>>REVIEW
MAGNETIC NORTH THEATRE FESTIVAL
Runs until June 16
National Arts Centre and other venues
Ottawa
The best play I saw last weekend was in a swimming pool. The One That Got Away, by Vancouver’s Electric Company and The Only Animal, is a marvelous after-life fantasy performed entirely in an indoor pool – in this case, the one belonging to Ottawa’s Soloway Jewish Community Centre. That soggy novelty aside, it turned out to be the indisputable highlight of the opening weekend of Magnetic North, the annual Ottawa-based festival designed to showcase some of the best of English-Canadian indie theatre. This year’s programming, featuring nine plays (of which I caught the first six), also included shows by Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop and other companies from Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax.
There are a few reasons Calgarians should be interested in Magnetic North. Not only has it presented local acts (One Yellow Rabbit played the inaugural fest in 2003, as did the Trouts), as of next year it will be programmed by a Calgarian, Ken Cameron, late of the Alberta Playwrights Network. Given that Magnetic North is held on alternating years in different Canadian cities (Edmonton and St. John’s in 2004 and 2006, respectively, Vancouver next year), it seems likely that Cameron will bring the $1-million fest to Calgary during his artistic directorship. Or, at the very least, his choices are bound to reflect his familiarity with Calgary and Alberta theatre artists and provide them with more opportunities to strut their stuff in the nation’s capital.
That’s all in the future, however, and I was at Magnetic North to see what it has to offer right now. This year’s edition is the last for founding AD Mary Vingoe, whose primary achievement with the festival has been to draw attention to English Canada’s creation companies (i.e. those that create and perform their own work) outside their home turf. Any festival is bound to reflect the tastes of its programmer, but Magnetic North can also be a useful indicator of the state of those companies. As The One That Got Away proved, along with the Trouts’ Famous Puppet Death Scenes and the four other works I saw, there’s creativity to burn out there when it comes to concept, design and performance. Where they fall short, with a couple of exceptions, is in the writing department.
This was most glaringly evident in the biggest production of the festival, the National Arts Centre’s première, in conjunction with Vancouver’s urban ink, of Copper Thunderbird, an eagerly anticipated new play by Marie Clements about First Nations painter Norval Morrisseau. The staging, under the expert direction of the NAC’s new artistic director of English theatre, Peter Hinton, is a spectacular evocation of Morrisseau’s vibrant, sinuous style, a living Morrisseau painting onstage, and yet the script is as flat and unfinished as a rough sketch. Long on symbolism, short on character development, it fails to cultivate the rich dramatic loam of Morrisseau’s wild life as a visionary artist torn between spirituality and the bottle.
The writing is also the weak spot in both The Russian Play, by Toronto’s Company Theatre Crisis and Absit Omen Theatre, and the provocatively titled Sexual Practices of the Japanese, by Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement. Each work has an intriguing premise that doesn’t deliver on the follow-through. The Russian Play opens with its cynical heroine, a comically gloomy Slav played to perfection by Michelle Monteith, promising to satirically undercut all the lugubrious clichés of Russian drama – only to lapse into those very clichés at the end. (It also loses points for using the horrors of the Stalinist secret police merely as a cheap source of tragedy.) The more likable – if less skilfully executed – Sexual Practices also plays with cultural stereotypes, contrasting the exotic erotic delights of Tokyo (the "love hotels" and "soaplands" bathhouses, the naughty "kogals," those oversexed schoolgirls beloved of Japanese men – not to mention filmmakers Tarantino and González Iñárritu) with the sad realities of seeking intimacy in a big, cold city. While the play’s comedy has some of the giddy appeal of Japanese TV, its tragic undercurrent, the tale of a lonely, doomed electronics CEO (Raugi Yu), needs better development.
Having harped at the Old Trouts in the past on their need for stronger texts, I didn’t go to Famous Puppet Death Scenes expecting a great script. Instead, I just surrendered to it as a string of enjoyably weird, black-comic vignettes that occasionally recall the macabre illustrations of Edward Gorey, and at other times look like something Samuel Beckett might’ve come up with had he tried his hand at puppetry. I also knew what I was likely to get with Cranked, by Vancouver’s venerable Green Thumb youth theatre. An effective play for teenage audiences about a 17-year-old freestyle emcee who nearly fucks up his life with crystal meth, it does have solid writing – by Michael P. Northey – as well as rap songs with cred by Kyprios and Stylust and an accomplished performance by Kyle Cameron as the hero, whose confident hip hop attitude disintegrates into a junkie’s paranoid twitches.
However, I had no idea what I was in for when I joined a large audience poolside at the Soloway to see The One That Got Away. Oh, there were a few suggestions this site-specific work was going to be a quality piece – Electric Company is one of Vancouver’s more exciting companies, best known for Brilliant! The Blinding Enlightenment of Nikola Tesla, plus the large cast for this production included such experienced hands as the estimable Nicola Lipman (a familiar face to Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects patrons). But who knew Nicola could swim so well? As it turns out, she and her eight co-stars literally plunge into this play with zest.
It’s a comedy/drama by Kendra Fanconi about a crusty New York Jewish producer (Richard Newman) who, on his deathbed, is transported to a Stygian pool, where he re-encounters his five wives and relives the defining tragedy back in the Old World that made him into a callous womanizer. The story is engrossing in itself, but director Kim Collier’s inventive use of the swimming pool-as-stage offers one stunning water-inspired episode after another – from a gleeful, booze-splashing piss-up in a floating bar, to a wonderful number in which the wives, as bathing beauties, cavort with silver wedding rings-cum-inner tubes like a scene from one of those old Esther Williams aquatic musicals as reconceived by Fellini. Collier displays the kind of imagination and finesse that marks her as an important new director to watch.
The One That Got Away has its final performance on June 14, but if you happen to be in Ottawa this weekend, Magnetic North continues to June 16. And if you happen to be a theatre presenter, I’d start looking around for suitable swimming pools.
For more information on the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, visit www.magneticnorthfestival.ca. |
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