At 10pm on a Friday night, a few friends and I showed up at the corner of Adelaide and Bathurst for Or. The show was described as a playful comedy about a spy turned playwright who is desperate to finish her piece without the constant distraction from her love life.
The piece started off slow; with dialogue delivered in thick British accents so quickly that it was hard understand. The pockets of laughter rippling across the audience indicated that smaller groups of people were getting the jokes at the beginning but never the entire audience at once.
I was unsure what to expect when we arrived at the Factory Studio Courtyard for the “invisible” Toronto walking tour. Gathered under a fire escape our guide Falen Johnson, gave us a small introduction to the tour.
She is of aboriginal descent (reminding us that the word “Indian” should only be used if you know someone really well and are comfortable with them (or if they happen to actually be from India). In a city as cosmopolitan as Toronto and as full of visible minorities, it’s funny to think of anyone actually being invisible.
Stranger Theatre’s mandate is to tell stories inspired by history, literature and folklore using a variety of performance techniques. Their newest show,The Hanging of Françoise Laurent at Theatre Passe Muraille (Backspace) as part of Summerworks tells the true story of a Montreal maidservant sentenced to death for stealing a pair of her Madame’s gloves. The year is 1751 and according to the law of the time a woman could escape a death sentence if the hangman marries her.
