The Box Studio and Theatre holds its first One More Night Festival, a chance to catch a revival of productions that have played around town.
First up is Cherry Bomb!, written and performed by Alison Blair, which follows the life and career of Cherie Currie, lead singer of Joan Jett’s first band, the Runaways. The story of drugs, family and stardom features the music of David Bowie.
Mel Aravena directs Ariel Dorfman’s Death And The Maiden, in which a human rights lawyer becomes the prisoner of a woman who believes he tortured her in a military prison years before. The show recently played at the Hamilton Fringe.
Another Hamilton Fringe work, The Judy Monologues, had an earlier life in Toronto, first at Buddies and later at the 2012 Toronto Fringe. The multimedia docudrama, based on actual voice recordings by Judy Garland, is written and directed by Darren Stewart-Jones and features Elley-Ray Hennessy as Garland.
See listing.
Home alone
Is home a place? A group of people? A concept we hold onto with hope and sometimes desperation?
Stephen Joffe explores these ideas in Offers Of Home, winner of the first Panfish New Play Contest. The production, which closed last Saturday, includes some intriguing, occasionally strong ideas but hasn’t yet pulled them together.
At its centre is Leo (James Pettitt), a street person and musician who tries to get some coins from the audience more importantly, he works at establishing a connection to us, and does so through tales and bits of poetry he recites.
We hear about his siblings, family and others in his life, who appear in the three stories he relates. Their objective truth is always in question: did these events happen, are they something Leo’s made up or does he want them to be his reality?
In one narrative, a drunken man (Jeffrey Roel) invades the house of an already troubled couple (Dawn Sadler and Alexander Plouffe) who no longer trust each other. It’s possible that the unwelcome visitor grew up in this same house.
In another, a group of friends (Katy Grabstas, Sydney Kondruss, Roel and Sadler) have to move on from the residence run by one of their number (Plouffe) when he shuts down the building to go elsewhere and look for his own idea of home. This causes problems for some of them, who need the security and togetherness they have in that dwelling.
The final scene, Joffe’s best piece of writing, starts to tie up some of the strings in the first two episodes. Leo meets a recently fired man (Plouffe) at a bus stop (or is it? characters debate whether a bus actually stops here) and gets involved in a discussion that’s both philosophical and emotional. At its end, a simple gesture of comfort and generosity suggests that Leo might find some happiness.
The writing is strong in some of the monologues, less so in its overtly poetic moments. Sometimes characters change in strange fashion, such as when the drunken, meandering home invader suddenly turns cold sober and articulate. Occasionally the relationships in the middle segment become farfetched and unnecessarily melodramatic.
Under Lyf Stolte’s direction, Pettitt’s Leo grows in warmth and texture over the course of the show. Plouffe nicely shapes the contrasting people he portrays, and Sadler brings a richness to the middle story, in which her character functions as a kind of house mother. Her heartfelt song near the end of the first act is a production highlight.
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