Surprise! Finding yourself at Found 2022: the festival of art in unexpected places

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Dig by Breanna Barrington, Found Festival 2022. Photo suppied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At  Found 2022 you could find yourself … following a story into a fort in the river valley. You could find yourself in a hidden nook of Old Strathcona, in a park, in a garbage enclosure in an alley. You could even find yourself in a ‘theatre’, or at a table outside one. 

That’s the thing about Found, the festival that returns Thursday for an 11th annual weekend of surprising encounters with art, artists, and audiences. There’s magic in adventuring outside the concept ‘theatre’,  both the space and the experience — and “having your expectations subverted, in a weird way,” as Whittyn Jason puts it. “I’m honoured to be at the helm of a festival where that’s at the core of it.”

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Designer/scenographer Jason (they/them) is Found’s incoming director. And along with Mac Brock, playwright/ actor/ administrator who’s Found’s new managing producer, they’re explaining their attraction to surprising interactions between artists and their audiences. It’s everywhere in this year’s live multi-disciplinary line-up, a mash-up of theatre, dance, music, poetry, visual art that sets you in motion, map or ticket in hand, from Found Fest headquarters, the Backstage Theatre and the patio outside it.

Jason and Brock have curated the line-up from submissions — save one project pitched to Found in 2019, and deferred from 2020. Perfect Strangers, the brainchild of innovative Vancouver duo June Fukumura and Keely O’Brien of  Popcorn Galaxies, is perhaps the most audacious experiment of them all. 

Perfect Strangers, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

Audience members who’ve never met are paired up for a walking journey through the Strathcona neighbourhood. And at curated stops along their route through the ‘hood, there are games, moments, experiences for them to share and react to, and leave a trail of Post-Its to record their impressions.

“It’s not a narrative in the theatrical sense,” says Brock. “It’s a development … an experience you wouldn’t have had with someone you wouldn’t otherwise meet.” Fukumura and O’Brien, who’ve spent weeks in Edmonton sussing out locations, have been “so thoughtful how to make a safe, engaging, meaningful experience for two people who may have little or nothing in common.” 

And who knows? Jason laughs. “You might make a new friend. Or a new enemy.”

Jason is a five-year veteran Found artist themself. “One of the first pieces I was ever commissioned for was a public art installation for the Found beer garden in 2017. I made cactuses made out of clothes and fabric…. A lot of my friends were moving, and trying to get rid of their stuff.” Since then they’ve even experimented with film for Found. 

Bringing a design background to the festival is a natural. The “truth through materials” design mantra prompts found-space choices like, say, producing a living room drama in someone’s actual living room (instead of trying to re-create a living room on a theatre stage). “If you’re doing a fight in a park, do it in a park!” says Jason. “It engages the audience in a different way…. There’s a sliver of that in Found.”

Big Feelings, Small World, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

In Big Feelings, Small World, designer/ model-builder Skye Grinde partners with three different artists, a poet, a musician and a playwright, to create miniature models that are mini-captures of  stories and memories. Grinde locates them in familiar locations in Old Strathcona, and adds an audio track accessible by QR code.

“What gets me excited about Found Fest,” says Brock, “is getting audiences to re-familiarize and re-contextualize places they know and love. And it’s really urgent right now, getting people out into the community again, re-engaging with public events and businesses. Being out in the community. Finding a little magic in places we walk by every day.” 

There are plays-in-progress at this year’s Found Fest (“we’re planting seeds for what shows are coming down the line,” says Brock”). From Steven and Nicole Sobolewski, Found Festival’s 2022 Fresh AiR artists-in-residence, is Gym Class Queer-Roes, their debut as theatre creators. This piece, about the queer community within a fictional gym, gets an in-progress reveal in the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Since Whittyn and Brock have re-thought Fresh AiR as two-year venture, Found 2023 will see a full production, in an actual gym.

003_Playback, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

At Found you could find yourself participating actively in the creation of an innovative movement piece — online. That’s the ‘found space’ for 003_Playback, the work of Vancouver’s Caroline MacCaull. In a live-streamed choose-your-own-adventure way that goes far beyond rhetoric or reactions in a chat box, “it asks the audience directly to have a tangible, visible impact on what they’re seeing,” as Brock puts it.

“They vote on how the piece expands and breathes and changes and moves,” says Jason. “They can change camera angles and lighting; they make decisions that change their viewing experience…. The audience has the ability to be a creator.”

Former festival director Beth Dart and her team were tasked with the full digital shift of 2020, as Brock says. “And the something that happened, the experience with digital and online, is now encoded in Found’s DNA…. We’re intentionally moving forward with that, and the new opportunities to be found in it.” Jason adds, “because 003_Playback lives exclusively in an online world, the audience could be anywhere.” 

It’s a testament to Fringe TV, “the amazing infrastructure for film and theatre broadcast” built by the Fringe in the pandemic years,” Brock says, “that it actually made more sense to bring the artists here to do the (live-streamed) show than to do it in Vancouver. 

Another exploration of technology, this one designed for in person experience, is BASK, which assembles the work of queer artists and plays with queerness, queer identities and perspectives. As billed it’s “a durational projection mapping installation,” the creation of Calgary projection artist/ animator Mackenzie Bedford. You’ll find it shaping to surfaces in (and possibly outside) the Backstage Theatre. 

Perhaps the most original (and direct) invitation to the audience comes from visual artist Breanna Barrington and Dig. After all, as Brock says, laughing, “in what other festival do you have to source 300 to 500 pounds of soil to pack into a garbage enclosure?” 

Jason laughs. “A gardening festival, I would imagine.” 

For the first two days of the festival, Dig asks viewers to contribute used objects, broken knick-knacks, “clean no-longer-usable things,” to be buried in the dirt. Saturday afternoon, “they will emerge from the dirt,” to be “activated” in a largely improvised performance by Barrington as she explores consumerism and its ecological impact, and the climate crisis … through trash. 

You don’t need to leave empty-handed. Bring a receptacle on Sunday, and “at the end of the day you can take home some dirt and have it live in your own garden,” says Jason. 

And there is, it need hardly be said, a party. The Hoe Down, happening Saturday night at the Backstage, is curated by Exstepmom, aka Salem Zurch. And it’s your chance to dress up country-glam. “We encourage DIY,” says Jason, an expert on the subject. Declares Brock, “it’s us re-claiming Alberta!”

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2022

Company: Common Ground Arts Society

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave. and environs, plus Fort Edmonton Park. 

Running: July 7 to 10

Tickets, lineup, schedule, show descriptions: commongroundarts.ca

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Sexual assault, scorched earth, and the fire that burns: Smoke, a review

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Gabe Richardson, Jade Robinson in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Smoke is both of the air and the earth. And so is Elena Belyea’s challenging and elusive play, getting its Edmonton premiere at Co*Lab in a Tiny Bear Jaws production with two casts.  

Smoke is set in the smouldering ruins of a relationship that has either burned out entirely, or maybe hasn’t. And at the centre of it, the hot ember so to speak, is a sexual assault and the related question of consent. And since Smoke is questing for clarity through the smoke-filled territory of gender, and audiences assumptions about gender, Jenna Rodgers’s production alternates casts: one night the relationship is heterosexual, the next night queer.

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We meet two post-collegiate characters who are, not coincidentally, both aspiring artists, one a poet and one a storyteller. And, as artists do, they use the raw materials of real life to create. Aiden (always played by Jade Robinson) is writing the once-upon-a-time fable of a town razed to the ground by “a giant fire,” re-built built over and over again only to burn again. We see Jordan (played by Gabriel Richardson the night I saw Smoke), doing final edits on a volume of verse called “Bloom,” at a book launch, reading a poem called Anxiety. The sound design (by Daniela Fernandez) has an uneasy kind of anxious buzz to it. 

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, the second cast in the Tiny Bear Jaws production. Photo by Brianne Jang

One night a fateful knocking at Aiden’s door reveals Jordan, there to confront his erstwhile lover about the allegations of sexual assault she’s confided to mutual friends. This presents itself on initial impact, at least to me, as an unwelcome encounter between a victim and her abuser, not least because Aiden is a fragile-looking Asian-Canadian woman and Jordan is, though genial and appealing, a big strapping guy. 

Aiden is a tinderbox of wounded fury. Jordan seems genuinely perplexed. He swears repeatedly he has no idea what she’s talking about, only that she vanished from his life without explanation. And he is believable. It takes a while to unspool time, back to a university party, with all the university party trimmings like an argument and drunk sex. Their memories are very different. What happens, not least to the audience, when two opposing perceptions collide is what Smoke is about — partly. But it’s also about the toxic, unbreathable smoke of trauma.

Belyea’s script is a complex volley of cross-hatched fragments; her ear for cadence is uncanny. The play, like its chosen metaphor, is stoked by accusation and resistance, out-and-out rebuttal, shards of shared memories, manipulatory tactics that get called, or don’t. Ah, and ancillary factors like artistic competitiveness. If there’s such a thing in this country as success as a poet (for another discussion another time), Jordan is gaining traction; Aiden is a collector of rejection notices. 

It’s surprising, moment by moment; Smoke seems (to mix my own metaphors) to come at you in waves that subside momentarily into apparent calm, tiny sparks that flame out in one place and get re-ignited somewhere else. And under Rodgers’ direction, the rhythms of the play are always disconcerting — it’s a nerve-wrackingly watchable experience. And Robinson and Richardson make every moment, even those that are wildly improbable on paper, possible and even plausible, shocking though they are. 

I must admit I have reservations about one of those developments in particular (and wonder how that would play out in the queer relationship version of Smoke that co-stars Hayley Moorhouse). But I must leave it with you, in the interests of not spoiling the surprises that are the infrastructure of the play. 

“This isn’t a story about what caused the fire,” Aiden’s story tells us. “It’s about what happened after….” And so here we are, immersed in a play that’s built on reactions to a sexual assault, while resisting  definitive answers about cause, blame and even the “truth” of the assault. Which leads Smoke, incrementally, away from the he said/she said scenario, unresolvable here, to the burning question of what it will take to satisfy Aiden. And how far Jordan will go to fix a crime he definitely declares he did not commit, as a kind of reparation.   

Here’s a dramatic concept to wrap your wits around: a play that’s built on reactions to a sexual assault that’s not about sexual assault. In a life incinerated by trauma, can you start all over again, from the ground up? Is the scorched earth policy the way to go? Smoke wonders about that; it stays in your lungs.

Check out the 12thnight preview of Smoke here, an interview with playwright Elena Belyea and director Jenna Rodgers.

REVIEW

Smoke

Theatre: Tiny Bear Jaws

Written by: Elena Belyea

Starring: Jade Robinson, Gabriel Richardson (alternate nights) and Hayley Moorhouse (alternate nights)

Where: Co*Lab, 9641 102 A Ave

Running: through July 1

Tickets and masking/vaccination specifics: tinybearjaws.square.site

 

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‘Immigrants get the job done’: Hamilton’s finally here, in a first-rate touring production

Posted on June 23, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Julius Thomas III (right), Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hamilton: it’s epic. It’s crazy rich in its language, music, and theatricality. And it explodes onto the stage with an offer, no, a demand, to focus both history and musical theatre from the outsider perspective.

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It’s been fully seven years (and a wealth, of Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize) since the sensational arrival on Broadway of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s audacious musical. And a lot has happened in the world (not least to the American mythology of greatness). Hamilton finally arrives in Edmonton, in a first-rate, powerfully performed Broadway Across Canada touring production on the Jube stage. And it will leave you dazzled, and a little dazed, at the achievement of it all — both the broad strokes and the layers of detail. 

I’ve seen Hamilton a couple of times before (like many amongst the cheering (and masked) opening night audience I suspect). But it still had that effect on me. You’ll leave buzzed. 

The story playwright/composer/lyricist Miranda tells — in a wild non-stop swirl of hip-hop, jazz, blues, G&S, rock, pop, musical theatre — is about an impoverished orphan immigrant from the Caribbean, who came to New York “longing for something to be part of” and became one of the American founding fathers. 

Julius Thomas III, Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada tour. Photo by Joan Marcus

Hamilton rose fast. He was an assistant to George Washington, a general in the Revolutionary War, a creator of the federal Treasury, a scholar and a pamphleteering defender of the Constitution. He gets a great delayed entrance in Hamilton, after Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and his arch-rival Aaron Burr review, in rap, this improbable biography.  

Anyhow, the story is, to say the least, an unusual choice of subject matter for the American musical theatre, which has hitherto not given much thought to the Federalist Papers. Hamilton hands over the birth-of-the-nation storytelling to performers of colour. And it gives much of the musical to hip-hop, the street-wise form that comes at you in a sassy barrage of cheeky rhyme, crowded with syllables.   

Hamilton, and Thomas Kail’s production, capture the flow of history in contemporary language, movement, music, and look. Paul Tazewell’s costumes attest to that, with their mix of period costumes and androgynous modern dance gear for the chorus. The cast are set in perpetual motion by Andy Blankenbuehler’s stunningly inventive choreography that takes the story non-stop into the urban whirl of New York, into battle, into backroom politics, “the room where it happens.”

Kail’s stagecraft unspools in a seamless flow of scenes. The room where Hamilton happens, in David Korins’s beautiful design, is lined with wood and brick, with hanging ropes, fold-down staircases, moved by human agency not techno effects. The lighting (by Howell Binkley) has sources like rustic lanterns and candles, and it has dramatic meaning. Characters appear in flickering shadows to command the limelight of history, and disappear into blackness.

At the centre, brilliant, ambitious, brash, maddeningly mouthy, energized (kinda like the musical itself) is Alexander Hamilton. And he gets a superb performance, capturing all those qualities, from Julius Thomas III. “I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy, and hungry, and I’m not throwing away my shot,” he declares in song near the outset. Thomas crafts beautifully the arc by which the upstart outsider catapults to success, negotiates tragedy at the intersection of the personal and the political, and then (spoiler courtesy of history) does throw away his shot in a fatal duel with his nemesis Burr.  

Donald Webber Jr. as Aaron Burr, Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada tour. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Burr, the cautious lawyer who is Hamilton’s rival, a man of careful calculation increasingly smoulders with grievance in the course of time, is something of a tragic figure in Hamilton. And Donald Webber Jr. delivers a performance with real resonance.  

Other stand-outs include Darnell Abraham’s soulful George Washington, and Justin Showell’s a raucously funny double-turn as the Marquis de Lafayette in Act I and a flamboyant Thomas Jefferson, the francophile denizen of Monticello (who never did free his slaves), in Act II.  

 In his recurring cameo As King George III, the monarch who famously lost America and went mad, Rick Negron is great fun. The audience cheered so loudly every time he came onstage that my companion, an independence-minded Scot, wondered if it was partly by dint of performing in a country still tied to British royalty. I’ll have to get back to you on that. 

The women of the production are less distinguished. But Victoria Ann Scovens as Eliza, the wealthy Schuyler Hamilton married and the Milika Cherée as Angelica, the sister he didn’t marry, do deliver their pop ballads feelingly. 

The American Dream, long fractured in the realities of the centuries since 1776, has crumbled into dust lately, as we know in a baleful storm of racism, violence, and right-wing backwardness. It gives Hamilton, with its hand-over of idealism and hope to outsiders, a particularly heart-wrenching quality of loss. “If you stand for nothing,” Hamilton says to Burr in Act I, “what’ll you fall for?” 

As this touring production demonstrates, the resourcefulness of theatre artists at the top of their game, unleashed on a groundbreaker of a musical, turns to stage magic that is human, and essentially low-tech. That’s inspiring in itself. Catch yourself a ticket if you can.

REVIEW

Hamilton

Broadway Across Canada

Book, Music, Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Directed by: Thomas Kail

Choreographed by: Andy Blankenbuehler

Starring: Julius Thomas III, Donald Webber Jr., Victoria Ann Scovens, Darnell Abraham, Justin Showell, Milika Cherée, Rick Negron

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through July 10

Tickets: ticketmaster.com

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Where there’s fire there’s … Smoke: assault, consent and gender in a play with two casts

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

Gabe Richardson, Jade Robinson in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Smoke, getting its Edmonton premiere Thursday at Co*Lab, a woman opens her apartment door to discover that the past has showed up.

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Aiden’s -ex is there to confront her about allegations she’s made to a mutual friend that she was sexually assaulted at a university party two years before.

“I’ve never had a play where people have had such different interpretations of both characters,” says playwright Elena Belyea, the artistic director and presiding muse of the sharp-toothed indie theatre Tiny Bear Jaws. Director Jenna Rodgers calls it “a play with two protagonists…. Both characters are likeable and deeply, evidently, flawed. A lot of the work is to continue practising not taking a side.” 

The subject matter of Smoke is flammable, to be sure, and nothing if not timely. And the provocation is further fuelled, intriguingly and unavoidably, by the double casting and considerations of gender. Aiden is played by Jade Robinson and the text remains “98 per cent the same,” says Belyea. But on some nights Jordan is played by a man (Gabriel Richardson), some nights by a woman (Hayley Moorhouse). 

“The casting,” says Rodgers, who’s also the dramaturge, “forces us to think about the way we map reactions onto different bodies.” The actors’ two takes on Jordan, though armed with the same words, are very different. And, Belyea adds, “Jade’s performance is definitely different depending on who she’s playing with…. It’s exciting to see that actors can do so many things with the same text.”

“In a play about sexual assault, the automatic assumption is that the sex of the perpetrator is male and the sex of the victim is female. And that is not always the case.”  

Smoke has smouldered for a long time. It premiered at Downstage Theatre in Calgary in 2019 after development in Toronto, at Nightwood Theatre’s Write From The Hip Playwriting Unit and workshops at Tarragon. But it was in Edmonton that Belyea (Cleave, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, I Don’t Even Miss You) felt the spark that would become Smoke. 

It was Wild Side’s 2016 production of The Realistic Joneses that “blew my head apart,” says Belyea of the odd and oddly funny play by the American writer Will Eno about two couples and the complicated dynamics in perception and language that underpin them. “I went home, still buzzing, and started writing that night.” The scene in which Jordan is at the door asking to come in was the start of Smoke.

The news of the moment contributed to Smoke, too, as Belyea explains — for one thing, allegations about Jian Ghomeshi as a serial sexual abuser; for another, the disastrous Fort McMurray fire. So it started with the encounter between “a woman and her parter trying to unpack together whether a sexual assault occurred,” says Belyea. Then “based on my experience as a queer woman, lamenting some of the assumptions people automatically jump to about gender,” other dramatic possibilities occurred to her. “How would the play would be different if Jordan was played by a woman?”

Would questions of sexual assault, rape and consent be different in queer relationships? Rodgers, who’d worked as a dramaturge on the Downstage production, was fascinated to examine audience assumptions and “the ways an audience might respond differently to the same text. … No matter what mental training we have, no matter what we think we understand about consent.” As she points out, theatre people “just assume we have so much in common…. Smoke is “a very large opportunity to encourage conversation in a community that’s often caught preaching to the choir.” 

Says Belyea “I don’t know if I’ve ever had a show where I hear the audience so much — people having opinions, people being surprised….”

“Both characters are, intentionally, really likeable.” Both the script and Rodgers’ direction “actively disrupt the archetype of what a good survivor looks like, what a potential abuser looks like.” Each version of the play “is made to hold up on its own,” Belyea says. Even if audience members don’t see both versions of the show, just knowing that there’s another cast, other possibilities of presenting the script, changes things. “In a strange little way,” says Rodgers, the three actors “do kind of function as an ensemble.”  

“The main question I had while writing Smoke,” says Belyea, “is what if someone had hurt me, or betrayed me profoundly what would it take for me to forgive them? Or if  I found out I had caused immense harm to someone that I had loved very very much, what lengths would I go to try and repair that?”

At a distance, Smoke, with its serious set-up and subject matter under investigation, might seem like “a 90-minute slog” of a prospect, Belyea says cheerfully. “But it’s also a fun and funny play I think… That’s part of what makes it uncomfortable!”  

And, says Rodgers, “I think there’s an ambitious amount of spectacle for a little space.” You may anticipate talking heads. “But there are also some aesthetic surprises!”

PREVIEW

Smoke

Theatre: Tiny Bear Jaws

Written by: Elena Belyea

Directed by: Jenna Rodgers

Starring: Jade Robinson (Aiden), Hayley Moorhouse (Jordan), Gabe Richardson (Jordan)

Where: Co*Lab, 9641 102A Ave.

Running: Thursday through July 1

Tickets: Tiny Bear Jaws 

 

 

 

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Sex in the city, hypocrite puritans, corrupt politicians … who’s ever heard of that? Measure For Measure in the park

Posted on June 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Priya Narina and Michael Peng, Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The opening image of Nancy McAlear’s production of Measure For Measure, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s companion piece to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hawrelak Park this summer, is a male pole dancer in a cage.

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It’s perpetual party time in Vienna (it’s been called Shakespeare’s Sex in the City). “The city,” says a disembodied voice by way of introduction to a genuinely strange and eerily modern play, “is about to come down hard on law-breakers.” 

Ah, but what if the cage is way more threatening than the pole, and the enforcers of righteousness are themselves corrupt? Hypocritical puritans in politics? Ring a bell anyone, in the relentless right-ward drift of the times?

The characters have their moments, but they’re all morally ambiguous. You can call Measure For Measure a ‘problem comedy’: the biggest problem might be the queasy open-ended finale that McAlear takes in hand and reinvents.

Really, Measure For Measure is not an easy play to like. Maybe that’s why Freewill has never staged it before (it’s a gutsy choice for this cast of veterans and newcomers). But, as McAlear’s production demonstrates, it is a play to get caught up in — absorbing in its densely worded, intricate arguments about justice and morality, leadership, order and liberty, the political system and the church.

Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

In the licentious chaos into which the city has fallen, the Duke (Michael Peng), who’s been a lenient ruler, opts to leave town. And he transfers authority for enforcing disregarded laws to his deputy Angelo (Vincent Forcier), a rigidly upright, cold-eyed moralist whose “blood is very snow-broth.” Then the Duke sticks around, in a monk’s disguise. And you don’t ever quite know why, except that the mystery monk sets in motion a variety of plot devices, like the old bed switcheroo, that lighten the tragic colours. 

The Duke doesn’t have the cajones to do his own dirty work? He’s got a case of workplace burnout, and needs some ‘me time’? He already suspects Angelo of not being the moral purist he claims to be? Or maybe he wants to spy on his home town to suss out the political climate? 

In McAlear’s production, Peng’s intriguing performance, full of silences, hesitations and question marks, suggests a character thinking on his feet, looking for tentative answers to a mystery that might be … himself. Either that, or the Duke has been in therapy too long — it is Vienna after all, the good doctor Freud’s home town. 

Anyhow, the crux of the plot is that in the new puritan climate, a young man Claudio (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri) has been sentenced to death for knocking up his fiancée Juliet  (Dayna Lee Hoffman). And Claudio’s chaste sister Isabella (Priya Narine), a nun-in-progress, goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. 

That’s when Angelo, poster boy for probity, finds himself attracted to Isabella and makes a fateful proposition: her brother’s life for her virginity. She’s horrified, and refuses the offer: “more than our brother is our chastity.” Which is an austere line to take, as poor Claudio argues when he changes his mind in a great jail scene between brother and sister. “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot….”

Vincent Forcier, Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

What gives Measure for Measure its disturbing twilight ambiguity is that no point of view can be dismissed outright — all get some heft, in densely worded confrontations or, especially in the case of Angelo, soliloquies. And McAlear’s cast really dig in. In the meaty role of Angelo, the bureaucrat in the conservative brown suit who’s more tempted by resistance than by easy vice as he’s shocked to realize, Forcier conveys an unwelcome sense of discovery. Angelo’s gradual resort to threats is scarily plausible. “Say what you will. My false outweighs your truth.”

Isabella is one of the most challenging “heroines” in the canon, as the quotation marks suggest. She can seem awfully fierce and unappealing. But in her persuasive performance, newcomer Narine mounts Isabella’s arguments to Angelo for mercy with real eloquence: “it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant….” 

As for the comedy in Measure For Measure, the urban demi-monde, fractious and licentious (costumed zestfully by Alison Yanota), is where it’s at, starring a rancid and amusing triumvirate: Brett Dahl as a sassy, dissolute man-about-town, Ian Leung as a smart-mouth worldly pimp, Nadien Chu as the cackling proprietor of a “house of resort” in the ‘burbs. Thanks to the dimbulb Constable Elbow (Troy O’Donnell), a repository of malapropisms, law enforcement is incomprehensible buffoonery.  

And Aaron Macri’s score, which veers between an ominous industrial buzz and thundering party rock, captures a crucial feature of the whole enterprise.  

To say that the ending of Measure For Measure is weird is something of an understatement. McAlear’s production goes to some pains to solve the problem that, after many convolutions, Isabella ricochets from one indecent proposition to another, even more bizarre, from the Duke himself, in and out of disguise. She, along with pretty much everyone onstage, is thunderstruck. In this version, we’ll see the women, all of them wronged in one way or another in the course of the play, moved to bond.  

The reinvented ending solves one problem and leaves another: the Duke himself. As the play closes he tortures everyone by insisting at sadistic length, as both a faux monk and himself, that Claudio has been executed although he hasn’t, and threatening many people, including the kindly jailer (Sarah Gale), with jail time. On preview night Wednesday, a formation of cynical gulls crossed the sky just then, squawking with laughter. 

Peng’s performance, full of subtlety and nuance, has made a good case for the Duke as a conflicted authority figure. But the more he’s in charge, the more manipulative he gets.  Maybe the contradictions of the play, as it explores abuses of male power at every level, are exactly what makes it relevant. In any case, it’s a fascinating and welcome chance to catch a rarely seen Shakespeare play in the great outdoors.

And since the city plans to shut the entire park for three years, a stunning lack of civic creativity, see Freewill at their creative work while you can. 

REVIEW

Measure For Measure

Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022

Written by: you know who

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Priya Narine, Vincent Forcier, Michael Peng, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Ruth Alexander, Ian Leung, Nadien Chu, Brett Dahl, Kijo Eunice Gatama,  Moses Kouyate, Troy O’Donnell, Meegan Sweet, Dean Stockdale, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Sarah Gale.

Running: through July 10, odd dates and July 10 matinée, alternating with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even dates and most matinée.s

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com or at the gate  

 

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More about folly than love: A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings Freewill Shakespeare back to the park. A review

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Nadien Chu as Titania and Ruth Alexander as Nicky Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz,

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Blow blow thou winter wind…”  oops, wrong play. 

After two years of wandering the town in small-cast entertainments, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival is back on the big stage in Hawrelak Park. And on Tuesday’s blustery, unremittingly soggy preview night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first of this summer’s alternating Shakespeares, capricious Mother Nature, who always gets an “ambience director” credit in Freewill productions, seemed to have screwed up her cues. You mean, it wasn’t going to be The Tempest? Or maybe Macbeth? Or the shipwreck in Twelfth Night?

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But that’s the fun, and the challenge, of outdoor Shakespeare on a summer’s eve in Edmonton. Sometimes the counter-intuitive impulses are bright sunshine instead of fog on the ghost of Hamlet’s father; sometimes it buckets down on the big festive marriage party at the end of As You Like It.  

You wouldn’t call Dave Horak’s kooky, high-spirited, aerobic production of Shakespeare’s early and most popular comedy — a web of romantic miscues and entanglements woven into no fewer than four plots in intersecting worlds — dreamy, or even Dream-y, exactly. It’s set in a world that’s gone somehow askew. 

Alison Yanota’s set is all wonky angles, brick-faced doorways and bright-coloured panels, a mash-up of the vertical and horizontal, the aftermath of some sort of earthquake perhaps, set down in the park. In a play where Wall is actually a character (later on in the play-within-the-play), one wall has a road with a yellow line going straight up, with a vertically placed manhole cover like a porthole, and a green compost bin sticking out. Characters appear and exit from it, along with lawn chairs, “magic” wands, and assorted props.

Have we perhaps, like a collective Alice, tumbled down the manhole into a world where Titania the fairy queen (Nadien Chu) talks about Nature in chaos, “the whistling wind,” “contagious fogs,” flooding rivers, the altering of seasons? O, wait….

Anyhow, there’s no “bank where the wild thyme blows,” as per fairy king (Ian Leung) Oberon’s idyllic vision. But there is a park, very visible, surrounding us. And as Yanota’s very odd assortment of costumes suggest, the play’s urbanite humans seem to be sprouting. The courtiers, led by Duke Theseus (Leung) and his captive bride Hippolyta (Chu) are growing leaves on their heads, flowers studding their their lapels, branches entwining their cloaks and jackets. Ditto the quartet of Athenian lovers (Freewill newcomers all). The guys, Lysander (Vincent Forcier) and Demetrius (Moses Kouyate), have outsized collars where flowers have popped up. The gals, Hermia (Kijo Eunice Gatama) and Helena (Brett Dahl), are flower shops on legs.  

The fairies are kitted out as the kind of party people who improvise vintage from thrift shops. Puck (Meegan Sweet), the “merry wanderer of the night” and instigator of the romantic mismatching, looks like a dealer in a Vegas casino. And in Horak’s production, fairy magic is deliberately and amusingly low-tech — human you might say.   

Brett Dahl as Helena, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

That’s one of the hallmarks of this version of Dream. It’s a romantic comedy that’s more about the nature of human absurdity than the nature of love. The lover plot — four young people ricocheting furiously through the woods ending up with the wrong person and in pursuit of the right person (or vice versa) — is set in motion when a father (Troy O’Donnell as Edges) invokes Athenian law to insist his daughter Hermia (Gatama) either renounce the man she loves (Forcier as Lysander) and marry Demetrius (Kouyate) the man he’s chosen for her — or else die or become a nun, either of which would be a real drag.

Meanwhile Helena (Dahl) has the hots for Demetrius and … but heck, you probably won’t care who ends up with whom. Chemistry isn’t involved. And there is no quiz next period. Andrés Moreno’s pre-show Thou Art Here puppet version of Dream gets a kick out of the plot complications in a little tent at the top of the grassy hill.

Brett Dahl, Moses Kouyate, Kijo Eunice Gatama, Vincent Forcier in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Humans in love, as Horak’s 15-actor production tells us, are figures of fun, ridiculously overheated, indistinguishable, and on short fuses. Kouyate and Forcier play Demetrius and Lysander as grotesques with no anger-management filters. Forcier, especially, has a streak of the smart-ass sardonic about him, Gatama and Dahl, who translate girly friendship and lovestruck intensity into high-kicking choreographed brawling when crossed (fight direction Anastasia St. Amand, choreography Amber Borotsik). Deep-voiced Dahl gets lots of laughs for Helena’s high-dudgeon outrage at offences against maidenly propriety.   

Meegan Sweet as Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

No wonder Puck is amused, in a detached way, by their dopey antics. Oberon’s fairy fixer is a veritable repository of malicious amusement in Sweet’s original performance. Puck has been at the human circus too long and is a tad jaded. Leung and Chu preside over this world with regal charm, and command the lyrical verse with authority.

As always in Dream, it’s the “hempen homespuns,” the “rude mechanicals,” who tend to steal the show (Matthew Skopyk’s appealing original score adds tuba parts whenever they’re onstage). They’re theatre people wannabes in workers’ construction jackets—  especially Nick (here, Nicky) Bottom the Weaver, a bossy histrionic stage-struck amateur who magnanimously offers to play all the lead roles. Ruth Alexander, equipped with a Scottish accent you could cut a haggis on, is a hoot. 

Their earnest rehearsals for Pyramus and Thisbe, as beleaguered stage manager Peter Quince (Sarah Gale) divvies up the parts, are amusing and even a bit touching in their generosity for fellow talents. It is, in the terms of a later age, a collective creation with amusing audience trigger warnings — all Bottom-ed out by star power.  You do hope they won’t be  reviewed too harshly by the courtiers when they put on their show. 

And when, as an instrument of Oberon’s revenge against his wife, Bottom is magically endowed with an ass’s head and Titania falls in love with him, Bottom effortlessly insinuates himself into the fairy world. And he brings his native bossiness with him. 

It all starts and ends in dancing. Like Pyramus and Thisbe with its prologue, this Midsummer Night’s Dream gets a prologue too — fairy speeches borrowed from Act II. It’s all, Puck says, about mirth and merriment. And, at the moment in our own world, those are words to live by. 

REVIEW

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022

Written by: you know who

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Ruth Alexander, Ian Leung, Nadien Chu, Brett Dahl, Kijo Eunice Gatama, Vincent Forcier, Moses Kouyate, Priya Narine, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Troy O’Donnell, Meegan Sweet, Dean Stockdale, Michael Peng, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Sarah Gale.

Running: through July 10, even dates and most matinées, alternating with Measure For Measure odd dates and July 10 matinée.

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com or at the gate  

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Their long journeys to Canada and the shoes they wore: The Shoe Project at Workshop West

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To understand someone you must first walk a mile in their shoes. The old truism gets renewed and powerful resonance in the performance event happening at Workshop West this weekend.

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In The Shoe Project, Saturday and Sunday at the Gateway Theatre, immigrant and refugee women share their stories of their journeys to Canada — the why, the how, their struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new identity, a new culture — through a pair of shoes. 

As Workshop West artistic director Heather Inglis explains, 11 years ago novelist Katherine Govier started a course for immigrant women. “Since the BATA Shoe Museum in Toronto offered free space, the venue inspired the central image that focused the course. The Shoe Project was born in that inspiration.

“It was a super-successful initiative,” says Inglis. In the decade that followed, companies — “not all of them theatres, not all with playwrights as mentors” — across the country took up the idea. She caught up with The Shoe Project in Calgary, at One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo in January 2020. 

The experience was unforgettable, she says. “Something about the collecting of voices from around the world, stories about the extraordinary experience of coming to a new country, not knowing the language or the culture, the challenge of learning a language later in life….” 

 “It was so inspirational: the resilience, the perseverance” required to leave one life and be transported to another, says Inglis. “It was narrative, yes, but felt intrinsically theatrical. And I wanted to use the Workshop West platform to amplify it.” 

The result was the Edmonton branch of the national project. And at Workshop West, the mentor has been star playwright Conni Massing. Refugee and immigrant women working on their English were recruited for “a free 10-week course, during which they would write a 600-word story centred on a pair of shoes. “The stories already have a sense of the dramatic; “having a playwright teaching the course gives them a (theatrical) texture,” says Inglis. And since most of the participants have never “performed” (with the exception of a Syrian singer), they got four weeks of coaching in performance by actor/director Alison Wells.

That was two years ago (“feels like 10!” sighs Inglis). Because of the pandemic, the 2021 participants were unable to have a public showing (they previewed online). They’ll be onstage this weekend, along with the 2022 cohorts (the schedule of performances, matinées and evenings, is at workshopwest.org). 

The women come from around the world to be here, and arrive for different reasons, “a huge range of experience and stories,” says Inglis. “Some are fleeing totalitarian governments, or ISIS. Two came here because they fell in love. One woman came because her husband got a job….” Among the women you’ll meet are architects, electrical engineers social workers, a visual artist from Ukraine, a woman whose precipitous exit from Iran was facilitated by the Canadian embassy, a children’s author…. 

Actor/playwright Amena Shehab, a Syrian refugee herself with experience as a journalist and TV producer, coordinated the recruitment of the participants. “Stories of lives written by the women who lived them,” says Inglis of The Shoe Project. “There’s a poignancy to it: these are people living in our community with one degree of separation from the world news.”  

They’re from Afghanitan, Chile, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Togo, Vietnam, Ukraine. They’ve had major journeys to find a life in Canada. And they’re part of what it means to be Canadian.

PREVIEW

The Shoe Project

Theatre: Workshop West

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. 

Running: Saturday and Sunday, 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. each day

Tickets: workshopwest.org 

  

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Let the journeying begin: Northern Light Theatre announces a new season

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The journey. After two years of our collective fretfulness — isolation, scrambling on the ground, pivoting on one foot, running on the spot as the world crumbles — theatre’s favourite metaphor gathers new dimensions.

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Journeys, and travelling, get unusual graphic treatment in Northern Light Theatre’s upcoming 47th season of three productions, announced Monday. And along with the trio of plays — two British and one American, all three by playwrights pretty much unknown here — the company has a new general manager to introduce, Bridget Norris-Jones.

Speaking as we are of journeys, Norris-Jones moved this year from Toronto and arrives at NLT with a history that includes both performance (as actor, dancer, and musician) and management credits at such companies as Nightwood Theatre and the SummerWorks festival.

There is journeying at the centre of all three shows in the 2022-2023 lineup, as artistic director Trevor Schmidt explains. The season opener Squeamish, by New York-based playwright Aaron Marks who specializes in the tricky art of “horror for the stage,” as Schmidt puts it, is “a thriller for one person.… Dark and disturbing, and it gets darker and darker.” 

Davina Stewart in Squeamish, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

In this third of Marks’ trio of “mono-tragedies,” a “grotesque tale of phobia and compulsion” as billed, we meet a therapist (Davina Stewart) in her late ‘50s, who leaves New York for south Texas and the funeral of her nephew, who’s died suddenly. A mental disorder clearly runs in the family, and while she’s there, uh-oh, she goes off her medication. 

Schmidt, whose own one-person thriller We Had A Girl Before You ran at Northern Light in 2020, directs the production, which occupies the spooky season time slot Oct. 20 to Nov. 5. Davina Stewart stars as the shrink with her own shrink. 

There are two flight attendants, long-time friends, in Enough by Scottish playwright Stef Smith, which premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2019. Thirty thousand feet above the ground, their professional lives seem organized, well managed. On the ground below them, though, they have a sense that things are falling apart.  

“Both have a sense of dread,” says Schmidt of the existential angst that fuels the play. They feel the ground shudder; they sense apocalyptic change in the air. “They’re overwhelmed by the news, by climate change.… They’re envious of each other’s lives, the one single in a relationship with a (possibly abusive) man and the other married with children.” 

Schmidt was attracted by the formal intricacies of the play, which unspools “in both the first and third person.” As he describes, “they narrate each other’s stories,” and there’s a weave of “choral work, monologues, dramatized scenes” as Enough explores the relationship between the women and the nuances of female friendship. There are only two actors, “but it’s a big show,” he says. “Lots of light, sound, movement (created by Good Women Dance’s Ainsley Hillyard). It’s gonna be very full.” 

“There’s one play every season that really challenges, frightens me.” And Enough is that one, says Schmidt. His Canadian premiere production (Jan. 19 to Feb 5, 2023) stars Kristin Johnston and Linda Grass.

Dayna Lea Hoffman in A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

The season finale A Hundred Words For Snow is one of the trio of solo plays in Heretic Voices, the volume of published monologues that Schmidt mined for Annie Fox’s Woman Caught Unaware. Schmidt directed the latter at last summer’s Fringe, and his production (starring Davina Stewart) has recently run at Victoria’s UNO Festival, with upcoming dates at the Vancouver Fringe. 

Tatty Hennessey’s A Hundred Words For Snow is the story of a teenage girl who undertakes an expedition to the North Pole with the ashes of her late father, who’d always wanted to go to the Arctic. “It’s about grief, loss, family … a beautiful play,” says Schmidt of the 90-minute piece. His production, starring Dayna Lea Hoffman (currently to be seen at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival), runs April 20 to May 6, 2023. 

Additionally, we can catch the Northern Light Theatre production of Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations, slated to run this past January and cancelled due to COVID, at the upcoming Edmonton Fringe. Davina Stewart directs; Ian Leung and Dave Clarke star as Beethoven and Quasimodo, respectively.  

All three Northern Light productions for 2022-2023 happen in the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn. And subscriptions are available at northernlighttheatre.com. 

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Under the big top: after two years Freewill Shakespeare Festival is back in the park

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Freewill Shakespeare Festival setting up in the Heritage Amphitheatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The geese are milling around backstage in the greenest of green rooms. A crew is planting marigolds on the route between the gate and the stage. The mosquitos are working out their ensemble numbers. Sound cues are floating through the air….

Yes, after two summers on the road the Freewill Shakespeare Festival is back home. Back with a cast of 15 human actors (and assorted squirrels), many of them new to the company, in two alternating high-contrast productions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure For Measure. And the artistic director, in his signature ball cap, is sitting at a picnic table with his laptop pre-rehearsal, at the top of the rise above the seats in the Heritage Amphitheatre.

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“It’s a hard space to do a show in,” says a smiling Dave Horak, who landed his Freewill gig in 2020 at the very pandemical moment the 33-year-old company had to shut down its big-cast full-length outdoor Shakespeares there. “But as soon as we’re back here we just realize what a unique and beautiful space it is… Being in a big tent so we can run rain or shine! There’s nothing like it in the city!” 

“I’m really hoping Edmonton audiences come and see how much of an event this is!”

There’s poignance attached to this joy. For two years, in a test of agility, the resourceful company has been on the move, light on its feet, with moveable, small-cast Shakespeares in unexpected locales. Last year’s Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth played backyards, parks, and communities, and even went to the Fringe, and they sold out all their performances everywhere they went. “We didn’t have to cancel any shows, for weather or COVID,” says Horak. “Surprisingly it all went off with a hitch.” 

And in its travels Freewill gathered new fans. “Our informal surveys showed that the majority of audiences had never seen our big shows in the park….”

Dave Horak, Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director, overlooking the stage pre-rehearsal.

Now Freewill is back in the river valley park where it was born, roughly the same size (and budget of about $650,000)  … for a single summer. Next year, the city plans to close the entire park for three YEARS (unbelievable but true) for renovations. And Freewill will be hunting down another locale, “another park where there won’t be as much space, and doesn’t have a tent…” So, to experience Edmonton’s much-loved outdoor Shakespeare festival in its full fun glory — big set, big cast, concession, puppet versions of the shows, seats under a canopy — the moment is now (June 14 through July 10). 

This summer’s pair of alternating offerings are both called “comedies,” which goes to show how elastic that term can be. Horak directs the romantic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which counts as Shakespeare’s most popular, and produced, play. He chose it to balance it with Measure For Measure, a so-called “problem comedy” that’s something of a rarity. Nancy McAlear’s directs Freewill’s first ever production of it.

There are Dreams aplenty in the Freewill archive. Horak himself was in the last one, which alternated with King Lear in 2013. “I was one of the fairies, Moonshine I think,” in the comedy where mortals and magic sprites, lovers and courtiers and artisans collide in the woods. In fact, in 1988, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Horak’s first Shakespeare ever — as one of the stage-struck rustics, bellows-mender Flute who plays Thisbe, in Dream’s always riotous play-within-a-play — as a Mount Royal student actor in Calgary’s outdoor Shakespeare that inspired our own festival a year later.

“I’ve never wanted to direct it,” he laughs, “because I’ve done it! As a teenager, as soon as a band I loved got popular I stopped listening to it…. But if I ever was going to direct Dream, I’d want to do it outside.” 

Director Nancy McAlear (right) in rehearsal with actor Kijo Eunice Gatama. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

Measure For Measure was McAlear’s choice, an unusual one, and she’s been waiting for the moment for a long time. Ever since she was a theatre student here building props for a Tim Ryan small-cast production a couple of decades ago at the Fringe, the play has fascinated her. Later the Toronto-based actor/director was supposed to be in a university production that didn’t happen. “It’s one of those plays for me; it’s always been in my head.”

“It is a weird play!” says McAlear. “That’s partly what I like about it…. The comedy is so base Shakespeare; the drama is so dark.” The play veers from big-city brothel to nunnery to courtroom. The story wraps around a corrupt justice system, ambiguous political leadership, the knotty moral problem of a virginal heroine who has a chance to rescue her brother from a death sentence for fornication by sleeping with a judge. 

Any play that makes a director wonder ‘what do I do with this?’ is intriguing, says McAlear, who hasn’t been at the festival since acting in the 2015 pairing of Coriolanus and As You Like It. With Measure For Measure she started with an image (the facade of a building sliding off to reveal the toxic ruin beneath) and the problematic ending, and worked backwards. The setting? “the not-so-distant future.” 

As both McAlear and Horak point out, the world has taken care of Measure For Measure’s continuing relevance. Things seem to be spinning backwards into the past, as the rise of the hard right and the Roe vs. Wade overthrow attest. As Horak notes, “there’s nothing about the plot that’s inconceivable now…. You think it’s fantasy, and … whoa!”  

As for Dream, there’s been no shortage of interpretations in the last 400 years. “For me, it’s been pulled apart and done so many different ways in many great and important versions, from Peter Brook to Julie Taymor, I didn’t know what to do with it,” says Horak, who sets his production in “a fantastical post-apocalyptic kind of world; the world has fallen, something has happened.” 

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director Dave Horak (left) in rehearsal with Ian Leung and Nadien Chu. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

But he was at pains to keep things light and fun in his production, he says. “We’ve been working on really playing silly and goofy. Which has been hard this last little while.” He’s been in productions of Dream where there are more edges, he says. The raw material is there: marriage is problematic, people get drugged, the patriarchy is strong. The play, after all, opens with a captive bride and death threats. There’s jealous rage; there’s talk of climate change and the drift towards chaos. “All valid,” says Horak. “But that’s not this one. We haven’t shied away; the text is there…. If we pull it off, it’ll seem very light and easy, But that’s been hard.”  

Of his concept of the fairies Horak says “I flipped it around a little bit” There are versions where the fairies are leather-bar toughies; sometimes they’re acrobats, or malicious demons, or winged sprites in ballet dresses. Horak’s idea, as he explains, is that “the fairies come from the audience; they are the audience, and they look like regular people… but they have magic. They are magic.”

“I don’t want to get too sentimental, but being back after so long without an audience … the audience really is the magic.”

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure For Measure

Directed by: Dave Horak, Nancy McAlear

Starring: Priya Narine, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Troy O’Donnell, Meegan Sweet, Dean Stockdale, Nadien Chu, Moses Kouyate, Michael Peng, Dayna Kea Hoffman, Brett Dahl, Ian Leung, Vince Forcier, Ruth Alexander, Sarah Gale, Kijo Gatama

Running: June 14 to July 10 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream even dates and most matinées; Measure For Measure odd dates and July 10 matinée)

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com or at the gate

 

 

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Re:Construct, at RISER, is a celebration of self in trans-it. A review

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Welcome!” declare the beaming go-for-the-gusto duo who greet us in Re:Construct. “You are SO SO SO … valid.”

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Valid! Hurray! Unless, of course, we’re not. Ah, there’s the rub: All good! Relax! “Do whatever it takes!” — unless we make other people “uncomfortable.” 

“There are no wrong answers … but if you do it wrong….” That’s the crux of Even Gilchrist’s clever and insightful new play, premiering as part of RISER Edmonton 2022. Re:Construct is a playful, theatrical, very personal de:construction (a much-too sombre word for the fun of being in the audience) of gender — and on the notions of perfection that underpin it. To be trans in a world of gender orthodoxies is to be undermined  by doubts and un-validating signals.

In the conception of Gilchrist, a queer trans writer/designer with a witty purchase on theatricality, we’re at a celebration of Self. There’s  even a cake and party hats. Émanuel Dubbeldam and Geoffrey Simon Brown are a trans man and his idealized cis alter-ego, an endearingly nerdy study in physical contrast (the one compact, the other tall and leggy). They speak in unison, a jaunty two-person chorus of upbeat affirmative solidarity — until their voices separate under the pressure of perfectibility. 

I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll be vague. Except to say that the pair invite the audience to join in thinking about body images, and the actors are delightful and funny.  

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang

In its high-spirited way, Re:Construct is the chronicle, a funny and poignant theatrical diary, of a trans man reviewing his beleaguered past self, and wanting to embrace that youthful quester. He’s still shaken by the trauma of being outed on a rugby field (“I begged for death”). Shame and lovelessness are overwhelming: mere survival seems the only reasonable goal and invisibility the only viable option. 

So he disappears, even to his own view. “I don’t feel real,” he tells us, under a barrage of images of perfect male pulchritude (the projection and set design is by Gilchrist). Whittyn Jason’s lighting, a story in itself, flickers between heightened brightness and the romantically celebratory, and every once in a while catches a face, mid-second thought, in silhouette.

It’s when the characters share the memory of a magical moment of sheer, exhilarating romance under the stars, that a life-giving sense of possibility glimmers. “This feeling is possible? I am possible? I could carve myself anew?”

Émanuel Dubbeldam and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Re:Construct, RISER 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang

As “a love letter to my younger self,” Re:Construct is powered by a puckish, surprisingly sturdy sense of absurdity that gives Sarah J Culkin’s production its unusual funny/sad tone and lightness of touch. Hoping for instructions on “how to become the voice inside my head,” our protagonist Googles authenticity and “better ways to be more real.” Understanding the galaxy doesn’t mean connecting the dots in a clichéd way and arriving at the Big Dipper; it means “tilting your perspective” until a powerful new image emerges.

It’s a good day, the pair tells us. The best of all possible days since, against all the odds,  “today I might start to believe in my own invention.” 

Heartbreaking and hopeful, an unexpected show you shouldn’t miss. 

REVIEW

RISER Edmonton 2022  

Re:Construct

Written by: Even Gilchrist

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Starring: Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

 

  

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