Pulse Theatre‘s production of A Flea in Her Ear, playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival, opens with a dominatrix cracking a whip on a submissive man dressed as a tiger. This is a strange image to experience at the beginning of a production, but I later realized that A Flea in Her Ear wears its strangeness as a badge of honour. The play combines overt sexuality, snazzy 70s fashion, and absurdist comedy to create a production that is colourful, energetic, and undeniably sexy.
As the saying goes, ‘if these walls could talk…’, what would they say? Well, Les murs on des yeux (The Walls Have Eyes) by Le Collectif Les murs ont des yeux playing at the 2017 Toronto Fringe festival explores just that. Five rooms of a house are uniquely personified as they discover together the evidence of domestic violence within their walls. This show is in French with English subtitles. Passionate acting, clear concept, and a very real language barrier made for an interesting experience.
Not enough people are going to see This Is Not She , a site-specific offering of the 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival, and that is a shame. It’s great nerd-fun, well conceived and acted, understated and affecting. But between “Shakespeare” and “audience participation” in the program, I think people will imagine themselves forced to do terrible humiliating English-class things and stay home. They should not. This is good.
Not enough people are going to see 