How much should a parent talk to a 14-year-old daughter about sex? And how much should she learn in school?
It’s a problematic question for many parents, but one that playwright Erin Fleck thinks needs discussing.
In Those Who Can’t Do…, Fleck plays Lillian, a young teacher saddled with a girls’ sex ed class, who discovers that some of her Grade 9s belong to a fellatio club. She decides to tackle the situation in a novel way, one not appreciated by parents and fellow faculty.
“The idea came up in 2006 in a writing group I was part of, when someone told us about such a group in her high school,” recalls Fleck, who facilitates Theatre Passe Muraille’s Crapshoot!, a late-night cabaret of new work by emerging artists.
“I was kind of surprised, mostly by the fact that these young women would use such a cold and service-based game as a means to make themselves sexy, powerful, desirable and popular. At that point in their lives, they probably didn’t have much understanding about what a relationship or a sexual partnership could mean.”
Fleck, from small-town Ontario, later realized that “not a lot of talking goes on about relationships or sex in lots of communities. When there isn’t much dialogue, the environment is protective and parents don’t want to deal with sexual issues, the only images of power and sexuality that girls aspire to are from the media, usually from a male perspective and not accurate in terms of real life.”
The show’s plot deepens when we discover that Lillian herself had problems with sex as a teenager.
“She’s a woman who has some major hang-ups that have stunted her in a number of ways. They’re not major traumas – there’s no abuse or tragedy in her past – but combined with an oppressive environment, they’ve affected her in a lasting way.
“I wanted to write an adult character who sympathizes with her students but is also taught by and respects them. That way the audience gets to see parallel experiences.”
Fleck met her director, Shari Hollett, when the two worked together in Nightwood Theatre’s Write From The Hip developmental series for young playwrights.
“In fact, I’ve been involved with most of the emerging theatre artists’ programs in Toronto,” she laughs. “I’ve found them useful in so many ways: meeting professional artists for guidance and feedback, getting to know artists at the same stage I’m at, and discovering colleagues and contemporaries I want to work with on future projects.”
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Dangerous Boy
There’s a reason that Tom Walmsley’s The Jones Boy warrants a revival more than three decades after its premiere.
Written in 1977, the tale of two couples living a life of drugs and sex has tremendous emotional and theatrical power, not only in the writing but also in Walmsley’s compassion for the characters.
Director Peter Pasyk, who helmed Walmsley’s play Blood last season (and was nominated for a Dora for his direction), collaborated with the playwright on this revised version of The Jones Boy for surface/underground theatre. The characters are written as sharply as the needles most of them use to shoot up, and Pasyk captures much of that intensity in this site-specific production.
The location is an unfinished basement, the floor littered with junk food wrappers and comics it becomes the basement apartment where the four live and where the two women bring their johns.
Lee (Nick Abraham) is desperate for a fix his friend, ex-con Wayne (Cyrus Faird), wants his help to roll a dealer. Carol (Shannon Taylor), Lee’s girlfriend, wants a different life than hooking, while Wayne’s partner and Lee’s sister, Sally (Cara Gee), is a tough and cynical sex trade worker.
The stakes go up when Carol brings home a trick (Dov Mickelson) who’s not easy to satisfy.
Add Lee’s insane jealousy, his voyeuristic interest in others’ sexual activities and a touch of incest, and you get a dramatic explosion, all happening within feet of the audience.
The women are the standouts in this production. Taylor offers a layered view of a woman whose surface roughness covers her hopes for a calmer relationship with her partner pain and desperation bleed into her scenes with Abraham.
Gee’s ballsy Sally doesn’t mind selling her panties to anyone who’ll pay for them. She knows how to manipulate the men in her life and has no problem turning on Carol when she sees Lee’s girlfriend messing up the delicate balance of the quartet’s lives and livelihood.
Mickelson’s not onstage long, but he makes a scary impression as a john who won’t put up with shit from anyone.
The Jones Boy only runs an hour, but it’s a harrowing 60 minutes.
A portion of the box office goes to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
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De Colores’ fresh tones
Want to check out some developing scripts by Latin Canadian playwrights?
Alameda Theatre adds new hues to the theatre scene through its De Colores Festival, which fosters works by emerging writers. Festival works that have gone on to full production include Victor Gomez’s Lizard Boy and Amaranta Leyva’s The Intruder
The fourth annual fest features a quartet of scripts by Mexican-born poet and activist Ari Belathar (formerly Emma Ari Beltran), comic Martha Chaves, actor and graffiti artist Gilda Monreal and multidisciplinary artist Aracely Reyes.
The two-day event begins tonight (Thursday, October 6) with an excerpt from Monreal’s Ayekan, a mythic story in which a young warrior attempts to save her lover from a desolate land, and a full reading of Chaves’s Staying Alive. The latter play, directed by Nightwood’s Kelly Thornton, follows the journey of a lesbian immigrant comic “from tragedy to comedy.”
The second program offers an excerpt from Reyes’s Anti-Romantic, about a young artist disillusioned with love, and a full reading of Belathar’s La Danza Del Venado, in which a group of migrants try to cross the border into the United States. Alameda’s Marilo Nuñez directs.
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