Review: (Toronto / Theatre) The Speedy (World Stage)

(photo by Chris Hanratty and Shira Leuchter)

by Greg Bunker

Combining curation, correspondence, comedy, and contemplation, UnSpun Theatre’s The Speedy is as remarkable for its true story as it is for the ways it unfolds. The Speedy was a schooner that left the port of Muddy York (present-day Toronto) in 1804, and sunk on its way to Newcastle with all aboard. Commissioned in 2012 by Harbourfront Centre to celebrate 40 years of theatre at the waterfront, The Speedy distills years of research and development into poignant vignettes of the ship, its forced departure, its ill-fated passengers, the serious historical and political consequences of this sinking, and the process of researching and developing the work itself. This even included which parts weren’t produced and why – that was a nice touch. 

Review: (Toronto / Theatre) Sea Sick

Alanna Mitchell (photo by Chloé Ellingston)

The New Big Blue: Warm, Breathless, and Sour
by Gregory Bunker

You can’t make this up: It’s the kind of story that has to be non-fiction to believe. Sea Sick, a solo performance by storyteller extraordinaire Alanna Mitchell, marks the grand opening of the new space at The Theatre Centre. Mitchell is a journalist by trade and the author of Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis (2009), from which this performance is adapted. Sea Sick is a personal reflection on the trips and interviews she conducted to help her understand and explain how climate change is affecting the oceans.

Mitchell has a TED-Talk-type delivery that emphasizes the knowledge-is-power ethos, but she also makes herself vulnerable during some touching, and riotous, moments with the audience. It’s unconventional theatre, and an example of art bringing meaning to science, which is so sorely needed with the topic of climate change. With just a table, glass, pitcher, chalkboard, and shell on stage, the focus is sharp, and the stories well-balanced between the scientific, the thought-provoking, and the hilarious. Directed by The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni with Ravi Jain, Mitchell’s movements and moods are enhanced by the delicate lighting (Rebecca Picherak) and sound (Tim Lindsay).

Review: (Toronto) A Conversation With Edith Head

A Conversation with Edith Head
by Gregory Bunker

Derriere not up to snuff? Could your bosom be doing more for you? Get some sage fashion tips from Hollywood costume legend Edith Head.

Written by Paddy Calistro and Susan Claassen, and produced by Joanna Syrokomla and CAFTCAD, A Conversation with Edith Head makes its Canadian premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre this weekend only.

The year is 1981 – the year of Miss Head’s passing – and she’s (Susan Claassen) recounting some of the highlights and not-so-highlights of her time in Tinseltown. With a career spanning almost 60 years dressing Hollywood’s top actors and winning eight Academy Awards doing it (the most any woman has won), there are stories to tell.

Review: (Toronto) A Room of One's Own

Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf
by Gregory Bunker

Ladies and gentlemen, Virginia Woolf. It’s 1928, and in what seems hardly a stretch, the Bloomsbury Collective has transformed Campbell House into Girton Women’s College – where Woolf made her first of two lectures that would together form her iconic feminist essay A Room of One’s Own. The play, adapted by Patrick Garland, is a period performance piece that sees Naomi Wright brilliantly channel Woolf’s wit right into 2013.

Bonus Feature: Interview - Actor Naomi Wright on A Room of One's Own

                                                                                             (photo by Emily Cooper)
Communion With Virginia
In Woolf's life, she suffered a lot of pain for a million reasons, and part of that was being a woman of genius in a society that did not recognize women of genius...
by Gregory Bunker

After the media storm surrounding David Gilmour’s comments and Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize in Literature, there could hardly be a better time to revisit Virginia Woolf’s iconic feminist text, A Room of One’s Own. Naomi Wright, who plays Virginia Woolf in the Bloomsbury Collective’s upcoming show, talks with CharPo Senior Contributor Gregory Bunker about the state of equality today, the translation of Woolf’s essay into immersive theatre, and whether David Gilmour knows that his favourite female writer will soon be brought to life at the historic Campbell House.

CHARPO: Do you think that Judith Shakespeare [William’s hypothetical, equally talented sister] would be able to match William’s legacy today?

WRIGHT: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer, actually. Back in the spring I started writing grant proposals for this project, and I started googling, 'Where is equality for women today?' and it’s kind of disconcerting when you look into the facts. Women still make less money than men for doing the exact same job, and we still make up a tiny percentage of people who make decisions in the general scheme of the world. Then I googled, 'What is equality for women writers?' and I found this study that a woman at Harvard had done. She had gone through the arts in America, and one of the things she found was that The New York Review of Books still gives 80% of their reviews to men, so when you think about that, when you’re reading the New York Times, when you’re reading all of these amazing reviews, maybe one in five is given to a woman, so what is the likelihood that they can sell the way that men can? For me, it’s not that we need to be burning anything or standing on any soapboxes, but it is really interesting for us to just take stock and to think about it. (cont'd)

Review: (Toronto) Far Away

(photo by David Poon)

Caryl Churchill's Cold Metaphors
by Gregory Bunker

Bad Dress’s take on esteemed British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is, indeed, so distant as to be indecipherable. Published in 2000, Far Away’s high-minded, postmodernist theme of pervasive fear in a world where everything – humans, deer, grass, trees, rivers, even weather – is at war, seems to require training in philosophy and dramaturgy to truly understand. Having an education in science, I can say that from this perspective it is ecologically daft. In a world where animals are constantly trading sides, how would ecosystems even function? Why would gravity care to get involved? And how would anyone even communicate with it? We are not provided with explanations for how we got into this dystopia or rules for how it works, and this is not ok. Simply put, the writing of this play is an intellectual exercise and not for a general audience.

Review: (Toronto) The Nefarious Bed and Breakfast

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by Gregory Bunker

The Nefarious Bed & Breakfast, a comedy by Monkeyman Productions, sees a former supervillain – Dr. Notto Nefarious – turn a new leaf as the sole-proprietor of a Toronto bed and breakfast. His first guests are anything but normal, and Nefarious soon finds out there’s more to running a B&B than forced conversation and croissants. Especially when his clients have their own reasons for being a part of this particular B&B.

Review: (Toronto) You Should Have Stayed Home: A #G20 Romp (Touring to: Montreal, Ottawa)

When You're Not So Lucky
A vital story to hear
by Gregory Bunker

Toronto’s downtown G20 meeting in 2010 was insanity: all of a sudden the city became foreign, and news feeds made sure flaming police cruisers and black bloc vandalism were the most memorable moments for those who weren’t there. Few have heard a first-hand account of the largest violation of civil liberties in Canadian history. Abuse and arrests were indiscriminately dished out to peaceful protesters, passersby, even tourists. I was also unwittingly caught up in it, and I was lucky to get out. Tommy Taylor, the playwright and sole performer, was not so lucky.

What makes Praxis Theatre and The Original Norwegian’s You Should Have Stayed Home a vital story to hear is the detail, the honesty, and the loss of naïveté – not just Taylor’s but Canadians’ in general - about corrupted power structures. What makes it touching is that Taylor handled the ordeal just as you or I might have. Why couldn’t he just get a break?, you keep asking yourself. He was nice. He did as he was told. This is Canada and police can’t just arrest you without reason, and they certainly can’t get away with it. But Taylor was let down, of course. And still, he is too nice about it. (And so are we, the public, but this is his show.)

Review: (Toronto) Schützen (SummerWorks)

Ready, aim…Educate?
Schützen misses the mark
by Gregory Bunker

Schützen, a work making its North American debut from Berlin, is about shooting people. The mercifully charming Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt reports on her research about the aforementioned, with field-recorded effects courtesy of front-row assistant Matthias Meppelink. Fourth wall removed, Ullerup Schmidt tells the audience that no violence would be a part of the show in a backhanded way so-if-you-see-violence-it’s-real kind of way. The reassurance-turned-warning was a promising trick that—considering that the topic is guns—made me both anxious and excited. But the yoga quickly mitigated that and I started to feel like I was quietly rooting for a friend to slam-dunk her high school presentation in a strangely nostalgic, now-let’s-go-out-and-play kind of way. So went the first 30 minutes, and then we actually went out to play.

Review: (Toronto) The Art of Building a Bunker... (SummerWorks)

Sense and Sensitivity
by Gregory Bunker

Original, uncomfortably funny, and ultimately unsettling, The Art of Building a Bunker or Paddling the Canoe of My Self Down the River of Inclusivity and into the Ass of the World is a brilliant one-man tragicomedy that sees an everyman unravel over the course of his much-loathed, company-mandated sensitivity training sessions. The training is so farcical that you’re almost certain Elvis, the protagonist, can quietly mock it all the way through. As we begin to learn more about Elvis, and as Elvis begins to learn more about himself, we realize how perfect the title really is.

Review: (Toronto) Show and Tell Alexander Bell (SummerWorks)

When Bell Plays Broken Telephone
Crossed lines between theatre and performance art
by Gregory Bunker

Like a dream, Show and Tell Alexander Bell (produced by Ars Mechanica) is fantastical, schizophrenic, hard to understand and even harder to recall. Sadly, the premise gets lost and the plot becomes so bewildering that the nightmarish atmosphere towards the end feels appropriate: you know that soon, you’ll wake up and it’ll all be over.

News: (Toronto) SummerWorks launch

Michael Rubenfeld

Guns, Magic, Space, Elvis
SummerWorks 2013 excites
by Gregory Bunker

“…Sounds of the sea,” were the words that ended a poem spontaneously composed by Four Words, an interactive experiment where party guests joined Sook-Yin Lee, Adam Litovitz, and Max Chandler in creating poetry, four words at a time. It was one of many interactive art pieces meant to entertain and intrigue the patrons at last night’s fundraiser bash in Toronto’s historic Campbell House. This 23rd season of the SummerWorks Festival will showcase over 70 original pieces of theatre, live art, and music from August 8th to the 18th in venues across the city. SummerWorks is the largest juried performance festival in the country, featuring boundary-pushers from Canada and beyond. Here’s a quick look at some of what’s to come.

One of the “and beyond” pieces creating buzz is Schützen by Danish performance artist Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt and German Matthias Meppelink, making its way from Berlin for its North American premiere at the festival. Schützen is a trilogy about the human ability to kill and its effects on the body. It is based on the artists’ interviews of American drone pilots, Israeli troops, and Berliners at a shooting range. Last night audio clips of these interviews were available for listening, as were clips of seriously slowed down shots from an AK-47. The former was raw interview material with the odd skip and cut; the latter sounded less like a gun and more like a spaceship taking off. What kind of marriage will these clips make?

Review: (Toronto) Fairy Tale Ending

Not All As It Seems
by Gregory Bunker

Wow.

Enormously entertaining and rewarding for all ages, Role Your Own Theatre’s Fairy Tale Ending: The Big Bad Family Musical will keep children and adults—not just parents—laughing and thinking from start to finish. The clever Fairy Tale Ending follows the re-telling of fairy tales gone wrong from the perspective of a coming-of-age Jill (of Jack and Jill fame). Written by Kieren MacMillan (who is also the remarkable pianist seen backstage) and Jeremy Hutton (who is also the Artistic Director at Hart House Theatre), the cast of nine run through the tales of Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and Little Red Riding Hood, with adorably sinister appearances by Jack (again, of Jack and Jill fame) throughout.

Review: (Toronto) I Will Not Hatch!

Michael Bedford (photo: David Levine)

The Anti-Social Art of Flying
by Gregory Bunker

With cathartic laughs at the air industry’s expense, Steady State Theatre’s I Will Not Hatch! is a clever, quirky production. A Fringe favourite, playwright Maya Rabinovitch explores the question asked at every childhood sleepover: If your plane is going down and you know the end is near, how would you spend your final minutes?

Review: (Toronto) La Ronde

Brandon McGibbon, Grace Lynn Kung and Mike Ross (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Socio-Sexual Edgeplay
Soulpepper runs Schnitzler's genital relay

by Gregory Bunker

Soulpepper’s La Ronde is a not-quite-convincing cobbling together of Torontonians’ sex lives. The original Arthur Schnitzler play was scandalous in its day for its display of sexual relationships across the rigid class lines of late 19th century Germany. Jason Sherman’s modern-day adaptation is downright wholesome in comparison. Set downtown, we are in a different place and time—especially for conversations of a sexual nature—and a uniquely Torontonian update should not only show us how times have changed but also expose us to how times are changing. It was, after all, the cultural context of the original play that made it so deliciously dirty at the time. Here, Schnitzler’s template of crossing class structure with socio-sexual edgeplay seems difficult to transpose onto the cultural milieu of sexual Toronto.

Review: (Toronto) The Dumb Waiter

Dis-Pinterest
Serving up a classic with a side of confusion
by Gregory Bunker

In The Dumb Waiter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter creates a suspenseful, one-act play centred on two hit men discussing the mysterious nature of their next job. Completely character-driven, the script carefully ratchets up the tension with each line to its eventually obvious but still unbearable conclusion. This tension was sadly missing in the Two Wolves production, replaced instead by general confusion.

Review: (Toronto) Two Rooms / II

Elkahna Talbi and Jean Marc Dalpé (photo credit: Mathieu Girard)

No Room for Compromise
To love or loathe those “swinging Tunisian hips”
by Gregory Bunker

Théâtre Français’s Two Rooms elaborates on the racist overtones created by the “war on terror”. It uses an older, white, “old school” Canadian policeman and a young, intelligent, beautiful, Muslim immigrant to tell its story. Originally written in English by Mansel Robinson, Two Rooms has been tweaked and translated for a French audience, shifting the immigrant’s identity as an Uyghur Muslim to a North African Muslim, for example. Jean Marc Dalpé, the male lead, translated the play to reflect a more natural French rhythm. But anglophones need not fear: surtitles are provided, which were effectively used by this humble reviewer even if their near proximity made it a bit difficult to flit between the acting and the dialogue.