>>REVIEWS
IGNITE! FESTIVAL
The embers are still warm after the close of Sage Theatre’s second annual Ignite! Festival, a showcase for emerging artists complete with production assistance and mentorship modelled on Edmonton’s 11-year-old Nextfest.
From an adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play, to an anthropomorphic tomato consuming its own placenta, this year’s lineup included an incendiary mix that sizzled more than it fizzled, stretching six one-act plays and a short program across three days. Though the Pumphouse Theatre may be a bit out of the way for theatergoers more used to the downtown theatre district, the festival’s second year was a treat that should have the community clamouring for next year’s offerings. If 2006’s robust attendance was any indication, they already are.
THE SHORTS
The festival’s shorts program included three very physical pieces tackling, respectively, the challenge of unity, the pathology of a faceless telephone culture and the joys/horrors of parenthood.
Babble Rabble, performed by MoMo Dance (an arts company that includes disabled artists), offered a wordless movement piece employing repetitive movement and sound that, through interaction, became a synthesized whole. A solid effort.
Hotdogs and Telephones, written and directed by Jennifer Roberts, was a personal reminder of how excellent movement-based pieces can be in small doses. "Missing their middles" (shirts), underwear-clad bill collectors Stephen Shroeder and Laurie Montemurro stalked their telephone "prey," Maya Posavec, in a comic stab at the impersonal world we all fear when we glance at the call display. Bite-sized, lip-smacking and not too filling – just how I like them.
Hothouse, the short program’s keystone piece, and the festival’s only explicitly clown piece, told the sordid tale of Murky (Judith Mendelsohn) and the birth of her puppet child, Hothouse, after a literally messy love affair with a tomato. From a Jello-spewing placenta to shadow puppetry exploring birth, death and even a haunting, Hothouse creators Mendelsohn and Jennifer Piercey have created a hilarious piece of physical theatre.
SALT LAKE
If no news is good news, and a sold-out house is even better, then the fact that I wasn’t able to attend Laurel Lepine’s Salt Lake certainly bodes well for Lepine’s tale of two incarcerated Mormon missionaries.
KILLJOY WAS HERE
Newspapers would be far more interesting if we could affix the kind of sticker I’d like to award Jon Adams’ Killjoy Was Here – a scratch-and-sniff sticker announcing "Grape Job." Adams’s surreal story of social engineering given a terrifying literality is certainly a fascinating beginning, if clumsy in its execution.
While the notion of a disaffected eccentric stumbling on a means to effect his will on the world is an intriguing conceit, Adams needs to pull the millstone of high school angst from his play’s neck before it can rise. And while addressing the issue of high school angst, it might also behoove director Lee Cookson, when directing himself, to ensure he takes his Ritalin. Many audience members and reviewers are deathly allergic to manic ham.
FIERCE: A GROTESQUE BURLESQUE
Created by Ottillie Parfitt and Polly Wiseman, Fierce was a picaresque trip through evisceration, arson and cannibalism. Journeying from the bowels of hell – rendered with an eerie simplicity as two furies emerge from a glowing red box – to the frozen North, the show was an apropos addition to Ignite!’s lineup, given that the show has already been performed at Nextfest. Mixing equal parts humour and the macabre, Fierce was a delicious hour of indulgent theatre, with the show’s final moral diatribe the sole interruption in an otherwise seamlessly surreal flow.
DIS/ASSOCIATION
Dis/Association was not unlike a fantastically attractive flirt who might offer a smile but won’t give you the time of day – the lack of follow-through was agonizing, and yet I found myself forgiving playwright Toby Cygman almost immediately.
As its title suggests, this ambitious work follows the interconnected lives of seven characters whose relationships each embody their struggles with meaningful human connections. Populated by an exceptionally talented cast (save for Johnny G’s inanimate performance as the cuckolding Alex), staged expertly by Amy Dettling and complemented by an excellent production design, the scarcely 35-minute production ends far too abruptly for its own good. While its synopsis defends the work as an abstracted narrative, the reality is that while Cygman’s characterization is unquestionably economic and robust, there is still more work to be done to bring its thesis to a conclusion, rather than an incomplete sketch of urban anomie.
BEAUTY HERSELF IS BLACK
An adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Mike Unrau’s Beauty Herself is Black saw William Shakespeare (Phil Fulton) as a self-aggrandizing plagiarist, speaking grandly of the power of words while revealing his own fickle loyalties. Sporting the festival’s most elaborate costume design, courtesy of designer Marueen Mosher, the production boasted a strong cast and a refreshingly unique return to The Bard’s iambic pentameter in an otherwise explicitly contemporary festival.
AMERICAN WOMAN
Judith Clark’s one-woman show, performed by Liz McMullan, was a clumsy, artless look at the experience of an American immigrant dealing with her transition into her Canadian identity. An unfortunate mishmash of unrealized themes that included yeast and magpies, McMullan’s portrayal of Clark’s already one-dimensional characters meandered lifelessly across the Victor Mitchell stage with director Tanielle Geib’s inexplicably drawn-out staging. Hobbled by the same tired clichés the play decries –even taking its own swing at the utterly empty "Joe Canada" piñata – American Woman had all the mechanical unoriginality of the PowerPoint slideshow that played behind it. |
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