Showoff Festival: Come on, you know you want to

First of all, it’s clever. In only 48 hours, there’s a script (mostly well-memorized), staging and props, lighting and sound cues, and synchronized dancing. There’s even, sometimes, character and meaning, or the achievement of a strongly theatrical moment. 

At the Showoff Festival, creative teams are given 48 hours to pull together a 12-minute performance starting with an “inspiration package” including props and sound cues.  Each package is different, except for the same, unhelpful chunk of dialogue: “look a stranger in the eye, avert your gaze…. Mystery solved.”   From these modest beginnings, we get Janes Bond (not a typo), pomegranate pedophiles (and that used to be my favourite fruit), sewing machine murders, and a modern Medusa on a French beach. Only Medusa was able to make that chunk of dialogue work.

At its worst, the short pieces fall back on fart jokes, pop-culture take-offs, and in-jokes for the theatre crowd.  There’s sometimes a bit of forced hilarity in the room, on stage and in the very appreciative audience, making the experience similar to viewing the zombie art on the walls upstairs at the Chapel Arts venue: everything’s a bit over the top.  At its best, the results are still inspired.  A woman wearing a paper dress waters a pot already full of water, while a microphone amplifies the sound she makes. It’s raining in the basement, she sings to us.  It is, indeed. It’s very evocative, and also delightful that in such a short time frame the creative team cared enough to create that moment for us, as well as designing the paper dresses, setting the stage, and writing the dialogue.  And even though I really didn’t want to see a play about pedophiles, the actors in that other piece were certainly successful in their creepiness.

Showoff tries to put the “play” back in theatre. And it succeeds – if you like your play a little light, and a little dark around the edges too. Produced by Here Be Monsters Collective.  The Showoff Festival was part of the Carnival of the Arts, continuing to November 1st with the play Jesus Christ: The Lost Years and other events.  November 1st is the wrap party with the Best of Showoff from the festival’s ten-year history.