Review: (Toronto) Free Outgoing

Anusree Roy, Ash Knight (photo by John Lauener)

A Show that Deserves to Go Viral
by Keely Kwok
@Kowkles

Normally when I review a show I take a lot of notes. I probably take too many notes and drive whoever’s sitting beside me crazy. But not last night. After the first two minutes of Free Outgoing, I closed my trusty notebook knowing full well I would not forget what I was about to witness. 

Free Outgoing is about a young 15-year-old girl named Deepa who, out of love and foolishness, becomes the focus of a nationwide scandal when a video of her and her boyfriend having sex goes viral. But the real story is about Deepa’s widowed mother and brother, Malini (Anusree Roy) and Sharan (Andrew Laurie), and what they must do to navigate the scandal in their conservative Tamil community in Chennai, India. 

Review: (Toronto) The Happy Woman

(L-R) Maria Vacratsis, Martin Happer, Maev Beaty, Ingrid Rae Doucet and Barbara Gordon in The Happy Woman. Photo Credit: Guntar Kravis

Story Time

Happy Woman has a strong plot...but other problems

by Dave Ross

“Happy, happy, happy…” These words open the production of Rose Cullis's The Happy Woman from Nightwood Theatre. The play is billed as a “darkly comic exploration of what happens when bliss gets in the way of truth and threatens to destroy the very foundation we rely on.”  The play gives us exactly that, a darkly comic story with tragic elements dispersed throughout. Unfortunately, the production itself lacks in several regards.

Sunday Read: First Person - Rose Cullis on The Happy Woman

Hap-hap-happy!

...it began in a small village in Spain...

by Rose Cullis

The Happy Woman began a number of years ago, when I was briefly living in a small village in Spain.  Every morning I went to a little, clattering café and watched two burly men and their mother preside over an extraordinary cast of characters.  The mother, in particular, fascinated me.  She was a big woman, and clearly very hard-working, but she wore a lady-like knee-length skirt and a delicately-crocheted sweater, and she beamed with satisfaction as she served customers.  

I was fascinated by her stalwart happiness, and so I began a play where a woman (Margaret) is returning home from the market dragging a cart behind her.   She stops to mop her face and marvel at the beauty of the day and delight in having a grandchild on the way.  Margaret encounters her more cynical neighbour, (BellaDonna), on the street.   When Margaret leaves, BellaDonna turns to the audience to reveal both her role as “chorus”, as well as the news that Margaret’s life is not as idyllic as it seems:  her daughter is acting out, and her daughter -in-law seems to be going mad with her pregnancy.  

From this opening scene I stitched bits and pieces from my own life, until the play took on a shape that helped me understand my fascination with Margaret.  Cassie, Margaret’s daughter, appeared, suffering from some kind of mysterious angst.  She finds her mother’s joyfulness implacable; Margaret can’t hear anything, Cassie complains, if it’s not in a major key.  Then, Margaret’s perfect son, Christian entered the story - apparently contented and happy – much like Margaret herself.  His pregnant wife, Stasia, is troubled, however, and her fears and obsessions will prove to be uncannily related to unspoken tensions in the family.   

First Person: Kelly Thornton on The Penelopiad

Megan Follows (l) and Bahia Watson (photo credit: Robert Popkin)

Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Staging The Penelopiad 

by Kelly Thornton

As the Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre, it has been an epic journey to produce Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, but as Canada’s premiere feminist theatre, I don’t think there is a more fitting play for our company to have brought to the stage. 

The power of Atwood’s The Penelopiad is that her Penelope, captured in myth as the archetypical woman of virtue, chastely waiting for a long absent husband, is constructed as a wholly contemporary voice. Now with two thousand years of knowledge, of ongoing misrepresentation, of being made a grotesque example, “a stick used to beat other women ” into servitude, comes this outspoken messenger. 

Her voice is potent not only because it reframes The Odyssey, arguably the most popular myth of all time but because it calls into question the “heroic actions” of Odysseus. Rather than validating the existing social order, as myth had traditionally served to do, The Penelopiad dissects the ethics of such actions filtering it through such issues as gender and class. Here Atwood steps out from behind the tall shadow of patriarchal myth-making to “spin a thread of her own”. 

Review: (Toronto) The Penelopiad

Megan Follows (photo credit: Robert Popkin)

A Whimsical Production that Warrants Applause
...and a conversion...
by Alexandra Lelli

The word ‘contemporary’ gets thrown around a lot when describing Margaret Atwood’s ability to spin a yarn. In The Penelopiad – a revisionist account of Homer’s The Odyssey from the perspective of his virtuous wife, Penelope – Atwood’s cunning wit and relevant analysis of class, gender and privilege leaps off the page.

I am reluctant to admit I wasn’t a fan of Atwood’s novella (published in 2005) – reluctant because it makes me feel anti-Canadian. I felt like something was missing. Fortunately, Nightwood Theatre’s all-female cast brought Atwood’s contemporary epic to life. Under the direction of Kelly Thornton, who also acts as Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre, my foray into the alluring shroud of “classical tragedy, Victorian melodrama, campy burlesque and rollicking song” had begun. I found my missing ingredient: this story was meant for the stage.