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Culture Stage

Fouls flies

Last Saturday (March 26) we were present at an important birth. Hustle n’ Bustle Theatre, a new company devoted to young audiences, made its debut with the help of long-established troupe Roseneath Theatre.

There are far too few such companies in Canada – good theatre for young audiences builds tomorrow’s adult viewers – so it’s a pleasure to welcome an addition to the local scene. Especially so since Offensive Fouls, by Alberta playwright Jason Long, is such a good production.

Teenage Joey (company artistic producer Colin Doyle) and his girlfriend, Christine (Mayko Nguyen), aren’t having the best day. He rattles on about basketball, she’s sullen. Christine, who comes from a conservative Chinese family, finally reveals that three guys hurled racist slurs at her uncle in his convenience store, and she suspects that Joey was part of the trio.

The 50-minute show is filled with high energy and equally high emotions, thanks to the cast and director Rae Ellen Bodie. The well-plotted story lets us in on Joey’s attitudes, which seem to be influenced by those of his older, idolized brother, who’s never accepted Christine in the six months Joey’s dated her.

But we also get a sense of Christine’s racism, both internalized and externalized. She’s afraid to introduce the proudly Irish Joey to her protective parents, and hurts Joey with comments about his “alcoholic father.”

Nguyen carries the play’s emotional weight in the early part of the show, while Doyle focuses its humour with his non-stop talk and an exhibition of Irish dancing. Later, as Joey explores their relationship, we see the hurt and anger in a teen who usually coasts with the belief that everything’s okay.

But beyond the show’s connection with a teen audience, all sorts of questions pop up. How do we feel when the obviously devoted Joey says to his girlfriend, “You’re not really Chinese…. You don’t look that ethnic,” or when we discover that Christine tries to be invisible at school so she won’t be treated as one of “them”?

Offensive Fouls’ ending is an open one: will the two get back together after all the hurt and recriminations? With the production off to tour local schools, it would be fascinating to watch the talkback sessions after a show that not only entertains audiences but also gives them something to think about.

Motherly Lear

We enter Harbourfront’s Studio Theatre and, instead of sitting in our usual seats, are directed to a line of chairs on the stage. Actor Clare Coulter’s on one side, reading all the parts from the first scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear quietly into a microphone. Three other women move around the auditorium.

Not your average take on Lear. But this is a development workshop sponsored by HATCH, and anything can happen.

This version of the Bard’s text has been created by Idée Fixe with the intention of exploring the story and asking questions about its characters’ motivation.

Casting the talented Coulter as Lear takes the male gruffness out of the role.

Lots of fascinating material in the collectively created workshop, directed by Philip McKee, starting with Coulter placing three groups of styrofoam cups around the stage to represent the portions of the kingdom that Lear plans to leave to her three daughters. Goneril (Rose Plotek) and Regan (Kate Whitehead) stack them one inside another as they get their portions, a visual symbol for “This is mine and keep your hands off.”

Later, a doll-like puppet becomes the Fool (voiced by Lear) in another scene, Lear and Cordelia (Lindsey Clark) speak lines given to another parent and child, Gloucester and Edgar, whose story parallels that of Lear and Cordelia.

In a fascinating bit of staging, Lear wears a suit that’s literally cut off her by the others. It’s a symbol of her loss of sanity and of her very being what we finally see are the discarded, ruined rags of this woman.

McKee is clever to put us onstage, intentionally disorienting our theatrical expectations. Some scenes take place in the traditional audience area, as if we were watching long shots in a film others are performed a foot away from viewers, as if they were close-ups. At one point, a movie screen is lowered, radically reducing the space we’re in and giving the action a claustrophobic feel.

Our main problem is with the intentionally flat reading of much of the dialogue in fact, the actors often read off the page rather than speak from memory. The text is so rich that deleting its emotional sense doesn’t work. In the discussion following the workshop, though, others say they heard the story more clearly because of the lack of emotion.

Even if this workshop was a one-off, this Idée Fixe is something that we want to follow as it develops.

Triple-word funder

Love Scrabble? Want to play it with some well-known people?

Performing Arts Lodge (PAL) Toronto, which offers a home to semi-retired and retired artists, holds its annual fundraiser, Scrabble With The Stars, on Monday (April 4).

Hosted this year by Jeanne Beker and Barry Flatman, the event allows you to play with Mark Breslin, Dave Broadfoot, Mary Lou Fallis, Graham Greene, Gordon Pinsent, Louise Pitre, R.H. Thomson, Theresa Tova and others. Another celeb contestant, David Warrack, has written a special song for the event.

There’s also a silent auction, in which you can bid on art by Jayne Eastwood, Marilyn Lightstone, Sandi Ross and Barbara Budd.

See listings.

Biting into the Apple

If you need proof that Toronto Fringe and SummerWorks shows have life after the festivals – internationally as well as in Canada – you only have to look at this year’s lineup at New York’s Bridge Theatre Company.

For the first time since the theatre was founded in 2004, the company devotes its season to Canadian material, beginning Friday (April 1) with Matt MacKenzie’s SIA (a hit at last year’s Fringe), followed by Daniel Karasik’s The Innocents (ditto at SummerWorks, 2010) and Nicolas Billon’s Greenland (ditto, SummerWorks 2009).

Greenland will again be directed by Ravi Jain, with Claire Calnan and Andrew Musselman rejoining the cast the third actor is Eryn Murman, seen by Toronto audiences in Billon’s adaptation of Iphigenia At Aulis in SummerWorks 2010.

For more info, see thebridgetheatrecompany.com.

stage@nowtoronto.com

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