dumb-smart dumbass-smartass genius at work in Grindstone’s new Accidental Beach sequel, the final instalment of a trilogy of musicals inspired by the possibly toxic sludge of E-town’s ever-shifting river beach.

Bonkers and high-spirited, in a way that “manic” doesn’t even begin to describe, the Accidental Beach musicals are all about local. And as this team has discovered with the first two instalments in the  trilogy we do love local, in all its absurdities, potholes, miscellaneous corruptions, crackpot authorities, an LRT that goes nowhere anyone wants to go, its victory-averse hockey team, etc. Nobody gets a bigger kick (or more double-entendres) out of civic low-esteem than this ridiculously agile, multi-tasking bunch of musical comedy-soaked artists. And they’re nothing if not breezy about being scathing.

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After the inaugural instalment in 2024,  a verbatim account of something made up on the spot from audience cues as part of Grindstone’s weekly improvised musical The 11 O-clock Number, and last year’s GUMS: An Accidental Prequel, written down in advance, Beaches … has returned the characters to us, including public-spirited Sandy the lifeguard (Abby Vandenberghe) — who can’t swim, as I recall — her dimbulb boyfriend (Dallas Friesen) who cruises the Saskatchewan River murk in his SeaDoo. And the Mayor (Malachi Wilkins), a doctor/drug dealer with an office on the Walterdale Bridge.

This  sequel, directed by Donna Leny-Hansen and written collectively by a four-member cast, gleefully rips off the crucial narrative arc of that movie you’re thinking of. Via Sandy’s lifeguard chair that the multi-talented Doc Rogers-Place (Wilkins with his dander up is an amazingly electrified sight), now ex-mayor, doctor, inventor with a PhD in astro-physics, has transformed into a time machine. There’s a clever catchy song (the accomplished score is by Abbott and Erik Mortimer) with an ode to “the lifeguard time machine that takes you any-when you want to go.”    

Sandy (Vandenberghe) in the future is a single mom, working shifts at the Water Factory that turns Saskatchewan River poison into … well, something. Like most of the younger generation in River City her son Harry (Ethan Snowden) is a mutant lizard with a tail. He wants his late dad Razor (Friesen), back to a time before that fatal SeaDoo explosion…. Why do I find myself explaining the plot? Too much River water?

Anyhow, the nostalgia for a city where stuff worked and the Oilers win the Cup, takes them back, back to the time when Accidental Beach was On-Purpose Beach. The opening song and dance number is classic musical theatre, “we’re going back to the beach.”

Very funny make-shift props, a non-stop tickletrunk of flammable wigs, Speedos, and a folk-rock/ full-rock/ jazzy,pop musical, with love ballads, and, voilà, everything, is before you. With a cast of dexterous comic actors who commit fully, and then some. Crazy, frantic, and fun.   

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Under the covers, away from the outside world: In My Room, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in In My Room, Fringe 2026. Photo supplied

In My Room (Stage 17, Grindstone Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In My Room, by a pair of this town’s hottest young triple-threats Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, is, in a quirky, comically literal way, a chamber musical. There is an actual chamber: it’s Eli’s bedroom, specifically his bed, which he has been unable, or unwilling, or a bit of both, to leave in three weeks.

Eli is not alone, however (what musical theatre artist ever is, in truth?). His best friend/ personal assistant Rain is there. And so is Elaine (Elaine Dunbar), his live-in personal accompanist at the keyboard. And we are there, too, as guests invited to his “three-week-iversary” as arranged by the obliging Rain (with festive streamers from Party City).

Is this a retreat from the horribly screwed-up world? A protest? A time-out? A tantrum? A dream pyjama party? Hmm. There’s a worldly mystery attached to Eli’s pj-clad living arrangements, to be untucked from the duvet in the course of In My Room. Eli lets his phone ring through to voice mail; on opening night the two rats from Rat Academy (Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie) left him a message, with an invitation to play pickleball.

Meanwhile, though, the situation lends itself to … performance. Eli produces a microphone; Rain has one too. Elaine, who’s a top-drawer piano player, springs into action with complex and appealing arrangements. So In My Room is an eccentric free-associative cabaret of sorts, with a bouncy mattress stage. And it’s directed by bossy Eli (what musical theatre artist doesn’t, secretly, want to direct, and stage manage?).

It starts with the dreamy Brian Wilson song from which this new piece borrows its title. And it moves on to songs from another Eli’s “super-pepper-upper” place, movie musicals. Nuns figure prominently, then improvised puppets (provided by the resourceful Rain), with Eli in his dream role as Maria.

Well, how do you solve a problem like Maria? This is a show that doesn’t fret about seques, to say the least. There’s a kind of weirdness to Eli blithely repurposing I Am Unworthy of Your Love with Jesus as the hot poster boy (what musical theatre artist doesn’t want to sing Sondheim?). There’s a lovely version of Joni Mitchell’s Blue that’ll get under your skin, too.

Anyhow, Yaschuk and Matkin are charming performers, with Dunbar as an amusingly wry, skeptical third. Rosy-cheeked chipper Eli is not exactly a classic case of depression, but escapism is an urge we all understand, at our moment in time. And this show, in its oddball way, is a response to our shared feeling that the outside world, toxic in every way, has become a public enemy. Bring on the music.

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Edmonton’s biggest opening night! The Fringe is back tonight

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

No one knows how this happens every year, a hiccup in the space-time continuum perhaps? But suddenly, mere minutes after Canada Day, it’s the biggest opening night of the season.

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The Fringe is back, with a 45th annual edition of our monster 11-day summer theatre binge, Edmonton’s wild grassroots experiment in handing over power to artists and the people. Tonight’s the night curtains go up on 60 of the 209 shows, in 38 Fringe venues.

It’s big — the oldest and biggest Fringe on the continent and the prototype for all the rest, in fact — but don’t let size put you in a panic. Be bold, be jazzed and spontaneous, take a chance. Artists, some 1,600 of them, are experimenting, and so can you. And you never know what unexpected expansion, or re-routing, of your tastes might happen; you never know what you really needed in your life — to make it more fun, or more exciting, or more interesting. Those kinds of discoveries are what the Fringe is for. What The Hell Was That?, a “musical cabaret” as billed, has a title you’ll hear, in many other contexts from audiences emerging from theatres across Old Strathcona, for the next 11 days. Discuss among your fellow fringers; that’s what the Fringe is for, too.

It’s probably not surprising that improv is so big at the Edmonton Fringe. The festival itself, was an improv in the deadmonton summer of 1982 when Brian Paisley got the bright but loony (sorry, bright AND loony) idea of inviting artists to “do whatever you want” at something called a Fringe Event — and then see what an audience might make of it. Well, it seems to have caught on. Last year’s edition sold 140,000-plus tickets to 223 indoor shows, and drew a crowd of more than 700,000 to Old Strathcona Fringe headquarters. And this year, the box office is smokin’: 56,010 advance tickets sold already (3200 ahead of 2025 at this point), and 47 performances are sold out, along with two whole runs, The Butter Chicken Odyssey and The Naked Philosopher.

Just for starters, have you had a chance to look at a 12thnight selection of 13 intriguing prospects for your consideration here? And further possibilities here? There is no wrong way to fringe (except maybe to stay in the beer tent for 11 days, and never actually see a show). I used to know a fringer, a theatre publicist by trade, who would only go to shows from New Brunswick. No offence to N.B., but that does seem a little niche.

Anyhow stay tuned to 12thnight.ca for reviews starting Thursday night. And 12thnight is lucky to be joined this weekend by a guest reviewer, veteran arts journalist Fawnda Mithrush.

 I’m really hoping you’ll be able to chip in a monthly sum to my ongoing Patreon campaign — every little bit helps — to support theatre coverage on this free (so far!) and independent site. It’s supported entirely by readers! The link is here.

Edmonton invented the verb: let the fringing begin.

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A cross-border Fringe story, with a fistful of firsts: meet the creators of Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Rainier Pearl-Styles and Nicholas Chieffo in Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, Holy Scoundrels Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This is a cross-border/ cross-festival/ cross-platform/ cross-time zone story in which the Fringe has a plum role (and Zoom has a bit part).

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The route to Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, opening Thursday at Mile Zero Dance (aka Fringe Stage 30), “has a lot of firsts,” says Rainier Pearl-Styles, with Nicholas Chieffo its co-creator and co-star.

The clown characters, as she explains, are two guys going to a grocery store, “and realizing they don’t fit into categories of manhood society places on people. They spend the next 40 minutes trying to figure out how to be men, in a way the world will approve…. It is a play! There is a plot!”

And it was developed largely on Zoom, since Pearl-Styles, the new managing producer of Common Ground Arts here, moved to Edmonton from the U.S. on the first day of the Fringe two years ago (a sign, surely!) with her theatre artist wife Emilia Fox Hillyer, a puppetry specialist. And Chieffo, Boston-based, “a brilliant musician and composer” as his stage partner reports, works with the Fork & Shoe Co-operative. “Things started to really open up for them after Emilia and I moved to Edmonton: five shows a year, a new works festival, an in-house band … a lot of what they do seems like Common Ground Arts stuff!” says Pearl-Styles, who now oversees  such varied multi-disciplinary ventures as the Prairie Mainstage Series, the Found Festival, and RISER, an initiative to support and mentor indie theatre artists.

Rainier Pearl-Styles and Nicholas Chieffo in Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, Holy Scoundrels Theatre. Photo supplied

She and Chieffo have collaborated before, “me as a director and facilitator, and Nicholas as music director and composer,” with puppets by Fox Hillyer. The pandemic was an instigator, since she joined him in the Boston apartment he shared with his roommate Fox Hillyer. “We all got laid off from our food service jobs. And we started making little virtual puppet shows, a fun thing to do when we were all stuck together inside.” They called themselves the 13 Pratt Theatre Company, named for the street where they lived.

Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS is something of a return to the stage for Pearl-Styles, who arrived in Edmonton with an Ivy League double degree in theatre studies and religion, and a master’s in applied theatre. ”Most of my artistic practice has been in devising, and new work creation, but I’ve often been on the facilitator side of it.” One of the theatre projects she’s most proud of facilitating, for example, involved “a group of people responding to Macbeth and its themes,” and arriving at a show that wasn’t an adaptation of the Scottish play, but a piece “about the choices we’ve made and getting stuck in a cycle of violence.” It led to a master’s thesis that was an alternative curriculum of sorts, designed, she says, “to prove that you learn about Shakespeare without reading Shakespeare.”

100 Foreskins For My Hand In Marriage, the solo performance she premiered at the Calgary Fringe last year under the Fork & Shoe banner, was “the first time I’d performed in a full-length play in five years. A lot of fun,” she says of a piece that re-tells ancient biblical stories of King David from the perspective of his wives.

“Writing, creating, and performing together isn’t something Nicholas and I have done before…. We came up with the name The Holy Scoundrels to have a container for the sort of work we want to do.” Additionally, neither had ever developed new work on Zoom, another first. “It’s a very different process than it would have been if we’d been working in person….” says Pearl-Styles. Instead of “showing up in a room and playing around till we came up with something … we’ve both been doing a lot of independent writing and bringing it to the Zoom room.” From the themes they came up with, an outline emerged. “And from the outline a flow of scenes … and writing it from there.” Pearl-Styles went to Boston for two weeks for a development workshop; Chieffo came to Edmonton for a weekend of photo shoots in May.

They’ve had a clown consultant, Jan Henderson, the best in the biz. And what has emerged is a clown character dynamic of the classic Joey and Auguste tension. Like Fingers and Shrimp in Dayna Lea Hoffmann’s Rat Academy, and Mump and Smoot, Pearl-Styles plays Jeff, the Joey character who’s “in charge and grumpy.” Grungled, played by Chieffo, is the Auguste, a more wide-eyed, eager-to-please naif of the pair.

“We talk a lot,” Pearl-Styles says of the characters, but Henderson has been advising the actors on how to make the show more “muscular” and let the physicality do some of the talking.

Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, Holy! Scoundrels! Theatre!. Photo supplied.

Why a grocery store? That setting “was one of the first things we decided,” says Pearl-Styles. “It’s a microcosm of society at large … just two guys doing something everybody does at some point.” And that opened conversations about “perceptions of gender identity…. I’m someone whose gender expression matches my own identity as a cis person,” which means the scrutiny isn’t particularly focused or intense, not like the world’s “hyper-perception” of Jeff and Grungled. The grocery store voice-over, “Attention shoppers!”, says Pearl-Styles, is the sound track of the patriarchy “enforcing certain rules.”

And as for the Fringe, it’s a big draw in Pearl-Styles’ new world north of the border. “One of the big excitements to moving to Edmonton was the Fringe, getting to be part of the Fringe scene, getting to know the Fringe community.”

It’s a deep dive, since in addition to Jeff and Grungled KNOW FRILLS, (which runs through Aug. 23), Common Ground Arts (and their new managing producer) have curated the five other Fringe shows with it in the lineup at the 100-seat Mile Zero Dance BYOV on festive Beer Street. “I tried to curate a variety of pieces, from Edmonton, Canada, internationally.” And the line-up there includes a large-cast dance show (Storybook Skin), a puppet show (12 Angry Puppets), a musical satire (Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour), a solo show (tony wrestles a stranger), and a couple of two-handers (Gerald, Jeff and Grungled…).

“So many requests,” says Pearl-Style happily. “So hard to pick!”

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Tiny Bear Jaws’ Elena Belyea takes the Greeks for a spin at the Fringe in a new version of The Oresteia: ‘gore (i want to disappear)’

Posted on August 9, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown, Sarah Emslie, Kristen Padayas, Autumn Strom in ‘gore (i want to disappear)’, Tiny Bear Jaws, photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What’s something I haven’t tried before?” Elena Belyea asked themself a year ago.

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Now, there’s a question for Belyea to take to their seventh Fringe festival. They’ve written provocative dramas (Smoke, Cleave) and dark comedies, a site-specific teen house party (Everyone We Know Will Be There), an apocalyptic dance musical for a contactless world (I Don’t Even Miss You), a satire with bite, (Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable) — all for their 11-year-old indie theatre company Tiny Bear Jaws (with creative partner Tori Morrison). And they’ve acted in them, sometimes directed them, too. They’ve collaborated with theatres across the country. They’ve done stand-up, and a “stand-up hybrid” (This Won’t Hurt, I Promise); they’ve created and performed TikTok videos, and a live web series, for their queer sketch comedy duo Gender? I Hardly Know Them (with Sydney Campbell).

But they’ve never before tried an adaptation. Gore (I want to disappear), premiering Thursday midnight at the Fringe, is the first. And firsts are something the Fringe is for, as many a veteran theatre artist in this theatre town has discovered. What Belyea and their cast of four have been working on since last summer is Greek and ancient. The Oresteia by Aeschylus is a trilogy of linked tragedies that chronicles an extremely dysfunctional family, The House of Atreus, in all its violence, murder, treachery, vengeance, curses, sexual heat, weird dealings with the gods….

Belyea and Aeschylus go back. The former had originally gone west, as a college kid, enrolled in creative writing at the University of Victoria, and the latter was on a reading list. “I was convinced I was going to write fiction,” Belyea says. They lucked out with an inspiring theatre history prof (Dr. Jennifer Wise), and a playwright was born. Did you know, for example, that “an oracle predicted that Aeschylus’s end would come from the sky, so he spent the majority of life indoors,” till he stepped out one day “and got killed by a turtle shell dropped by a seagull”? Belyea remains struck by the bizarre combo of tragedy and dark comedy in this “not very epic way to die.” Nectar from the gods for Tiny Bear Jaws sensibility.

Belyea and the cast “would meet once a month to try scenes out, on our feet. And we’d go into a rehearsal hall once in a while to play with design elements.” It’s the long-form way to create work.

“I need more hats,” declares Belyea, who’s the producer, writer, director, and also production designer — assisted by technical consultation with the designer (and Tiny Bear Jaws partner) Morrison on “how to set up my tech system” to fit within the Fringe constraint of quick turn-around between shows. “A simple set,” as they describe the gore (I want to disappear) design: “a bunch of practical lights and plastic.” Morrison also contributed a sound design that includes covers of songs “from artists I really love,” like Peaches.

Sarah Emslie, Autumn Strom, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kristen Padayas in ‘gore (i just want to disappear), Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

“There’s a lot of violence” in The Oresteia, as Belyea points out. After all, in the very first scene Agamemnon kills his first-born daughter Iphigenia on request from the gods, so his forces can secure a fair wind to sail to Troy and rescue his wife’s sister Helen. In Belyea’s version, none of the violence is depicted onstage in a naturalistic way. With movement designer Ainsley Hillyard, “we worked on different ways of (conveying) the inner world, and feelings, of the characters.”

The tricky thing about adaptations, Belyea has found, is to assess “what are parts of the story that need to be changed, because they bug me, or to be more complex and interesting?” and what are changes that would fundamentally alter the story?

Gore (i want to disappear) “takes place in ancient Greece, but they have phones and cars…. Die-hard House of Atreus fans would be ‘Hey, wait a second!’. But I’m OK with that,” they say. “I wanted (to explore) some of the questions I have about the world right now….” And the lens through which the story is seen is queer and trans: Orestes and Electra, brother and sister, “are both queer in some way … and Electra is trans.”

All four actors are double-cast, which makes for complicated logistics. “Each actor plays a Fury (one of the chorus of goddesses of vengeance) and two other characters….” In the same scene, Sarah Emslie plays both Agamemnon and the daughter Iphigenia he’s killing, simultaneously. “Wild to pull off!” Geoffrey Simon Brown plays both Cassandra the oracle and Orestes, who kills his mother Clytemnestra in the original; Autumn Strom is both Electra, Orestes’ revenge-driven sister, and Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. And Kristen Papayas plays both Clytemnestra and Orestes’ gay lover Pylades, both soldiers back from the war “trying to re-integrate into a normal life.”

A central question that Belyea and the actors returned to again and again in rehearsal has a contemporary kick, too. “Being a person means we all go through a variety of challenging moments, moments and changes that shape us irrevocably. So what does moving forward look like if your idea of ‘forward’ has changed? When do we let ourselves be defined by an event? And when do we try to move past it?”

“So much of the play hinges on revenge!” Here’s the crux, says Belyea. “Something happens. What next?”

Gore (i want to disappear), starring Sarah Emslie, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Autumn Strom, Kristen Padayas, runs at the Fringe  (Stage 3, Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns) Thursday through Aug. 19. Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca.

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Playing around in the 209-show universe: further thoughts on what to see at this year’s Fringe

Posted on August 7, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Take a chance! The 209-show Fringe universe is yours to play around in, starting Thursday. And this is no time to be daunted by the choice. Be tickled instead, and curious. Did you peek at 12thnight’s preliminary survey of 13 intriguing prospects? It’s here. And here are some further thoughts about what you might catch.

Making it up as you go along: the Fringe seems to bring out the improviser in theatre artists, and the crazy ambitious (or just plain crazy) in career improvisers. Impossibly inventive forms of “making shit up,” as the Rapid Fire neon-lit mantra has it, are everywhere: murder mysteries, entire musicals, a battle of genres (really, it’s from The Kinkonauts), It’s a town where theatre and improv were always in bed together, and the affair continues at the Fringe. In The Dinner Party, for example, Rapid Fire stars Marg Lawler and Joey Lucius invite special guest improvisers to the dinner table (site of some of theatre’s most traumatizing dramas), to see what happens. In Three Ladies, Belinda Cornish and Jana O’Connor invite a guest for tea and gossip. In Solovela, Miami-based Diane Jorge improvises an entire telenovela, with multiple characters, based on an audience member’s real-life love story.

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Joe Vanderhelm, the agile improviser who introduced audiences to A.I. as a novelty Fringe playwright five summers ago with Plays By Bots — A.I set the stage with an unfinished script and the company improvised the rest — has pivoted, as he says. “The tone” of our interactions with the invading A.I. hordes has changed. With PLAYS BY [BLANKS], Dramatron is unplugged. And, as billed, “humanity has reclaimed the stage.” Vanderhelm and company go a step further, with new scripts (the audience picks from three every show) each written by “an everyday person.”   

“My show is so much about community, in that the format allows me to bring in guests from out of town, so I figured I would look to my community to find potential playwrights,” says the affable Vanderhelm, one of Rapid Fire’s top improvisers.“I recruited my parents, and my sister. My 7-year old daughter teamed up with one of her friends to write one. My goddaughter wrote one. I reached out to teacher pals, and my neighbours down the street,” along with  two members of the Spoken Word Youth Choir.

“Convincing them to write a play wasn’t too hard,” says Vanderhelm, evidently one of world’s most persuasive people. “I took some pressure off them … they don’t have to write a full play, just the first eight or 10 pages, enough to set up who the characters are and for the performers to get what’s going on. The script still runs out partway through and the performers improvise the end. Another pressure I could remove was the need for it to be ‘good’.”

Ron Pederson, Mark Meer, Jacob Banigan in Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Fruit Of Our Purloins. Photo supplied.

And, of course, the ultimate in Fringe-themed improv is back. Die-Nasty’s annual Fringe edition, a nightly serial with its ensemble of deluxe improvisers (plus guests) as Fringe-y characters. And Gordon’s Big Bald Head returns — Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, Ron Pederson — returns to the Varscona stage, a venerable Fringe tradition directed by “the hand of fate” as billed, in Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Fruit of Our Purloins. Their crazy ne plus ultra proposition: they’ll improvise their own version of any Fringe show in this year’s 209-show edition. The audience picks the show.   

Wanna simplify your life? Don’t write a new musical and premiere it at the Fringe. Amazingly, lots of artists do, and on a scale — surprisingly big or surprisingly small. Pork & Beans: Attorneys at Law, from Top Bunk Theatre (Soup & Hogan’s 16th Annual Hotdog Eating Contest, Sam’s Clam & Oyster Bar) is one, starring a couple of Harvard classmates-turned ’70s Chicago lawyers. The cast of 10 in Lauren Boyd and Elizabeth Janzen’s production includes the musical’s co-creators Ethan Lang and Sam Daly. The eight-member cast of David Son’s musical comedy A Hellmark Christmas Musical Parody start with heartwarming seasonal magic, a small-town homecoming, a romance rediscovered, etc. And then really really move on, to a dark secret about Christmas spirit. Hey, you can tell it’s fa-la-la-la-la  fare: the warnings include “adult language/content, cartoonish violence, death, drugs, alcohol, gunshots, sexual content, smoke/fog, and violence.”

At the other end of the scale, it might be even trickier to create a two-actor musical. And that’s what Walters and Watt have done with their new sailor-meets-mermaid romance The Shape of Seamen (by Jacquelin Walters, starring Nicole Maloney and Michael Watt). Anna Leslie and Michael Long’s new and evocatively named “light-hearted apocalyptic musical comedy” has an even shorter cast list. The Last 1.5 Librarians North of Lethbridge joins a very exclusive musical theatre subset: librarian characters. But, hey, in an age of book-burning governments they may be the new action heroes.

Not an ensemble player? Working in mysterious ways (like some directors we know)? God is doing two shows at the Fringe, both of them, interestingly, are one-man productions: God! The One-Man Show and God Is A Scottish Drag Queen, the former (by and starring Rich Potter) from New York City, the latter (the latest instalment in His hit series by Mike Delamont) from Lake Country in the Okanagan.

The classics: Shakespeare, who’s an old hand at fringing, is lying pretty low at this year’s edition, save the solo clown show Hereafter (with its clown protagonist modelled after the Gravedigger in Hamlet), and a new comedy/drama Shakespeare’s Judgment Day, involving an action hero who could have played the Melancholy Dane. But the Greeks are here, ready for action. Superfan, a collective creation by the Theatre Network Summer Academy, directed by Nextfest’s irrepressible Ellen Chorley, is a “rock ’n’ roll fuelled retelling” of Euripides’ The Bacchae, set in a 1964 prep school, with Dionysus a hot guitar player. Tiny Bear Jaws’ gore (I want to disappear), by Elena Belyea, is a four-actor version of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. The Fringe is full of family dysfunction, but hell, in the screwed-up family stakes, The House of Atreus gets a gold star every time.

Welcome home (your green onion cake awaits). Amongst the homecomings at the Fringe, Dammitammy Productions, with a new edition (and cast and orchestrations) of Rebecca Merkley’s delightful Rivercity The Musical, which premiered at the Fringe a decade ago. The characters we know and love from the Archie comic books step brightly forth from Rivercity High on the last day of school, singing (Merkley’s clever musical theatre songs) and dancing and bending the shape of the classic love triangle.

In a fusion of veteran and new young talent that’s pure Fringe, Susan Sneath, who was part of the very first Fringe in 1982, returns to the festival after a 20-year retirement, to co-star (with Mark Guerrero) in Seanchai, a 2024 Gavin Bradley play, and inaugurate a new company, Rua Theatre, that Bradley and Amanda Samuelson have started. All about storytellers and the oral Irish tradition.

A very Fringe irony: Murder Plot, one of Trevor Schmidt’s two new plays premiering at the Fringe premiering at the  Fringe, is about, yes,  a homicide — “six suspects, one detective, no clue.” The Novus Actors are all lawyers and know about such things.

And consider this option, a bargain at the price: a bunch of your favourite Fringe performers in one show, different every performance. Story Story Lie, from Winnipeg’s Tits Up Productions, gathers a trio of top-of-the-galaxy Fringe stars and they tell unbelievable stories. Two are true and one is a lie. You can ask questions, and the first to spot the liar wins.

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