Lac/Athabasca, playing at this year’s Toronto SummerWorks Festival, is based on the Lac-Mégantic train derailment disaster of 2013. It also takes into account the affect oil mining has on the environment and the local residing people. The story line is non-linear with different characters and their stories weaving in and around each other, culminating in an explosive end. Continue reading Lac/Athabasca (Theatre Free Radical) 2015 SummerWorks Review
As part of the Sears Ontario Drama Festival, one play written by a student is selected to be workshopped and given a staged reading with professional actors and director. This year’s winner, Callum Hutchinson’s politically charged Fighting with Monsters, is playing the Factory Theatre Rehearsal Hall as part of the 2015 Toronto SummerWorks Festival.
The Tall Building (It Could Still Happen), now playing at the 2015 edition of SummerWorks, takes place in a building that keeps growing floors. Meanwhile, a city much like our current Toronto (but run by a mysterious “lady mayor”) slowly devolves into a coyote-strewn, apocalyptic wasteland of fire and wind.
In a series of intriguing vignettes, three characters – a closed-off, suspicious woman named Sulla who owns a single pair of magical, fraying pants (Molly Flood); a credulous and sweet 12-year-old boy with absent parents, his own street newspaper, and a 7-11 obsession (Philip Nozuka); and a pompous, ineffectual assassin (Clinton Carew) – reach an uneasy détente as the world outside burns.
Continue reading The Tall Building (It Could Still Happen) 2015 SummerWorks Review
The unpaid internship is a rite of passage for many early 20-something recent grads with a certain level of affluence. I’ve done my fair share of them. But for a bright-eyed grad, being thrust into the working world is often an alienating experience. Writer/director Iain Soder explores this alienation in Tough Guy Mountain presented in Toronto as part of the SummerWorks Festival
Continue reading Tough Guy Mountain: a play (Tough Guy Mountain) 2015 SummerWorks Review
the marquise of O- (the red light district), adapted and directed by Lauren Gillis and Ted Witzel for SummerWorks, is loosely based on an 1808 short story by Heinrich von Kleist, filtered through Kant’s ideas on reality and knowledge, and the remix culture of Reddit.
This story, about a widow whose life and honour are saved from an encroaching army by an instantly-besotted count, and who later mysteriously falls pregnant, is both devotedly retold and revised into a modern exploration of how we treat rape, and how belief and rationalization can be tenuous and dangerous things.
Continue reading the marquise of O- (the red light district) 2015 SummerWorks Review