So, is he married yet? A Brimful of Asha, live at the Citadel. A 12thnight review.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You are here,” the engaging title character tells us with a smile at the start of A Brimful of Asha, “to help me sort out my son.”  The son smiles too, and rolls his eyes.

In this amusing and good-natured play-cum-memoir — which opens the Citadel’s Horizon Series Live in hospitable fashion — this ‘sorting out’ takes the form of a duelling recounting of a real-life 2007 story by a real-life mother and son. Ravi Jain is a notable Canadian actor/director (the founding artistic director of Why Not Theatre). Asha Jain (“hope” in Hindi) is his mom, a non-actor and as she cheerfully puts it, “an abused mother.” The dispute, says Asha, is “generational.” Ravi does not disagree.

Immigrants from India, Asha and Ravi’s dad are determined to arrange, in the traditional Indian way, a marriage for their resistant, in their eyes outrageously single, 27-year-old son. As a new theatre school actor grad with a career that’s starting to take off, Canadian-born Ravi has his own ideas on the subject of marriage. They involve waiting for a couple of years, what’s the rush?, till he’s more established professionally and he’s  found a girl for himself, and fallen in love.

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Bad enough, then, that Ravi is unmarried and wants to find his own life partner. But theatre? “What a proud profession for Indian parents,” she says, with an eye-roll you feel from Row P. Many of her interjections, amusingly, are director’s notes: “hurry up, you’re taking too long!”

Originally, the co-creators themselves performed the hit show, which undoubtedly gave this unusual storytelling enterprise an added immediacy. Not least because Asha, the theatre skeptic, turned out, by all reports, to have unexpected comic timing and a great deadpan. In the Citadel production directed by Mieko Ouchi, the characters are performed by a couple of terrifically likeable actors, Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji.

The challenge of direct, conversational rapport is upped by the change of venue, from the Citadel’s intimate Rice Theatre to the 680-seat Shoctor. This enables reassuring social distancing in a masked audience reduced to a 100-person max and scattered through the house. And it feels very safe, though I can imagine that, under non-COVID-ian circumstances (remember those?) the experience of A Brimful of Asha would be enhanced by eye-to-eye connection in a space that might seem less “theatrical.” Ditto the shared laughter.

Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

But if that sounds like ingratitude, I must add that it feels like a special occasion to be out in the city and in a real live theatre with people. And Ouchi’s production and the actors, experts at generating affectionate connection with each other, are a lot of fun. Elise CM Jason’s set (lighting by Patrick Beagan), a long dining table, gets the position of influence  in the centre of the Shoctor stage. And in Ouchi’s production which locates the characters at opposite ends, ventures towards reducing the distance between mother and son are always smartly walked back, which makes narrative as well as COVID sense. “Family album” type shots and other assorted documentary projections happen on a series of high screens behind Ravi and Asha. Only Ravi acknowledges them.

Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

Kanji inherits the tricky task of being the actor who portrays the “real-life” half of the pair, who scores big on sheer natural charisma. And Kanji is very droll, and adept at making Asha ’s quick-witted rejoinders and annotations ‘non-actorly’. And Adolyn H. Dar as Ravi, who unlike his mom is in his natural habitat in a theatre, is much busier and more flamboyant at presenting the series of comic characters who populate the story (occasionally many at a time as befits a tale that’s as much about families as individuals).

Hang on, I’m getting to the story. The starting point is Ravi’s trip to India to give a theatre workshop in Calcutta. The plan is that he and his Canadian friend Andrew will travel around the country afterward and see the sights. Through a series of subterfuges involving a parental “vacation,” Ravi’s single-minded mom and dad arrive in India and keep setting him up, over and over, with “nice Indian girls,” i.e. suitable marital prospects they’ve vetted, in encounters and negotiations that involve both families. Ah, they even put an ad in an Indian newspaper.

In the battle for the upper hand in the culture collision and the gap between contemporary and traditional, Ravi, the modern Canadian guy with the gift of the gab, would seem to be the odds-on favourite. But he keeps getting out-manoeuvred and ambushed at every turn. And there’s a hilarious escalation in his mounting exasperation, as charted by Dar.

A Brimful of Asha, named for a song by the Brit alt-rock band Cornershop, is actually a sort of cross-generational cross-cultural screwball. And in the course of it, Asha unapologetically argues for the old ways, arranged marriages over so-called “love” matches. After all, when you get married and have kids, as you must and you will, it’s not just the individuals but the families that get hitched. Love is something that grows; it’s not where you start. Besides, getting a son married, which is to say “happy and settled” in Asha parlance, is her chief maternal duty.

Why would parents be better than kids at picking a life partner for them? “Parents have experience,” she says, an answer that echoes around the globe in every household of every culture. To Asha the filial rejoinder “it’s none of your business” is just so much lint in the cosmic dryer.

In a sweet, unexpectedly funny scene Asha tells the story of her own arranged marriage, her emigration to a new country and a lonely life in Toronto. Ravi wonders if it doesn’t seem, in retrospect, sad to have given up her own girlhood dream. That’s just on hold, she says puckishly. When Ravi is finally “married and settled,” and not a moment too soon, she can get back at it.

The phrase that recurs nearly as often as “married and settled” in this winsome little play is “on the same page.” And that, in the end, after all the arguing, is where the relationship between mother and son lands. You’ll leave smiling. 

REVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel Shoctor Theatre, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: through Nov. 15

Tickets (and COVID precaution details): citadeltheatre.com

 

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The experimental spirit lives on in Edmonton theatre, live and in unusual hybrids

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Calling the pandemic an “obstacle” to live theatre, or maybe a “challenge,” is a bit like saying COVID is the flu.

The pandemic has had a devastating effect on an art whose raison d’être is the experience, interactive by very definition, of real live people sharing a space. But as they continue to prove, there’s been a remarkable resilience about theatre-makers. Performing for, communicating to, audiences … it’s what they DO. And dammit, they’re going to figure out ways to do it.

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I wrote in July (have a peek here) about the resourcefulness of theatre artists and companies struggling to jump-start their craft after the fateful, heart-stopping industry-wide shutdown in March. In exile from live stages, they taught themselves, fast, to write for, and perform on, unfamiliar virtual platforms. Or they took live theatre to The People instead of the other way round, one backyard deck at a time.

The financial implications for the industry are potentially ruinous, as the stream of lay-offs, cancellations, indefinite delays continues. But as the weather turns frostier, the spirit of experimentation lives on — in the gradual return of audiences to live, scaled-down in-person theatrical experiences, and in new virtual/live theatrical hybrids. It’s time to check in on the scene again. This week, when there are lively, and welcome, examples of all of the above, is a good time to do it.

Inviting size-small audiences inside into size-large theatre spaces for small-cast productions is a test of ingenuity in creating intimacy (and also in making the money work, in even a modest way).

Workshop West’s Here There Be Night, continuing its run till Nov. 1, is an experiment along the opposite route. It takes us out. And it’s intimate by definition: one-on-one immersive theatre that takes audiences, singly or two at time, to a series, of eight original five-minute solo plays that are custom-tailored in the writing, the directing, and the performing, for eight unexpected locations, mostly outdoors, in Old Strathcona — and for the eerily isolating times in which we live. In each case we’re part of the play; we have a role in the script.

We’re caught (as the cellphone app narration has it) between destinations, the world as we knew it and the unknowable world-to-be. Everything about it, including the locations (I mustn’t tell you about them in advance), speaks to the unnerving experience of being in a familiar world but seeing it in a new way. Here There Be Night takes you to  odd nooks in Fringe Theatre Land, from  jagged new angles. If you can possibly score a ticket, put your mitts on and sally forth, and prepared to be immersed. (WWPT’s Heather Inglis talks about the show here. We went out and saw the show Friday night. Read about that here. 

Colin Matty, Curio Shoppe, Catch the Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

Curio Shoppe (running through Oct. 31), Catch The Keys, purveyors of the annual Dead Centre of Town excursion into Edmonton history at Fort Edmonton, is a clever experiment in turning an online experience in the lurid annals of Edmonton history into an interactive grave-straddling experience — a haunting on location at your place. The story unfolds based on your choices. Eerie? Ask not for whom your cellphone rings, it rings for thee. Check out thoughts from director Beth Dart here, and our experience with the show here.

Speaking as we are of playful creative experiments in the online world, I wish I’d seen an intriguing venture from The Fox Den Collective (Queen Lear Is Dead). They crafted an online mystery, S.I.S.T.E.R.,  live streamed to audiences on five-member teams that are visited in Zoom break-out rooms by a succession of suspects. The teams are invited to collaborate to ask questions, assess clues, make deductions. Sounds like fun.

We’ve already had the benefit of the increasing sophistication of Zoom and YouTube fractured-screen experiments. The plays have  been especially successful when, like Mac Brock’s Tracks which premiered in June, they’ve used the online medium itself as a sort of metaphor, and they’ve actually been created to be about COVID-ian feelings of disconnection and isolation.

Girl Brain has been savvy and playful with that thought. Catch their very amusing video series mining the Zoom disconnect and discomfort for comic sketches about the ambiguities and perils of dating in a pandemic. In the summer, the Citadel’s [esc] Series of playlets commissioned digital theatre experiments that were all about the domestic and professional miscues and mixed signals that are inevitable disruptions when life is live streamed instead of live.

Cherish Violet Blood in Deer Woman, Article 11. Photo by Prudence Upton.

The riveting live-streamed Article 11 premiere production of Tara Beagan’s Deer Woman, presented online by Calgary’s Downstage Theatre (starring Cherish Violet Blood), took this gut-wrencher of a play out of the theatre and into the woods. It’s a solo show till it isn’t —a visceral, galvanizing production that chronicles an escalating personal quest for some sort of social justice in a world of violence for Indigenous women. It isn’t cautious or polite in its exposé of white hypocrisy.

Like everyone hungry for theatre, I’ve been watching a huge assortment of theatrical productions created with a film version in mind (the deep-dive into the National Theatre, RSC, and Shakespeare’s Globe archives). Some locate you amongst real audiences in real theatres, from the Before Time. Some are playful with the conventions of YouTube viewing. And some, like the Old Vic’s series of solo or two-hand plays (Lungs, Faith Healer, Three Kings with the mesmerizing Andrew Scott), with distanced actors onstage in any empty house, capitalize on the premise of distance and an empty theatre.

The Twits, hosted online by The Guardian, is a filmed “theatrical reading” of the delightfully gruesome Roald Dahl story. It was storyteller theatre reduced to its base elements: a book with a story in it, a couple of (distanced) top-drawer actors on a stage in an empty theatre, clutching the book and a prop or two, selecting what to dramatize. It was a model of apparent simplicity. I learned something from that.

Nathan Cuckow and Beth Graham in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, Kill Your Television Theatre

Guys in Disguise experimented with radio play theatre earlier in P.T. (pandemic time). They reconfigured Dragula, their gothic Fringe spoof of a decade ago for voices inhabiting a clever space-defining sound design. Now Kill Your Television Theatre has just launched a YouTube audio version of their spooky and ingeniously framed gothic 2012 thriller Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, by Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow.

until the next breath, Catalyst, Grand Acts of Theatre. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

But the hunger remains for a live experience. Catalyst Theatre’s until the next breath (part of the National Arts Centre’s Grand Acts of Theatre series across the country), a hauntingly lyrical outdoor extravaganze in a clearing in Victoria Park, was the largest-scale theatre experience of the fall: a cast of 50 actors, musicians, dancers, performing for an audience of 100.

Increasingly, theatre companies have ventured back to in-person performances of limited-cast shows inside theatres. “Safe” isn’t a kudo to which the risk-takers of theatre would have aspired a year ago. But safety is the starting point for the return of audiences to theatre. And theatre companies have been exemplary.     

Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

The Citadel has launched a three-production Horizon Series LIVE with A Brimful of Asha, a hit-two-hander based on a real-life story, about the subterfuges of a mother trying to arrange a marriage for her son, who’s pushing 30 and still single, on a “vacation” to India. The show, originally destined for the Rice, has been moved to the Shoctor, for a 100-member masked audience with sanitized hands. That’s where it opened this past weekend. Meet director Mieko Ouchi here, and co-creator Ravi Jain here. More on the show to come.

Musical theatre specialists the Plain Janes experimented with reconfiguring theatre space for pandemical times, with the playful and ingenious Scenes From The Sidewalk: An Inside Out Cabaret. A masked audience of 20 distanced and in the Varscona Theatre lobby, looked out at the world through the big theatre windows, where six performers reached out to us through the glass, singing, dancing, presenting poems. The configuration was a metaphor for the subject matter, the pandemic experience for musical artists, looking wistfully at theatre from the outside (and vice versa). It felt both happy and poignant to be there. Read about it here.

Teatro La Quindicina returns live to the actual Varscona theatre stage for Welcome Home (two of the three Fridays of performance remain), a variety/ concert/ interview show with singing, dancing, and an original distanced Stewart Lemoine comedy for four actors. Have a look at the 12thnight preview here.

Improv is back live and in a theatre, too , with full COVID precautions. From the Grindstone (which includes live streamed versions of all shows), I caught a performance of Good Head by the amazingly dexterous Gordon’s Big Bald Head (Mark Meer, Ron Pederson). In a movie edition of their hit Fringe show they offered to “do” their own version of any flick in cinematic history. On the night I saw them, the duo did Gothika. Really.

Taking their cue from their chosen line of work, the ever-adaptable always-ingenious improv company Rapid Fire Theatre has moved to a flexible black box space, the Backstage Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn, that’s more adaptable to changing COVID restrictions than the fixed-seat Zeidler Hall at the Citadel. For now, at least, they’ve improvised  cabaret tables. And since they’ve never met a high holiday they didn’t like, their programming (which includes live streaming) features a Halloween show, Murder at Makeout Point, “an improvised teen slasher” that opens tonight.

Next week there’s more. An actual musical revue, Keep Calm and Rock On by the mysterious Will Marks, opens at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre (table service for an audience reduced to about 150 in a 450-seat house). And Northern Light Theatre has moved its season-opener We Had A Girl Before You, an original psychological thriller by Trevor Schmidt, from the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn to the much-larger Westbury Theatre. Look for 12thnight coverage of both shows.

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One on one theatre: Here There Be Night takes you into an underground resistance network

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sometimes the creative ingenuity and resilience of theatre artists just about takes your breath away. In a dangerous time when big live theatre gatherings have been cancelled, thwarted, delayed, diverted, they will find a way.

I went on an adventure Friday night outside in the cold dark air in Old Strathcona, with a map, my hand-warmers, and my cellphone. And in eight of the most unexpected locations in a district I thought I knew well, I met a story.

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Here There Be Night is eight five-minute solo plays each starring a single actor: an involving one-on-one encounter with a real-live person. So, eight experiences that lead you out in the world, look you in eye (from six feet, or behind barriers), and in an amazingly inventive variety of ways acknowledge the strange, distancing, anxious and isolating, not to say be-nighted, moment in which we live. It felt like an act of defiance, a sort of underground resistance network, to be out in the world, connecting (with absolute safety) like that in the dark.

It’s the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season-opener, elaborately plotted to take you (and a COVID partner if you like) through the dark into little moments that in the writing, the performing, and the directing, shed light on our weird, spooky situation. Tickets are vanishing fast (after all, this is theatre that gathers its audience one or two at a time). So get on this ASAP.

I really don’t want to spoil the fun of the unexpected for you. So I’ll just tell you that the pieces are acted with startling commitment, to engage you, their exclusive audience. And the writing is impressive — writing an original five-minute play that feels satisfying, and custom-tailored to its odd location must be devilishly tricky. Workshop West’s new artistic producer Heather Inglis (one of the four directors) has assembled 10 playwrights of different styles and angles of attack (I list them all below).

The range is wide; Edmonton playwrights have risen to the occasion. In the course of your tour you’ll encounter smart, political black comedy (from Jason Chinn). There’s puckish interactive whimsy (Harley Morison), unnerving spookiness (Bevin Dooley), a fantasia  on our disconnected feeling of being stranded between destinations (Beth Graham), or between worlds (Amena Shehab and Aksam Alyousef). There’s a meditation on our longing for love and spiritual connection (from Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki, a playwright new to me). Perhaps the most disturbing of all the encounters comes from the playwright Josh Languedoc, powerfully acted by Sheldon Elter.

The finale (Mieko Ouchi) is soulful. And so is the seductive conversational voice of the guide in your ear (by Susie Moloney, spoken by Melissa Thingelstad). My old cellphone was a wimp, and cacked out too soon in the cold. So I wish I’d heard more of the narration (by Susie Moloney, voiced by Melissa Thingelstad), which unspools from the thought that the veil between worlds is particularly thin at the moment. Don’t you feel that in your bones?

Meet at the Strathcona Community League (masked, to download the cellphone app and get instructions). And set forth, with earbuds and layers. Prepare to be surprised.

REVIEW

Here There Be Night

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre (with participation from Theatre Network, Catalyst Theatre, Northern Light Theatre, Theatre Yes)

Written by: Aksam Alyousef and Amena Shehab, Jason Chinn, Bevin Dooley, Beth Graham, Josh Languedoc, Mieko Ouchi, Susie Moloney, Harley Morison, Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki

Directed by: Patricia Cerra, Heather Inglis, Lana Michelle Hughes, Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Helen Belay, Nadien Chu, Patricia Darbasie, Sheldon Elter, David Madawo, Jameela McNeil, Christina Nguyen, Amena Shehab, Melissa Thingelstad

Where: eight locations in Old Strathcona (meet at Strathcona Community League with a cellphone, at least iPhone 6 or Android 4, plus mask and earbuds).

Running: through Nov. 1, staggered start times

Tickets, schedule, and COVID protocols: workshopwest.org

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A Brimful of Asha: a son, a mother, and a culture gap onstage at the Citadel. Meet co-creator and Canadian theatre star Ravi Jain.

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Ravi Jain, co-creator of A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of an emerging theatre career must be in want of a wife. (A wife arranged by his mother).

We now take you back a decade or so, to the life and burgeoning fortunes of the then-27-year-old Ravi Jain, a rising star in Canadian theatre — and single.

We caught up with the actor, director, theatre maker, artistic director of Toronto’s evocatively named Why Not Theatre to ask him about the company, and the hit play opening tonight on the Citadel’s 680-seat Shoctor stage (to an audience of 100 as part of Horizon Series LIVE).  A Brimful of Asha, his joint creation with his mother Asha, was inspired by the business, so problematic for his immigrant India-born parents and not for him, of his lingering singleness (at 27!) and their acrobatic attempts to arrange a marriage for him in the traditional way.

Born and raised in Toronto, Jain left after high school to study theatre abroad, in an assortment of the world’s theatre capitals, London first, then New York, Washington, Paris. “I didn’t grow up much on Canadian theatre,” he says of his younger self. “I was inspired more by physical theatre, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, a collision of cultures. For me it was always international….”

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“When I came back to Toronto I didn’t really see that happening anywhere,” says Jain, who’s lively, smart, and accessible in conversation. “And I wanted to find a way to make it happen, that vision, that conversation … to change the model of what a theatre company can be.”

The result, in 2007, was Why Not, a company of the experimental, innovative, risk-taker stripe that has acquired a creative team of 10 over the last dozen years, as well as an international profile for new work, and original takes on classics (witness an acclaimed production of Prince Hamlet, gender-bending and in an expressive melange of English and ASL).

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

In short, Jain was a happening up-and-coming Canadian theatre creator, and happy to wait for marriage until he had time and focus to, you know, meet the right woman and fall in love. Why not? Arranged marriages don’t get a lot of positive vibes from the contemporary western culture, right?.

Enter Asha. A Brimful of Asha, he says, was inspired by “a true story; it really happened.” And “it was important to have my mom’s perspective…. She said ‘if the audience heard my side of the story they’d agree with me!’”

“In a lot of ways she was right. And in a lot of ways she was wrong,” laughs Jain.

So mother and son wrote the play together, with its amusing and provocative counterpoint of perspectives, in a wild narrative that involves mom and dad following Ravi on a theatre work trip to India and plotting to set up meetings with a series of eligible bridal prospects. And Asha “agreed to appear on the stage as herself.” Which has got to count as a remarkably brave venture by a non-actor who wasn’t exactly thrilled, to understate the case, by the career her son had chosen.

The premiere run at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2012 sold out completely, as did a second run there. “People loved it. And the response has been the same as we toured it all over the world,” says Jain. As reports from everywhere confirm, “people come away feeling like our relationship is at the centre of the story. And we have a good one. People recognize their own mom in mine, and they’re really taken by the story…. Older people often say ‘when I was young I agreed with you; now I’m older I grew with your mom’.”

Ravi laughs. “It’s the same everywhere.” Besides, he says simply, “she’s great. And charming.” Mieko Ouchi’s Citadel production, starring Nimet Kanji and Adolyn H. Dar, is only the second ever with actors other than the Jains.

In the end, did four years of touring the world changed his mom’s mind about the desirability, or lack thereof, of a career in theatre. “I wouldn’t say that!” says Jain. “She appreciates it more…. She has more appreciation for the people, and the hard work that goes into it. She loves the interaction with an audience. But is it her dream job for her kid? Well, no.”

And come to that, it’s a moment of great uncertainty in the world of theatre. Jain, who’s not into Zoom versions of theatre for Why Not, thinks “The big change isn’t whether (live theatre) will be back, it will … but the process of how we go about making it, making space for different people, different voices…. This gives us time to think about the inequities.”

Ravi Jain and his mother Asha Jain at his wedding. Photo supplied.

I know what you’re wondering, of course. Did Jain manage to get wed, in the end, to someone he’d chosen for himself? See above. “I’ve been married for eight years,” he laughs. “I was engaged when we first opened the show.”

Check out 12thnight’s conversation HERE with director Mieko Ouchi about the “heartwarming realness” of A Brimful of Asha.

REVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: Saturday through Nov. 15

Tickets (and COVID precaution details): citadeltheatre.com

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Curio Shoppe is home care, Catch The Keys style. Give yourself a fright.

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Morgan Yamada as Marie, in Curio Shoppe, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Home care (Catch The Keys-style). “It’s time to haunt your own house,” says a silky voice, coming at us in the dark from the internet ether.

As its name suggests, Curio Shoppe, the ingenious joint creation of the Catch the Keys sister duo Megan and Beth Dart, spins its nightmare story from a selection of dusty, vintage objects. “The odd and unwanted, bits and bobs,” as the shoppe owner slyly describes a selection of objets that unlock a grisly narrative from Edmonton’s history. As we know from the company’s annual excursions into the past with Dead Centre of Town, we may be steeped in urban banality, but we’re the largely unknowing possessors of a surprisingly lurid, violent, bizarre history.

This time the location is your place, with the lights out, which is a trickier proposition. You’ll hear no more about the story from me; this is an experience that reveals itself in your online choices (designed by the ever-creative systems analyst Bradley King), and layers of projections and video and strange sounds and voices, and … oh my gawd, why is my cellphone ringing?

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I’m just reporting back from last night to say that Curio Shoppe is an artful, immersive piece of theatre, designed especially for a time in our collective history when we’re jammed between so-called reality, the online world, and, er, other worlds from the past and beyond the grave. Isn’t Google a sort of medium after all? How often do dead people text you?

Give yourself a fright.

Curio Shoppe includes Colin Matty, Morgan Yamada, Jake Tkaczyk, Christine Lesiak, and other cameos. And it’s the work of an entire team of audio, video, lighting, internet and theatrical designers and other experts who have lavished love on it.  And also ghoulish gore. I’m pretty sure it’s not fake. Is it?

It runs through Oct. 31. And tickets (one per household) are available at catchthekeys.ca. The only requirement is a reliable internet connection and a cellphone that’s on.   

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‘Welcome Home’: Teatro is back and live at the Varscona

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After catapulting its entire 2020 June to October season a year into the future, Teatro La Quindicina returns to their natural home, the Varscona Theatre stage, for the next three Fridays.

They’re back “with cautious aplomb and flamboyant vigilance” as billed (which sounds like a stage direction in a Teatro screwball). What’s on deck is an experimental live variety/concert/magazine show to celebrate the occasion. Welcome Home comes with all the festive trimmings — like singing, dancing, and a real live in-person audience (all with strict COVID protocols in place). Ah, and a “new non-contact playlet by resident playwright Stewart Lemoine.

Teatro, it must be said, has never really taken to Zoom and platforms of that ilk. When other theatres did online staged readings or live streamed events during these strangest of summers, Teatro sent out scripts of Lemoine comedies for its audiences to read.

“We’re trying to not let the building go silent,” says Lemoine modestly of the venture. The only theatrical event that’s happened in person at the Varscona so far is Plain Jane Theatre’s Scenes From The Sidewalk: An Inside Out Cabaret, which had us, the audience of 20 distanced, masked, theatre-hungry souls, in the lobby looking outside the main street window at the performers singing and dancing outside on 83rd Avenue. “Joyful and ingenious,” as Lemoine says.

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And now there’s a new Teatro variety venture for an audience of 45 or so (depending on the exact configuration of audience groups) inside the 200-seat steeply-raked theatre at the Varscona. Tickets are free; donations are encouraged.

The glamorous co-hosts are couple Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer. And the cast of physically distanced triple-threats are Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Steven Greenfield, and newcomer Chariz Faulmino, who would have been in the Teatro musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s this past summer had the world been different.

As for the new Lemoine playlet, Poking The Dragon – A Lockdown Experience, its theatrical premise, as the playwright describes, is epistolary, a perfect form for this pandemical epoch. It isn’t the first time Lemoine has ventured into correspondence for his theatrical storytelling. Love Litigants (1998), for example, is a series of letters spun from a one-night stand between a student and a cashier. The Hudson’s Bay Story, revived occasionally for Teatro New Year’s Eve shows, is an exchange of letters between head office and an increasingly disgruntled Bay employee who’s taken offence at Eydie Gormé’s version of Sleigh Ride, played every morning before store opening.

Welcome Home, made possible by EPCOR’s Heart and Soul fund, is “our opportunity to experiment with what’s possible,” says Lemoine simply. “We want to catch up with people…. To perform or to witness is a privilege.”

PREVIEW

Welcome Home

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Mark Meer, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Chariz Faulmino, Steven Greenfield

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday, plus Oct. 30 and Nov. 6

Tickets and COVID protocol details: teatro.com

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Hands across the border: the Citadel and a Chicago international new play festival

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Tonight at 6 p.m., Zoom brings us, live, an unusual collaboration, cross-border in both its production and subject matter.

A Distinct Society, by the Canadian-born New York-based playwright/director Kareem Fahmy, who’s of Egyptian extraction, represents Canada at the 11th annual International Voices Project in Chicago — an international new play festival happening in partnership with the Citadel Theatre, the Consulate General of Canada in Chicago, and Chicago’s Silk Road Rising. The cast includes three Chicago actors, plus two familiar to Citadel audiences: Nicole St. Martin (last seen at the Citadel in Sweat) and Will Brisbin (Matilda).

The play is set in a library poised on the border between Quebec and Vermont, and involves an Iranian family separated by the “Muslim ban.”

For this enterprise, St. Martin says she interviewed her mother, a Montreal anglophone, about the impact of the FLQ Crisis on life for her and her husband, a francophone. The play, she says, “is a cool piece of writing that explores a contentious part of our history that isn’t much talked about, while relating it to another, current, world crisis.”

After tonight’s performance you can ask St Martin to expand on a subject that doesn’t reach the world stage very often. She’ll be part of the post-performance Q&A along with the playwright.

A Distinct Society is available for streaming through Saturday at ivpchicago.org.

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A Brimful of Asha: the generation gap in living colour onstage at the Citadel

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nobody knows better than your mom what you should be doing that you aren’t doing, or what you shouldn’t be doing that you are doing, or what you’re putting off doing (like getting married before it’s too late). Right?

Everyone in the world who’s ever had parents knows this.

In the charmer of a play that marks the Citadel’s return to a LIVE (socially distanced) fall season Saturday, the gap between generations and cultures, tradition and the contemporary world, opens between two characters, a mother and a son, and the real-life story they tell, each from their own perspective, over tea. A Brimful of Asha chronicles, in a hilarious double-optic (with a stream of tart maternal interjections), a parental quest across continents — under the camouflage of an India vacation — to arrange a marriage for a 30-ish son.

The hit play, which premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2012 and toured internationally after that, was made together by a real-life mother and son, from their real-life story and conversations. And the comic dynamic of the characters onstage is enhanced by the fact that Jain is a Canadian theatre artist, and a much-awarded one (actor, director, playwright, creator and the artistic director of Toronto’s Why Not Theatre), and his 60-something mom Asha is not an actor. Not only that, she has her doubts whether theatre counts as a real job, much less a reasonable career. Four years of touring with her son apparently hasn’t altered that view materially.

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The Citadel production, coming to the Shoctor stage Saturday (it was originally slated for March 2021) is only the second in which the Jains themselves are not onstage. But the play has found a kindred spirit in director Mieko Ouchi and her cast, Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji.     

From the start Ouchi, a theatre and film artist with a distinguished archive in both fields, found A Brimful of Asha “such a nice fit” with her background and career. Her own family, with its complicated multi-ethnic multi-cultural history, has been a rich inspiration; her most recent play Burning Mom chronicles her mother’s trip to Burning Man the year after her father’s death. Says Ouchi, “Ravi and Asha have crafted conversations that really did happen: real events and a real story, told through a theatrical lens. I related!”

“I felt a real kinship to Ravi, and right away felt at home with the script, both in (its) connecting to family culture, and the verbatim route to storytelling.”

“I draw a lot on my family’s story in my work,” says Ouchi, artistic director of Concrete Theatre, a company specializing in theatre-for-young-audiences. “My first project out of theatre school (she graduated from the U of A in 1992) was a National Film Board documentary Shepherd’s Pie And Sushi about my family.” Mid-development she was cast as the lead in Anne Wheeler’s film The War Between Us, about the Japanese internment.

“My film became about going back to my own family saying ‘what happened to us during the war?’ I didn’t know the details. What had brought my parents together in an inter-racial marriage that in ‘60s Calgary wasn’t exactly a usual thing?” Ouchi’s mom is Irish/ German/ Scottish, her dad Japanese. There was a mystery waiting to be discovered. “What brought these two cultures together?”

“I have a biological brother, and an adopted brother who’s Cree, from the Sturgeon Lake band. So Indigenous culture is also part of my family,” says Ouchi. Her debut film became “a story of bringing together cultures and generations.”

Shepherd’s Pie And Sushi set off an empathetic reverb from a wide spectrum of multi-cultural Canadians. “Ukrainian-Canadian, Italian-Canadian … it’s so fascinating because it’s such a specific story and all kinds of people still felt themselves reflected,” says Ouchi. “Ravi’s play has that same appeal…. You don’t have to be South Asian to relate; we’ve all had battles with our parents, or our children, over what we think is best for them.”

This entry point to universality comes with an unexpected, even paradoxical, discovery: “one of the first lessons I learned as a writer,” Ouchi says, “was that you tell a very specific story to hit a universal truth. It’s not obvious when you start writing…. You learn by interacting with the audience and feeling them recognize and respond.”

With A Brimful of Asha, Jain, she says, “has found a really beautiful mix of hilarious moments, and the challenging dynamics between parents and kids…. There’s a heartwarming real-ness at the centre.”

A big part of the fun, says Ouchi, is “the meta-theatre of it.” The play is “a partnership between a theatre artist and a ‘real person’…. The Ravi character is working very hard, theatrically, to tell the story. He plays girls, uncles, grandparents, his friend Andrew, maybe 30 different characters, everyone they run into. And his mom gets to sit there, putting her two cents in.” Ouchi laughs. “As soon as you do documentary and verbatim work you realize that the ability to tell stories is (naturally) in so many people, part of many cultures.”

The two actors in the Citadel production are both professionals of course. “They’re so excited to be in a rehearsal, making a play about the culture they share,” says Ouchi, one of the Citadel’s three BIPOC associate artists who devised the summer’s Horizon Lab: Where Are Your Stories?. “We’re all so happy just to be part of theatre activity. In a theatre!” The first day of rehearsal it just seemed so miraculous, so emotional, to be here. And then as soon as you’re here it’s normal again. Home. Even if we take hand sanitizer breaks every hour.”

Originally the play was written with a parent and kid working things out across a kitchen table. And originally, Ouchi’s production was destined for the intimate Rice Theatre downstairs at the Citadel. COVID distancing has transplanted A Brimful of Asha upstairs to the 680-seat Shoctor, for a (masked) audience of 100. “Because we’re in such a big space, we’ve made it a dining room table,” says Ouchi of adjustments of scale, including projections, designed to “make the play feel at home in the Shoctor.” And, as she points out, “the distance, literal and figurative between the characters actually makes sense.… A Brimful of Asha is naturally socially distanced!”

And there’s this: “In COVID times, here’s a very sweet, funny, good-natured play. And that’s personally what I’m longing for right now…. warm, comforting, lots of fun.”

Check out an upcoming 12thnight.ca conversation with playwright Ravi Jain.

PREVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: Saturday through Nov. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com

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Rapid Fire Theatre is back live, across the river

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Flexibility!” declares Matt Schuurman. “It’s all about being flexible, in a space that’s flexible….”

He’s talking about improv, to be sure, a theatrically acrobatic subject on which he is an expert practitioner, mentor, producer. But the artistic director of Rapid Fire Theatre might have been addressing the infrastructure of live theatre generally these days, and the ever-changing COVID-ian rules that govern performing and gathering an audience.

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Mid-pandemic Rapid Fire Theatre has up and moved, from Zeidler Hall at the Citadel downtown across the river to the Backstage Theatre at Fringe headquarters, the ATB Financial Arts Barn. So, in this three-month commitment, Edmonton’s 40-year-old improv comedy company has returned to their old stomping ground in Old Strathcona. And as of Friday they’re returning with live (and live streamed) shows that embrace their roots.

For RFT The big plus of the Backstage, the Fringe’s adaptable black box theatre, is that, unlike the Zeidler, “it’s  a big open room we can configure depending on the rules…. We can add more seats, or we can go into full internet mode,” says Schuurman. Rapid Fire has done both, as he explains. They’ve created a 30-seat socially distanced cabaret, with tables for cohorts, and table drink service. And they’ve made the space a viable live-streaming studio too, with multiple camera placements.

“Let’s not focus on what we can’t do,” says Schuurman, a notable video and projection designer in addition to his improv repertoire. “Let’s say Yes (the improv mantra) to the situation we’ve been given!” And the improvisers of the company have never seen a restriction they haven’t wanted to be playful about.

Theatresports, Rapid Fire Theatre.

RFT, long Edmonton’s most internet-savvy theatre company, has been teaching a range of improv workshops, and performing improv shows, online since March. And their live shows will be continue to be live-streamed. For the opening, says Schuurman, “we’re bringing back Theatresports,” a team competition that’s been on hold since March.

“We’ve surrounded the stage in a Plexiglass box, a glass cage, so the cast can perform without masks, very close to the audience.” In honour of these particularities, with a nod to professional wrestling matches, they’ve dubbed it Apocalypse Cage Match. As Schuurman says, “typically, Theatresports is a a big ensemble show” that includes improvisers who drop in, spontaneously, for an episode. Improvising a schedule and ad hoc teams isn’t possible, times being what they are. Instead there are teams, 16 of them, set in advance, including roommates and COVID couples. And the programming is set up tournament-style, with teams that advance and others who are bumped out.

Double Feature, Rapid Fire Theatre.

Theatresports happens every Friday and Saturday night at 10 p.m. Before that, at 8 p.m., those nights is The Double Feature Improv Show, featuring two improv troupes, each with a showcase specialty and, as Schuurman say, “presentation that’s more theatrical, more narrative” than the quicker hits of Theatresports.

Even online, improv relies on audience cues and feedback, via chat windows and the like. “This is so much more direct,” he says happily of the return to live. “We can have an international audience, and the performers, online as well as live, can hear the audience reaction!” As he points out, the trickiest feature of online performance is “thinking of ways to engage the audience.”

The future is uncertain, of course. Ditto the timelines. “We’re not sure what’s next for us. But Old Strathcona and Theatresports bring back an era, says Schuurman. “It’s where I first started going to shows. And there’s nostalgia about being back in the ‘hood.”

PREVIEW

Theatresports and The Double Feature Improv Show

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10332 84 Ave, and online

Running: Friday and Saturday nights

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

   

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Curio Shoppe: taking the nightmare home … to your place

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Colin Matty as Will, with Curio Shoppe co-creators Megan Dart and (right) Beth Dart, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For 12 years, the creators of Dead Centre of Town have invited us on nocturnal excursions into our own haunted past — the graveyard where our darkest local secrets lie buried. Which is why we’ve found ourselves on location at Fort Edmonton, peering through river valley mist as the undead, the unsavoury, the unrepentant come to life by flickering firelight.

2020 is the year Catch The Keys Productions brings the nightmares home. Your home, that is.

It’s an unnerving thought. With Curio Shoppe, the latest from the sisters Dart, specialists in immersive theatre and macabre storytellers par excellence, the haunted house is … your place. In this shivery season, when the veil between the present and the past is the thinnest, your link between worlds is your internet connection. Ah, and your cellphone.

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Given the restrictions of the COVID-ian era “we’d been hoping to create a distanced in-person experience,” says Beth Dart, the director half of Catch The Keys with her playwright sister Megan Dart. “But with the (ongoing) construction at Fort Edmonton, there just wasn’t the space.” They decided to come to you, and haunt your house instead with an “interactive online nightmare.”

They studied international experiments. And they enlisted the Fringe’s inventive systems analyst and online designer Bradley King (the Dart sisters call him “Bradley the Wizard King”) to “build a brand new platform.” Curio Shoppe is, says Dart, a melange of pre-recorded video and audio, with “mysterious live elements.” Hmm. There’s an intriguing phrase that sticks in the mind, especially given the show’s uniquely come-hither billing: “a brand new theatre-meets-internet-meets-‘the call is coming from inside the house’ interactive experience.”

Morgan Yamada as Marie, in Curio Shoppe, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“Instead of laying miles of cable through Fort Edmonton” and praying for a lack of snow, Dart has found herself poring over “spreadsheets of what audiences track, in their own homes.” You get a ticket, a login and a password. Nature takes care of the outdoor dimming of the lights; you turn off the lights inside. And Catch The Keys takes charge of the options will appear on your screen. Every evening of the run, which begins Wednesday, four households at a time will see (er, feel, er, experience) Curio Shoppe, with new intakes every 15 minutes. “All you need is a stable internet connection, and a cellphone,” says Dart. Not to mention a spirit of adventure.

And you’ll find yourself immersed in a story, loosely harvested from the surprisingly weird and twisted local history that Megan Dart has mined for editions of Dead Centre of Town.

The “interactive nightmare” includes cameos from Dead Centre regulars, including Colin Matty, Christine Lesiak, and Adam Keefe, with two principal characters played by Morgan Yamada and Jake Tkaczyk.

PREVIEW

Curio Shoppe

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions and Fort Edmonton Park’s Dark 2020

Created by: Beth Dart and Megan Dart, Catch The Keys Productions

Running: Oct. 21 to 31

Tickets: eventbrite.ca

    

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