Theatre Direct’s revival of David S. Craig and Robert Morgan’s Head À Tête is the perfect family show. It gives young audiences and their parents a chance to laugh, learn and share a story about antagonism that becomes friendship.
Director Thomas Morgan Jones’s production, set in a ruined landscape of broken concrete and pieced-together costumes by designer Lindsay Anne Black, brings out the tensions not only between the two characters, Please (Sharmila Dey) and Moitié (Michelle Polak), but also those between the pair and the world around them the cold, the dark and unseen but threatening wild dogs.
The two speak different languages, English and French, so all communication happens through body, face and tone. Dey and Polak are totally charming, relying on their clown skills and physicality to demonstrate the growing closeness between Please and Moitié, who eventually realize the foolishness of drawing isolating, territorial lines.
Arguing like siblings, the two characters demonstrate their fear of human contact as well their need for it temper tantrums and besting the other provide a lot of the story’s early momentum. As they start to care for and about each other, the metaphoric walls melt away.
The staging also gives a nod to nature’s vitality and how it affects human interaction. In one of their battles, Please and Moitié kill the only tree in sight. When they connect at the end of the show, a sapling appears in the rubble.
Too bad the production, which also toured schools, closed last week. We wish a lot more viewers had the chance to see this excellent theatre for young audiences.
Celebrating theatre
Sunday (March 27) is World Theatre Day, celebrated each year by the reading of international messages about theatre’s importance.
You’ll find several of these here, including one by Ugandan teacher and theorist Jessica A. Kaahwa and another by Canadian playwright Michel Ouellette, translated by Linda Gaboriau.
Ouellette contributes some thoughts about the frantic pace of our lives and the opportunity theatre offers for quiet, reflective time in which to rediscover our common humanity.
S.L.I.P. onto the stage
For the past two years, we’ve participated in one of the most exciting performance training programs in town.
The SummerWorks Leadership Intensive Program (S.L.I.P.), part of the annual August SummerWorks Festival, invites a dozen or so young theatre artists to participate in a series of discussions, talks and performances that acquaint them with “the business of arts professionalism.”
The intensive – and it is indeed intense, as former members have told us – combines theory and practical training, giving participants a chance to interact with professionals and share their own ideas about such topics as independent producing, grant writing, financial planning and the role of the reviewer.
In addition to guest speakers, artists involved with SummerWorks shows mentor each of the participants.
Best of all, it’s free once you’re accepted into the program.
Applicants should be emerging artists who have a strong interest in theatre and artistic leadership those interested in but possibly without any experience in the business of the arts passionate producers, performers, directors, choreographers, writers and designers and graduates of post-secondary theatre programs or artists who have been in the industry for up to three years since graduating.
You must be available for the entire festival, which this year runs from August 1 to 14. While the focus is on theatre, the knowledge and skills you acquire can apply to any artistic practice.
See summerworks.ca for details and applications deadline is April 15.
Bedding down in Ireland
Remember bedbound, the powerful Enda Walsh play produced two years ago by MacKenzieRo?
The original cast (Richard Greenblatt and Cathy Murphy) and director (Autumn Smith) are taking the production to Ireland at the invitation of Druid Theatre. It’s one of the rare times that an Irish play has travelled from North America to Ireland. Curious to hear about the reaction of local audiences to the production.
While MacKenzieRo’s in Ireland, the company will workshop The Rake’s Progress: Do You Know Where Tom Rakewell Is? with a combination of Canadian and Irish performers. An earlier version of the script, based on a series of works by artist William Hogarth (also the source of an opera by Igor Stravinsky), was a hit in The Next Stage 2009.
Reinventing Lear
A pair of theatre artists – one of Canada’s best actors and an emerging director – collaborate on a workshop version of King Lear.
The Toronto/Montreal collective Idée Fixe’s Lear, directed by National Theatre School grad Philip McKee (SIA, Foster Child Play) and featuring Clare Coulter (a regular at Theatre Passe Muraille and the Tarragon in the 70s and 80s), looks at “the title character’s perplexing act of self-sabotage and examines the experience of a divided self…and our reasons for doing the things we know we shouldn’t.”
Presented as part of this season’s HATCH at Harbourfront Centre, the production also involves scenographer/visual artist Kate Whitehead and other artists.
A Q&A follows each presentation.
See Openings.
stage@nowtoronto.com
