A cultural survey of Cuba in a hot dance musical: Mi Habana Querida, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Mi Habana Querida, Cuban Movements Dance at Fringe 2021. Photo by Tyler Baker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Mi Habana Querida (Westbury Theatre)

The idea is intriguing: a cultural survey of Cuba in a dance musical. And so is the Romeo and Juliet theatrical premise, a tale of lovers, one Cuban and one American, separated by the Cuban Revolution.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

None of this, however, prepares you for the startling explosion of colour, the riot of gorgeous costumes (don’t get me started on the shoes) and the sexy moves that set them in non-stop motion, the irresistible music, and knockout dance numbers of Mi Habana Querida.

It’s a veritable extravaganza of romance, brought to the Fringe by Cuban Movements, the Edmonton dance company founded by Cuban-Canadian artistic director/choreographer Leo Gonzalez (they’re the recipient of the Fringe’s 2021 Mowat Diversity Award). And the operative word is hot, in all its implications, including a reminder of the perpetual summer we only dream about (did I mention the shoes?).

Mi Habana Querida is, you will glean, on a production scale you just don’t expect to find at the Fringe. It unfolds like a Cuban fan (fans are big in this show) in a sort of collage of dance solos, pas de deux, and ensemble numbers, fleeting dramatic scenes, flashbacks, and large-scale projection footage of seminal cultural events: the capital’s lavish pre-Revolutionary nightclub scene, the carnival, street parties, Afro-Cuban choirs, an impassioned revolutionary speech by Castro (who was, in case its slipped anyone’s mind, a great orator).    

Madrina (producer Cecilia Ferreyra) presides. She’s the engaging proprietor of the title Havana club, a self-styled “hopeless romantic” who introduces the scenes, narrates, plays yenta, joins in, or shoos everyone off the stage when the police are raiding. When the Revolution comes, it is, says Madrina, “the end of life as I know it.”

The natural rhythm of the numbers for the men, Gonzalez and Raydel Martinez-Portuondo, seems to be escalation — faster, higher, more and more acrobatic. The women, led by Amalia Cameron who plays half of star-cross’d pair of lovers with Gonzalez, are graceful, elegant, balletic.

The show pays tribute to Cuba’s Afro-Cuban culture, too, and its distinctive musical and choreographic personality, in forceful, visceral solos (and an entirely different set of costumes).

In the end, Ferreyra tells us sadly, “life is hard in Cuba … especially for the Afro-Cuban population.” Some day, says Gonzalez, Cuba will “get the smiles and the happy back.” The Revolutionary mantra of “Nation or Death” will cede to “Nación y Vida,” Nation and Life. And there’s a big flamboyant finale as a demo.

If you’re up for going out, try to see them live. It’s a treat.

  

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Landing lightly on a shameful chapter in our history: Camping, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Camping (Vanta Group Outdoor Stage)

Breathing life into our history onstage is the raison d’être of MAA and PAA Theatre. This little 35-minute play, by David Cheoros and his 10-year-old daughter Sophia Cheoros, alights on a shameful chapter in the Canadian story, the internment of Eastern Europeans as enemy aliens during World War I.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

How to shed light in a kids’ play on the bad exclusionary behaviour of a country that talks a good game about international kindness? In Camping, team Cheoros imagines a chance encounter in a Banff Park woods between a seven-year-old in 2021 and a Ukrainian man in 1916, imprisoned by the War Measures Act.

Nikki (Gabby Bernard) has her grievances. In an act of egregious unfairness her mom has taken her camping (a word she delivers like with eight or so grudging syllables) when the world should know that Nikki had her heart set on going to her BFF’s birthday party in town.

Nick (Matt Mihiliewicz) isn’t so keen on camping either, needless to say, since he’s been a starving prisoner for a year in a hard labour camp. He’s amazed that anyone who has access to an apartment that’s warm, dry, and safe in a city would choose to be spend time in a tent.

Both of them are surprised by the difference a century can make. Nikki is shocked that he’s cutting down a tree in a national park. “I only know how to plant trees,” she says. It’s a skill he’s never run across.

In the course of their encounter, as they pass the time, Nikki learns a little something about hardship, about dreams of a better life in a new country that didn’t come true. “Nobody invited him to the party,” she concludes, exploring the concept of the outsider in her own terms.

It’s simple; it lands lightly, even humorously; it’s a little eye-opener. The prisoner treats the kid kindly. And the actors are charming.   

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A play date with … us: Merk du Solapocalypse, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Merk du Solapocalyse. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Merk du Solapocalypse (Westbury Theatre)

In this latest instalment of Dammitammy Productions’ loopy Merk du Soleil series, the twin concept goofy/giddy really comes into its own.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

There is no real way to explain the nutbar down-at-heel charms of an entertainment that weight-lifts with pool noodles, revels equally in terrible puns and wigs, and introduces acts that include a stand-up comedian so spectacularly atrocious that he counts as a satire of stand-up, or maybe spoken word performance. And then the show suddenly cuts to an original song that really catches the ear.

Hang on. Merk du Solapocalypse has showbiz roots. It borrows — well, pilfers — from circus, old-school vaudeville, and cabaret. And there’s a premise. Merk (Rebecca Merkley, creator/ director/ composer/ Dammitammy muse), the headliner of a circus troupe with no interest in circus acts, has called it quits on live theatre in “the shitshow we call 2021.” Who’s gonna argue with that?

She’s sold off the theatre to some religious outfit. But then, as one of her very likeable trio of Sideshow Boobs (Carol Chu, Yvonne Boon, Kristina Hunszinger) notes, their “open-door policy” meant that the door was actually open and their stuff got stolen. Odds against notwithstanding, the Boobs say “the show must go on, jump jump jump jump kick.” Words to live by.

It’s what they do. And, hey, there seems to be an audience, so why the hell not?

What ensues has something to do with time-travelling, back back back to when there was no art. There were, however, cows (or do they come later? my notes are unclear on this point). And by then, we get to be part of a survey of our biggest beefs in order. (Anti-vaxxers got the biggest boo, at the performance I caught; the government was a contender).

Anyhow, in a stop along the space-time continuum, Jesus shows up with a parable. There’s Bible study that loses interest in itself and wanders off. It’s just one thing after another at the Solapocalypse, a high-speed entertainment with an attention deficit. Scenes end before the punch line; so do jokes, a vaudevillian take on nihilism perhaps.

The whole thing — including the sound which could use a boost — has an air of scrambled spontaneity that makes improv look planned out (back to goofy/giddy). You’ll have fun if you just sit back, relax, and go with free association and the non sequitur as a concept. And you’d have even more fun, I think, if you could hear everything better.

It’s a play date — with us. And the “us” is, in the end, the heart of the banter. “It was you who kept us breathing,” the beaming cast tells us. Yup, we’re back to live.

  

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cracking up, a black comedy about glueing ourselves together: The Man Who Fell To Pieces, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Man Who Fell To Pieces, Fairly Odd Productions. Poster image supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Man Who Fell To Pieces (Garneau Theatre)

The man we meet in this absurdist black comedy by the Belfast playwright Patrick O’Reilly has gone to pieces. Literally. He’s cracked up, and his body parts are in a bag on his mom’s kitchen table.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

“Are you too warm in there?” she asks him. “Could you speak more clearly?”

His fiancée Caroline (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is all for taking him to the hospital for repair. But Alice (Liz Grierson) has done what any loving mother would do under the circumstances. She’s called a handyman (James Hastings). “You can fix anything,” she says, sending Henry for his tools.   

John (Ben Osgood) appears onstage to introduce himself and tell his story, how he cracked up and ended up in the bag. The storytelling happens in an inventive, highly entertaining whirl of dance and red-nose clowning, circus acrobatics, plate-spinning, and juggling in Kate Sheridan’s production. It introduces a well-named new theatre indie in town, Fairly Odd Productions.

John explains that he started cracking up at work one day. His job? Telephone cold-call life insurance sales. A crack appeared in his face, and one of his ears flew off. That was just the start. “Fractures kept appearing everywhere.”

The more he denies that anything’s wrong, and patches himself together with cellotape and staples, the more he splinters his relationship with Caroline, who’s feels rejected and furious at his lies. They break up. Even his home is cracking up. He comes from a broken home — literally. His single mom regularly smashes up the furniture with her twirling baton so that Henry can come and fix them.

A crack-up is never a one-man show: John is a spreader of chaos; there’s a price to be paid for going it alone.

The four actors, who share a startling skill set, step up impressively to the fast and furious, ever-changing, very demanding physicality of the storytelling. A climactic breakup sequence, in dance, between John and Caroline is a knock-out. And the characters, even the handyman, have dramatic weight and dimension, emotional heft, in this literal deconstruction of a mental breakdown.

The ending, in which John, a one-man crack-up on (temporary) legs, will leave you thinking. A very cool theatrical way to spin a metaphor and be thought-provoking about a serious subject. It speaks in an ingenious, non-hectoring way to a moment in history where we’re all trying to glue the pieces back together.

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Taking sword in hand. Win The Warrior: a King Arthur Tale, a Fringe review,

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Yoner in Win the Warrior: A King Arthur Tale. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Win the Warrior, Vanta Group Outdoor Stage

The 12-year-old heroine of Ellen Chorley’s new play Win The Warrior: A King Arthur Tale, for kids and the adults they tend to bring with them, has a particularly tricky modern challenge. How to satisfy her appetite for heroic action when her video game device melts down (the horror, the horror!) on a trip abroad with her professor dad. Is a book, a gift copy of the Arthurian Chronicles, a worthy replacement?

Judging by the look on her face when she sees the book Arwen (Katie Yoner) has her doubts. We all have our doubts. But never underestimate the magic of location location (as real estate agents in every period, including the medieval, have always known). The kid’s in Arthurian country.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Soon she has imagined herself into the world of young Arthur, the magus Merlin, and the knights of the round table. Captivated, she’s taken on the cause, and the persona, of the boy who pulled the sword from the stone and landed a major royal gig. And she’s entered full-throttle into the sword-fighting and duels, in demanding sequences designed by fight choreographer Janine Waddell for Elizabeth Hobbs’ production.

Curiously, Arwen is only momentarily taken aback, along with us, by the implications of the Lancelot-Guinevere story for her own life; they’re inserted rather out of the blue into the play.  I guess she’s taking the magnanimous Arthurian position on the relationship she discovers between her dad (Aaron Refugio) and his research assistant (Kristin Unruh).

There are acting challenges for the trio in this enterprise. Prime among them is how to portray kid energy and enthusiasm without  making the audience want to hand you over to the Lady in the Lake for storage underwater. Yoner is delightful throughout, exuberant in her physical choices, and judicious in her “kid” vocal inflections and gestures. The counterpart to the cliche “kid role” is the cliche “dad role,” the dad who actually uses the term “quality time” with no irony to describe his parenting goal on the research trip. Refugio doesn’t overdo it. Both he and Unruh (who has fun with accents and sword-wielding) have multiple assignments in the storytelling, and rise to them with confidence and humour.

The framing of the play, between real life situations and Arthurian legend doesn’t really  hold together. But it’s lively, full of action; the kid wins; there’s a book in it. And there’s this: Win the Warrior: A King Arthur Tale will be the only play of this Fringe, possibly any Fringe, with the line “I found Excalibur! I found Excalibur! I have to go find Dad!”

  

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A fizzy offshore reunion: Destination Wedding, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Destination Wedding, starring Michelle Todd, Cheryl James, Kristin Johnston. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Destination Wedding (Westbury Theatre)

Like the drinks at a tropical all-inclusive — where you have no serious cultural obligations except buying jewelry with seashells in it and having fun — the clues keep coming in this fizzy comedy-with-a-twist by Trevor Schmidt.

Three old friends of middle years, sorority sisters of yore, have been invited to a destination wedding. Their long-time-no-see pal is tying the knot again, after untying several previous knots.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

And after a few (quite a few) margaritas), an innocuous oddity turns into a mystery that turns into a whodunnit. The details of this intriguing progression are safe with me (though for an Aperol spritzer on a Strathcona patio …). As in the best mysteries, Destination Wedding keeps you re-spooling to re-think casual throw-aways that might be clues, as the list of characters increases, and the net of possible culpability spreads wider and wider. Which isn’t the original meaning of ‘all-inclusive’, but whatever.…

Anyhow, in addition to the fun of discovering a puzzle that you don’t realize at first is one, there’s the all-inclusive entertainment value in this Whizgiggling production of seeing what three expert comic actors make of the characters. Amazingly, Kristin Johnston, Cheryl Jameson and Michelle Todd, who drink cocktails out of plastic pineapples, never leave their deck chairs. Their arrival catch-up, to the sound of waves, is a very funny cross-hatching of memories and barbs.

Like the costumes (designed by director Schmidt), the performances are a riot.  Johnston, in black, is an artist and the fiercest of the three, who has one of those steely gazes that could lift an acrylic nail off a pinky finger at 100 paces. Todd is the one who’s always taking offence: “what’s that supposed to mean?” or “I’m always the last to know….” Jameson is the dim and daffy one, in pink, always beaming, who’s always a step behind the gist of things. “Things have evolved,” she’s admonished on the subject of women taking their husband’s names. “But I haven’t!” she says brightly. Exactly.

The interplay is funny. And the circle is widened when each of the actors plays, and zestfully, another character in the story. A comedy based, like many wedding parties, on the proposition that we might not know our friends as well as we think we do is put together expertly. Larky fun.

Incidentally, you can vote for the guilty character on Whizgiggling Production’s Facebook page. The results will be revealed at the end of the Fringe.

  

  

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on A fizzy offshore reunion: Destination Wedding, a Fringe review

The Deaf world, from the inside out: Deafy, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Follow The Signs Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Deafy (Backstage Theatre)

Then character we meet in Deafy is droll, wry, a master of the eye roll/shrug combo, a guy who’s in touch with the absurdities of his world.

Nathan Jesper is Deaf. And his world isn’t easy to live in. It’s filled with non sequiturs and obstructions of all shapes and sizes, minor aggravations to major blockades. It’s riddled with reminders, as if he needed them, that he’s on the outside looking in. And they cumulate.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

That Deafy is multilingual — in spoken English, sign language, and captioning — is to the point, theatrically and dramatically. Nathan, who has a gig as a Deaf public speaker and educator, lives in three languages. And he’s in a fractious power struggle with his captions; who’s in charge? He glances suspiciously over his shoulder at them from time to time to head off insurrection.

Nathan’s dreams are heartbreakingly ordinary (being Deaf ups the ante on Seinfeldian comedy). He wants to hang out with friends, have a few beers at his local with his buddy Len, get a driver’s licence. And as he recounts, in funny stories with an absurdist edge, things go awry. The bartender claims he can’t turn on the TV captions on the hockey game, and Len, a Leafs fan, is outraged. No interpreters are allowed for drivers’ tests (whaaaat?), so Nathan recount’s Len’s crackbrained plot (and we all learn the sign for “completely insane”).

Chris Dodd’s very funny, very moving tragic-comedy arrives at the Fringe in a crack production directed by Ashley Wright. The play is gracefully formed, and vivid in capturing quotidian reality through Nathan’s eyes. Dave Clarke’s sound score, an elusive aural landscape of vibrations, heartbeats, far-away bells, is meaningful. And Dodd, who’s Deaf (he’s founder of the SOUND OFF Deaf Theatre Festival), is an exceptionally expressive, physically dexterous actor. In one scene, he conjures an entire room of Deaf people signing — “six pairs of arms!” — at a living room TV watching party.

He has one of those malleable faces that registers incredulity, or mounting exasperation, in a delivery you associate with the Borscht Belt comedians of old. And it makes him a captivating eyeball-to-eyeball storyteller, a sad clown with an air of “I rest my case.”

The colour palette darkens, the ripples spread. And it’s for us to figure out how much. Nathan drifts toward isolation, caught between the excluding impulses of both the hearing and the Deaf world. Loneliness, the need to belong … they’re not exclusive Deaf property. Nathan’s silent encounter with a homeless man in an airport will break your heart.

Wright’s production, a rhythm of pauses and frantic physicality, gives those moments room to breathe and sink in. A rich, entertaining Fringe experience. Highly recommended.

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Deaf world, from the inside out: Deafy, a Fringe review

A collision of worlds and cultures: Chanzo, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Chanzo (Backstage Theatre)

Guilt, grief, and responsibility, the enduring triple-crown of family dysfunction world-wide: that’s the emotional infrastructure of Chanzo. And since this new play from the Kenyan-Canadian playwright/ dramaturge Mūkonzi Mūsyoki, in a fluid mixture of Swahili and English, is set at a high-collision intersection of worlds and cultures, past and present, the potential for explosion is enhanced exponentially. And it increases with every secret revealed.

In the aftermath of his father’s death, the title protagonist (David Shingai Madawo), who’s been away at university in Canada, has come back to Kenya — with his Canadian girlfriend (Jasmine Hopfe). “I’m here — finally,” says the troubled young man to his late papa when he gets up the nerve to visit the mortuary.

Whoever said that absence makes the heart grow fonder was undoubtedly a foundling. Chanzo’s formidably fierce sister (Onika Henry) is unremittingly hostile, to a mysterious degree of intensity. ”I’m not going to waste my time on this!” she says dismissively taking a strip off her bro, and exiting abruptly. Family problems, she says on another occasion, “can’t be paused like in a movie.”

She’s particularly enraged by his behaviour at the funeral. Chanzo argues he was being himself when he announces his break with Christianity. She argues that he was setting up the family for public ridicule.

His girlfriend tries to fit in and make peace, in a conciliatory, ineffectual, might we say Canadian?, sort of way. “Is everything OK?” she keeps asking. Well, no, actually. She’s game, and her intentions are honourable, but she seems to have a knack for entering at exactly the wrong time when the sibling shouting matches are reaching peak intensity. Anyone for tea?

What do we owe our families? What do we owe our individual selves? How do we find our true selves in the universal, complex and negotiable questions of identity that Chanzo wonders about? The two cultures have dramatically different expectations. And in Jeong Ung Song’s production, the actors, all three, really dig into the multi-faceted struggle Mūsyoki sets forth. And even though the production lags from time to time and is inclusive — which may of course be the point since Chanzo’s problems may always elude resolution — the performances do have the feel of authenticity about them.

Chanzo is an intricately constructed web of concealments, partial truths, game-changers, secrets and partial revelations, and it has special relevance for us in a country built on the concept of multi-culturalism to know how universal the coming-of-age struggles of families really are. You’ll swear you’re learning Swahili.

  

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Burlesque meets accordian: Squeezebox Cabaret, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Squeezebox Cabaret (Garneau Theatre)

“We wrote a song about COVID for you…. Just kidding.”

There is some mesmerizingly kooky about a burlesque cabaret that’s presided over by a flamboyant accordionist, doing squeezebox covers of pop songs, annotations, introductions as the dancers arrive onstage. Is it the instrument itself folding and unfolding as it does (a possible metaphor)? Is it the unusually exuberant personality of Tiff Hall, who presides with good-natured gusto, and volume, over proceedings?

It gives you some idea of the general demeanour of Squeezebox Cabaret, this new House of Hush burlesque, that she kicks off with a rendition of Rihanna’s “work work work work work.” Yup, as long as there’s a tassel to be twirled and a feather boa to be flung, a burlesque artist’s work is never done.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Anyhow, burlesque is by nature a teasing and playful sort of vaudeville. The art is in the rhythm of cover-up and reveal, which, come to think of it, is a quality it shares with theatre as diverse as murder mysteries and one-person confessionals. As Chekhov noted in a somewhat different vein, if there’s a gun in Act I, it has to be shot in Act II. In burlesque, if there’s a corset lace, it must be unlaced. A zipper must be unzipped, a strap unstrapped.

But I digress. The Squeezebox Cabaret (named for the double-entendre Pete Townshend song?) features four of Edmonton’s burlesque artists accompanied by the irrepressible accordionist, who has a delivery about as shy as a wrestling commentator. She tucks full-on into songs that have an amusing relationship to the progressive doffing in progress.

A veteran of such historically adventurous burlesque ventures as Send in the Girls’ Tudor Queens and the Brontë Burlesque, LeTabby Lexington, a House of Hush co-founder, does a vintage peek-a-boo double-fan dance, to Let It Down Easy (“and show me what you got”). Scarlett Fussion, in Western mode, takes off pretty much everything except the cowboy hat, to the strains of Lil Nas’s Old Town Road (“I’m gonna ride till I can’t no more”).  Amusingly, Holly Von Sinn performs to Dancing on My Own, with the tortured look and operatic gestures more usually associated with the fall of the House of Atreus.

In fact, curiously, there’s a lot of tragic intensity associated with many of the numbers. The funniest might well be Judy Lee’s straight-faced burlesque account of the Miley Cyrus song Wrecking Ball.

You have to admit that the musical conundrum “should I stay or should I go” as delivered on the accordion has special meaning in a burlesque cabaret. And should you? Depending on your tolerance for repetition, a hoot-and-holler diversion from your more serious Fringe pursuits.

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The body-shaming knot unravelled, in a cunning little play: Woman Caught Unaware, a Fringe review

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart in Woman Caught Unaware, Edmonton Fringe 2021. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Woman Caught Unaware (Varscona Theatre)

In this surprising, cunningly written little 2018 play by the Brit writer Annie Fox, an older woman (a woman of a certain age, the delicate way of saying over 50 and under 90) makes a horrifying discovery.

She’s an art history prof, and as the title, borrowed from her field, suggests, that will figure in the way things play out. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” says the student who comes to see her in out-of-office hours.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

It’s with the unwelcome news that a photo of her, naked in a changing room, has been taken without her knowledge and posted online. And the viral sharing, the mocking hashtags (#crone #witch #nevergetold), and the laughing emojis have begun.

What action should she take? That’s the question Professor Conté must grapple with in Woman Caught Unaware. In Trevor Schmidt’s production Davina Stewart captures so convincingly the wry but thoughtful reticence, the analytical habit, the dry self-assessment and reserve of the career academic, you’ll remember all those times you handed in an essay late.   

The social media reaction to the photo is, of course, an indictment of body-shaming, the vilification of the aging female body, the implication that a woman’s worth is in direct equation to appearance measured against the cruel youth/beauty standard. But more than that, social media hashtags reflect a prevailing cultural attitude in representations of older women, as an art historian is well-positioned to know. “When we age, you flinch,” she says appraisingly.

There’s no shortage of allies in the professor’s “civilized” world for  a spirited response to her “ordeal,” a legal fight perhaps, some sort t of retaliation in the media. And it’s amusing to see that world of academia, in all its petty jealousies, one-upmanship, and liberal persiflage, conjured with such dexterous economy. Being a victim of an unwanted revelation, though, in a way accepts that occupying an aging female body is a humiliation. So …. how will Professor Conté react?

Woman Caught Unaware explores all this in a multi-angled way, surprising and provocative at every turn. Schmidt’s production, and this very fine performance by Stewart, build beautifully to a slow reveal.

Sometimes live theatre just knocks you out the way it can jolt you out of one way of thinking and open up other possibilities. This is one of those those times.

Posted in Fringe 2021, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment