Office politics clash with a newfangled business lingo in The Memo playing at Unit 102 Theatre in Toronto

Anyone familiar with the language of business knows that it can get a little… dramatic. Corporate lingo has this amazing way of charging forward impressively — driving results to generate insights for maximum value, and so on — without actually saying anything.

Vaclav Havel’s hilarious 1965 comedy The Memo, in a new production by Thought for Food theatre company at Unit 102 Theatre, addresses the nonsense of office jargon, and though utterly absurd, it’s spot on. Desk jockeys be warned, however: this ain’t “The Office.” The Memo is a darker comedy than that, and it kind of hurts.

Continue reading Review: The Memo (Thought for Food) →

A study on the concept and theory of colour, I Send You this Cadmium Red is playing at Toronto’s Enwave Theatre

What do we talk about when we talk about color? Probably not the same things John Christie and John Berger did. The two men — one an artist, the other an art-writer — passed letters back and forth on the subject for more than two years, a beautiful correspondence that was later collected into the book I Send You This Cadmium Red. It’s a philosophical effort, but never fancy or arcane: just red, blue, and the rest. Beneath the simplicity, however, lies an astonishing depth.

Continue reading Review: I Send You This Cadmium Red (Art of Time Ensemble) →

Me Talking to Myself in the Future is one woman’s retrospections at Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

At one point midway through Me Talking to Myself in the Future, currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the show’s creator and star Marie Brassard interrupts herself in the midst of a reverie and says, “I am telling a story which makes no sense.”

When she delivered the line on opening night, the audience laughed with palpable relief, as though she’d named the elephant in the room. Afterwards, my friend and I agreed that her candor in that moment helped us connect to the performance — in truth, the show is often quite hard to follow (at least by the standard of stories that makes sense).

But things aren’t what they seem in this hallucinatory play about evolution and transformation, including that stodgy old elephant, which turned out to be a red herring. Brassard wasn’t conceding to literal-mindedness, but gently reminding us to shift our expectations.

Continue reading Review: Me Talking to Myself in the Future (Buddies in Bad Times) →