Review: (Winnipeg) Executing Justice (Fringe)

Hatred on Trial
by Edgar Governo
@pseudohistorian

There hasn't been an execution in Canada since a double hanging on December 11, 1962, but Bill Pats takes us into a hypothetical Canadian future where capital punishment has returned, with Daryl Kane scheduled to be put to death on April 7, 2030.

On a personal level, I consider the death penalty to be cruel and unusual punishment--I'm glad it was abolished in Canada and hope this future never comes to pass. Regardless of where your opinion lies in this debate, however, there is at least one element of the story Pats has crafted in Executing Justice to give you pause. For every heinous crime Kane has committed, there is someone else who benefitted from it; and for every seemingly ignorant opinion, there is a fact to justify it.

Pats continues to be an intense performer, with none of the levity in this show which he included last year in the autobiographical I Hate Bill Pats Too: Almost Homeless (which I also reviewed on this site). At the end of the performance I attended, he claimed to have arrived at his tech rehearsal with "half a script" and only a vague idea of the show as a whole, and I'm amazed with the results if that's the case.

Considering how dark he is willing to go in this first fictional outing, I almost shudder (in the best possible way) to think of where he might go next.

To July 27