Well, I was feeling good about my review assignment last night. Andy Jones’ show An Evening with Uncle Val was up at Presentation House promising a dose of Newfoundland comedy.
There is a scene – maybe half way through blood.claat – where the mother of Mudgu, the play’s central character, appears. The scene takes us back approximately three years to when Mudgu had her first period, before her mother’s departure for Canada.
It’s hard to say anything bad about Andy Jones. He’s just such an affable guy. The kind of guy you just want to sit around drinking and laughing with and listen to him talk.
One morning, a young geneticist awakes with a box on his head. The box is simple, unadorned cube and a familar, comfortable shade of brown. At first he thinks it's a dream, or a morning like when you're a sick child and your eyelids stick together, but he soon learns that the box is permanent. His questions begin to loop: am I alone, or is there someone else out there?
Early on Wednesday, a Facebook friend sent me a video of neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor giving a talk at conference this past March (it’s worth a look). In it Dr. Taylor describes the morning she awoke with a blood clot in her brain causing a massive stroke. Being a brain researcher, she saw the stroke as a great gift for her, and her insights into the event are her gift to us.
Boxhead, vancouver's a hard place to get to know people
_We are deeply disgusted with the contemporary theatre (verse, prose and musical) because it vacillates between historical reconstruction (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction of our daily life; a finking, slow, analytic, and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, of the age of the oil lamp._
Return of Futuristi! Susan Bertoia and a vacuum; photo: Ali Sohrabzadeh
As soon as the lights dim, the red stage curtain performs a striptease, rising and falling flirtatiously. After this warm flush, a beautiful Italian woman invites us to use fax machines and cell phones during the show.
The Return of the Futuristi, Kris Tung, Joe Procyk, Stefano Giulianetti, Louis Chirillo, Astrid Varnes; photo: Ali Sohrabzadeh