Have you ever met a couple whose relationship was an easy, smooth mesh of personalities? Probably not.
Relationships are sharper-edged and more twisted than usual in Repetitive Strain Injury, a dark comedy by Rob van Meenen presented by Company Kid Logic.
At its centre are Dave and Julie, about to wed and late in planning the ceremony. His friend Guy, a fast talker with women and full of macho bluster with men, picks up Candice, who’s not averse to a quick hop into bed. Meanwhile, Julie gets into a strange relationship with a female telephone solicitor. By the show’s end, these five connect in all sorts of ways.
“The relationships in the play are cringeworthy and strange,” admits Ava Jane Markus, who plays Candice. “But at the same time the conversations are true. Marriage is a real question for many people. Individualism is so ingrained in my generation that relationships are constantly in flux. It’s hard to know how to move forward, handle previous partners and acknowledge a connection with a third person that hinders one’s primary relationship.
“It’s no surprise that it’s difficult for people to commit to only one person.”
Despite exploring serious topics, the play is a comedy, which Markus, who appeared in Terminus, says has an element of sitcom.
“But we get to play with the comedy longer than in something like How I Met Your Mother,” she explains. “The jokes are biting, their sting takes a while to calm down, and they’re woven from one scene into another. Just as importantly, the laughter is born from real situations that characters want to get out of but can’t easily.”
Candice, she says, is the kind of self-confident woman “who walks into a room and feels like a million dollars. But she grapples with wanting connections with multiple partners and also having one guy with whom she shares trust and respect.”
Working with director Harry Judge, the cast – which includes Pat Kiely, Amy Matysio, Robin Dunne and Imali Perera – has learned that one of the tricks of performing the script is “discovering the pace at which the characters think. The style of writing works best when they react and respond faster than the average person.”
See listing.
Talking Fringe
The Fringe has always been a grassroots organization, its indie companies chosen democratically by lottery.
Now you can have a say in the Toronto Fringe’s planning for the 2014 festival, which runs July 2 to 13.
A town hall meeting for Fringe artists past, present and future will be held Friday (December 6) from 6 to 8 pm at the Fringe Creation Lab (720 Bathurst, suite 402).
Feel free to come with ideas, suggestions, solutions or even just questions about the festival and independent theatre in Toronto.
After the meeting there’ll be free beer and a more informal chance to chat and network with Fringe staff and others in the arts community.
RSVP to creation@fringetoronto.com.
No jibber Jabber
Teen romance versus tradition are at the core of Marcus Youssef’s Jabber, in which an angry young man and a young Muslim woman new to his school find some surprising things in common.
Fatima’s (Mariana Tayler) parents moved her to a different school when someone scribbled anti-Muslim graffiti at her old one. The hijab-wearing Fatima misses her friends (who, all wearing hijabs, called themselves jabbers) and feels an outsider in the new environment. She meets Jorah (Ian Geldart), a guy with attitude and a satiric way of relating to the world that’s explained partway through the show.
Connecting after some misconceptions about each other, the pair break some crucial rules defined by parents and school authorities (who include David Sklar as a guidance counsellor) and begin a relationship that goes off the rails.
Directed by Amanda Kellock, this Geordie Productions show from Montreal, presented by Young People’s Theatre, is full of thoughtful material and an anchoring performance by Tayler her Fatima’s initial nervousness soon turns to shy experimentation. The play’s not precious about using real teen language, with “a-hole” and “effing” part of these kids’ vocabulary, something you rarely hear at this theatre.
But Youssef’s Brechtian style, which works so well in his collaboration on shows like Winners And Losers (closing this weekend at the Berkeley Street Theatre) and the Ali and Ali scripts, causes an irritating disjoint here. The actors present themselves at the show’s start as performers who inhabit roles, which is fine, but the often-used phrase “let’s say” that precedes a narrative line jars us out of an emotional understanding of the characters.
See listing.
Boffo Billon
Not only is Nicolas Billon a talented playwright, but he’s also a very generous man.
Last week he was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Prize for Drama for Fault Lines, a trilogy of plays. He’s donated $5,000 of the prize money to the Theatre Centre, which is finishing off work on its new Queen West home.
Made in his parents’ name, the donation goes toward the Centre’s capital campaign.
Mother’s love
There’s no more basic bond in our lives than that with our mothers, but that link is often stretched as we grow up.
Hume Baugh’s The Girl In The Picture Tries To Hang Up The Phone explores his relationship with a mother who was strong, influential, self-affirming and had a problem with alcohol.
The show, presented by Optic Heart Theatre and directed by Mark Cassidy, is simple and direct. Baugh’s the sole performer, onstage with a chair and a few candles that suggest this is some sort of ceremony. At the start of the show he presents a photo of his mother as a child and plays a sound clip that sounds like percussive static. Only at the end does its meaning become clear.
Baugh’s performance, immediate and engaging, takes the audience into his confidence as he shares his memories and emotions. The play is a study in relative truths, both how he and his siblings view their mother and how she sees them.
He describes his mother as often aloof, an intimidating, intellectually fierce feminist, an academic in an unhappy marriage and with a history of family depression. She alternated between being biting and warm toward her children. As he recalls moments in her life, the writing is nostalgic without being saccharine, detailed in its observations, with bits of humour directed at both mother and son.
Her relationship with alcohol, central to the piece, is the elephant in the room that took over her life for 25 years. When he confronts her about her drinking, the exchange is electric. Her later illnesses, her failure to deal with them, and the siblings’ different ways of handling her lead to a family battle.
There’s a reaffirmation of her love for him toward the end, but the play brings up questions about how we interact with our families without supplying easy answers. It feels totally honest and totally right.
See listing.
War games
How do you sell war? That’s the challenge facing Paul (Alden Adair) and Gilles (Geoffrey Pounsett), the two ad execs in Michel Garneau’s Warriors. They’ve been hired by the military to come up with a new slogan to entice people to join up.
Directed by Eli Ham, the production by Stuck in the Mud captures the often tense relationship between the two men, boyhood friends, over the 10 days they have to come up with the perfect campaign. Along the way they show their skill at winning what is, in fact, a battle between the hard-edged reality of the military and the need to seduce people into thinking that combat is appealing.
They may be joined by their business goals, but their personalities are quite different. The cowboy-style frontman Paul goads, the more ethical ideas man Gilles responds, and both are aware of their dynamic. They frequently play rough “boy” games and go through Chivas Royal Salute like water coke’s on the menu, too.
Ham not only draws strong portraits from the actors but also carefully orchestrates the play’s rhythms, which are sometimes of the chest-beating variety and at others more delicate and nuanced. All this is mixed with bits of the philosophy of war and a dark satire of those who buy into battle games of various sorts.
Gilles may reflect sadly on what they’ve become, but he won’t back down from the challenges the corruptible, worldly Paul throws at him.
Though a strangely matched pair, they clearly know how to work with each other in a hyped-up fashion. Warriors shows both the surprisingly ordinary fruit of their collaboration and what their relationship does to them, which leads to a poignant, far from happy ending.
See listing.
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