It’s hard to pin down the central figure in Adam Seelig’s Like The First Time, a woman who redefines herself for everyone else in her life.
No surprise, then, that she has three names. For her abandoned husband, Sylvio, she’s Fulvia for her current lover, Marco, she’s Flora and when she returns to live with Sylvio and the daughter who thinks she’s dead, she becomes Francesca.
“She’s pulled in all those directions, wearing different masks for each part of her life,” says Dov Mickelson, who plays Marco in the One Little Goat production. “They represent various sides of the character: the dutiful wife and the free, passionate mistress, the saint in the living room and the sinner in the bedroom.
“All the characters, in fact, have an untold part to their lives, something that happens offstage that’s important in determining who they are. As we go deeper into the play, we discover that the secrets they keep from each other can destroy the relationships they hold so dear.”
Marco, explains Mickelson, is driven by a passion that overrides everything else. He’s tried to return to his wife and sons but is magnetically drawn back to Flora.
“The audience sees him in a state of heightened desperation his emotions are operatic in size,” continues the actor, whose local appearances include The Jones Boy, Elora Gorge and Catalyst Theatre’s Frankenstein. “He’s made more frantic by the power games he plays with his lover she toys with him and treats him like a pet dog.”
Seelig’s script, inspired by a Pirandello play that also uses the idea of social masks, offers Mickelson and the other actors an unusual challenge. It’s written without punctuation and printed so that certain words are aligned vertically on the page, creating what the playwright calls “a circumscribed ‘tonal universe’ for the dialogue.” The result, the playwright notes, frees up the actors to choose what to emphasize in their lines. (You can see what it looks like here: onelittlegoat.org.)
“It was initially a little daunting to read,” laughs the performer, “but that’s what intrigued me about doing the play and looking at a character through a distinctive kind of lens. In rehearsals, we’ve found that the placement of the words lets the script sing in a different way there’s a flowing quality that helps you find different rhythms.
“But the audience won’t be hearing anything unusual. I don’t think the dialogue will sound different from that in other shows.
“In fact, Adam captures an everyday way of speaking, one where you interrupt your own thoughts to figure out what you want to say and how to explain yourself to someone else.”
See listings.
Free Republic
A theatre production is part of Holocaust Education Week, which runs from Tuesday (November 1) to November 9.
Audiences can attend a dress rehearsal of Hannah Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic, which opens at the Tarragon next month, on November 6 at 8 pm.
The play, a co-production between the Harold Green Jewish Theatre and the Tarragon, looks at the life of Janusz Korczak, a doctor who tried to protect Polish-Jewish orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto.
You can book free tickets on a first-come, first-served basis prior to November 3. Call Hannah Schwartz at 416-635-2883, ext 5153, or write hschwartz@ujafed.org.
Tuneful Tomson
We don’t usually get to see playwright Tomson Highway performing, but Factory Theatre, which presents his hit play The Rez Sisters next month, has organized a benefit evening featuring Highway not just as playwright but also as composer and pianist.
Maybe you didn’t know he trained as a classical pianist.
He and Peruvian-Canadian singer Patricia Cano present numbers from Highway’s newest play, The (Post) Mistress, a solo show, in an evening called Cabaret Of Songs.
“Think,” he says, “in terms of Kurt Weill and Cole Porter, with Cree, French, English and Spanish lyrics… a cultural production unique to Canada.”
The fundraising evening, which includes pre-show snacks and drinks, is tonight (Thursday, October 27).
See listings.
Conveniently scheduled
Soulpepper Theatre opens its 2012 season with the hit of the 2011 Toronto Fringe – and NOW’s cover story for the festival – Kim’s Convenience.
Ins Choi’s popular show about a Korean grocer and his family sold out its Fringe run in July all of its tickets disappeared within minutes when an added patron’s pick performance was announced for the last day of the Fringe. It then went on to a successful Best Of The Fringe Uptown run at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
Kim’s Convenience was developed as part of fu-GEN’s Kitchen series for new scripts beginning in 2006 it was further workshopped in the Asian-Canadian theatre company’s 2008 Potluck Festival.
Choi continued working on the show when he was part of the Soulpepper Academy, and the Academy grads feature prominently in the upcoming production, which will expand last summer’s script. It’ll be directed by Weyni Mengesha, with design by Ken MacKenzie and Lorenzo Savoini.
It marks the first original full-length play that Soulpepper’s produced but also follows other shows – Civil Elegies and Window On Toronto – that present a theatrical look at our city.
The other Canadian play on the company’s 12-show roster of repertory productions is Lee MacDougall’s High Life.
As well, there are some blockbuster classics, including Eugene O’Neill’s intense Long Day’s Journey Into Night and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy You Can’t Take It With You, a perfect vehicle for the ensemble company.
Other 20th-century classics in the rep are David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, British playwright David Storey’s Home and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
There’ll be laughs in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys and darker humour in Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Royal Comedians.
Remounts of hit productions of Death Of A Salesman and A Christmas Carol and a new version of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame fill out Soulpepper’s 15th season.
Rich Cabaret
Like your cabaret varied? You can’t do better than the Global Cabaret Festival at the Young Centre, the fourth incarnation of the star-studded event.
Featuring 44 performances and 150 artists, most of them with great musical credentials, the festival includes performances by Jackie Richardson, Molly Johnson, Judith Lander, Patricia O’Callaghan and a host of others.
New this year is an Album Series, concerts based on classic albums: the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush, Paul Simon’s Graceland, Prince’s Purple Rain, Carole King’s Tapestry and a Stan Rogers Songbook.
And you can catch some theatre, too. The National Theatre of the World offers The Carnegie Hall Show, while (re)Birth: E.E. Cummings In Song returns to the festival where it first saw light several years ago before Soulpepper gave it a mainstage run last spring.
For details see globalcabaret.ca.
Night fears
Understanding that sharing what frightens you is a great way to dispel the fear, Clay & Paper Theatre holds its 12th annual Night Of Dread Saturday (October 29), just in time for Halloween.
The hour-long procession through darkened Toronto streets invites everyone to share their private and collective fears, and features pageantry, music, masks, large puppets, stilt walkers and fire spinners.
This year’s communal fear is municipal service cutbacks. Look for an oversized gravy boat to be part of the procession.
The community event draws on international folk and theatre traditions, notably from festivals of remembrance and death.
Audience members are invited to wear the company’s costumes and carry puppets as part of the parade.
Assemble and pick up a costume at the Dufferin Grove Park rink house starting at 4 pm the parade departs at 6 pm. Suggested dress code is “black and white and dreadful all over.”
Pwyc, $10 suggested. See listings.
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