Four new plays open the New Ideas Festival at the Alumnae in TorontoThe first week of the 30th annual New Ideas Festival—organized by the Alumnae Theatre Company on this its 100th year—offers four new plays. Each one disentangles different approaches to the concept of following what you feel is right, and how that can come back and haunt you.
Polarizing play takes to the Toronto stage4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane (Native Earth Performing Arts, 2018) is a 75 minute ode to suicidality. The protagonist, her lover, and her psychiatrist rarely engage in dialogue, with most of the narrative unfolding in the form of voluminous poetic monologues. There is no plot per se, but rather a deep exploration of the inner life of someone on the brink of death. Continue reading Review: 4.48 Psychosis (NSK Theatre)
The Soulpepper team brings Idomeneus to the Toronto stage with visually stunning stagingIdomeneus, written by Roland Schimmelpfennig and translated by David Tushingham, now the latest Soulpepper production on stage at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, is an intensely mesmerizing hybrid of spoken word and movement set to a stunning cinematic backdrop. It’s a captivating tale brought to life by a chorus that fully embodies the script at hand. But, for me, the visuals are what had me sold.
Canadian play talks memory, storytelling, and voice, now on stage in TorontoMichael Healey’s The Drawer Boy, currently running at Theatre Passe Muraille, is one of the most produced Canadian plays of all time. It features a familiar societal conflict: urban versus rural, actor versus tractor. Somehow, in all my theatre education, I had missed seeing this play thus far, and was excited to hear that Passe Muraille was bringing it back in honour of its 50th season.
What makes The Drawer Boy so enduringly popular with theatregoers, I think, is its exploration of the power of story and theatre; in particular, how story is so inextricably linked with memory and identity. When we change the stories we tell to and about ourselves, we can’t help but change who we are.
Continue reading Review: The Drawer Boy (Theatre Passe Muraille)
Big laughs in stylish comedy, now playing on the Toronto stageChristopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a comedy that gets funnier after funnier with each scene. Playing at the Scarborough Village Theatre, this story will make your own sibling relations seem perfectly functional.
Wistful Sonia (Deborah Jarvis) and complacent Vanya (Chip Thompson) are stay-at-home siblings to whom nothing exciting ever happens. Things run amok after their psychic housekeeper Cassandra (Carolyn Williamson) warns them of housing doom and gloom. Sure enough, their movie star sister Masha (Martha Breen) waltzes in to visit, introduces her young bimbo boyfriend Spike (Holm Bradwell), and announces she wishes to sell the family home. Masha is the one who has been paying for its upkeep, while Sonia and Vanya have spent the past 15 years caring for their elderly parents, now deceased. Continue reading Review: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Scarborough Players)