I walked into a full house for Wildlife at the 2015 SummerWorks Festival at Artscape Youngplace. This is always a wonderful thing to see. Even more impressive was how many young industry professionals I recognized in the audience. The room was buzzing and full of energy and I was eager to see what all the hype was about. Continue reading Wildlife (Events In Real Time) 2015 SummerWorks Review
Full disclosure: I love immersive theatre and audience participation. And it was no surprise to me that I thoroughly enjoyed Lemon Bucket Orkestra’s dinner theatre-esque “Ukrainian folk opera,” Counting Sheep, the Production-in-Residence at this year’s SummerWorks Festival. Audience members are thrown head-on into creators Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s emotional recounting of their experiences supporting protesters in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
Continue reading Counting Sheep (Lemon Bucket Orkestra) 2015 SummerWorks Review
Castor and Sylvie is a tiny wee character drama set in Simone de Beauvoir‘s living room. Her lifelong companion and literary collaborator Jean-Paul Sartre has just died, leaving her stunned and unsettled. Can she go on without him? Can she write, can she see people, can she wake up in the mornings?
Through conversations with the devoted Sylvie Le Bon — the two are more than platonic friends, but less than lovers — Beauvoir parses her identity, regains her equilibrium, and raises unsettling questions about Le Bon’s own future.
This piece runs on two levels: as a portrait of not-quite-sexual female intimacy, and as a (heavily embellished) glimpse into Simone de Beauvoir’s final years. If either of those appeal to you, Castor and Sylvie has something to offer. If they don’t, you’ll probably just find it tedious.
Continue reading Castor and Sylvie (Gailey Road) 2015 SummerWorks Review
To put it plainly, The PepTides’ LOVE+HATE (as a part of this year’s SummerWorks Theatre Series) is essentially a concert threaded together with skits about the two biggest emotional drivers that determine how we interact with the world around us: love and hate. And I guess there were also a few digs at pharmaceutical companies. While I may not have understood every lyric due to microphone issues, The PepTides’ upbeat energy was so infectious that I still had a fantastic time.
Continue reading LOVE+HATE (The PepTides) 2015 SummerWorks Review
I spent an hour on a lovely Sunday afternoon watching myself (and fellow audience members) on a semi-blurry screen while listening to instructions and observations delivered by a variety of robotic voices with charming British accents. SummerWorks Special Presentation, Offending the Audience, might not be for everyone but it definitely contained many interesting ideas about what is theatre and our identity as theatre-goers.
Continue reading Offending the Audience (Recto-Verso) 2015 SummerWorks Review