With his writing, Ernest Hemingway wanted to create the sense that the lives of his characters continued on before and after the narratives he created; to achieve a sense of looking at a snapshot in the lives of real people rather than providing characters whose actions conformed to demands of plot or theme. With This, currently on at the Vancouver Playhouse, Melissa James Gibson, evokes a similar created reality: it is as if we are dropped into the world of her characters – in this case, educated, mid-lifers, living in New York – and then suddenly pulled out as their...
Celebrated Canadian playwright Judith Thompson spearheads Sick!, a brave and insightful work (now playing as part of the Next Stage Theatre Festival) which gives voice to a myriad of young performers - some of whom are practiced actors, some not - but all of whom have a real ailment or non-medical condition which they share and parse for the audience.
It's a candid collection of personal stories told in direct address that move and resonate, partly due to the lack of pretence permeating the majority of performances, partly due to the often difficult details of the lives described. Sick!...
This deceptively simple dark comedy from writer David Egan (playing now as part of the Next Stage Festival) is the kind of play that one knows is good if for no other reason than by virtue of the fact that despite its dramatic restrictions, one is just as engrossed at the end of sixty minutes as one is at the beginning.
Indie theatre personality Nicola Gunn presents with At the Sans Hotel (on as part of this year's Next Stage Theatre Festival) a quirky and difficult to define one woman show about, well, a lot of things and nothing all simultaneously. Call it performance art, call it theatre, call it what you will, one gets the feeling Gunn could not care less about labels anyway.
Guiding the largely direct address presentation is Gunn's alter ego, Sophie, a skittish, flower-print summer dress wearing French import who charms with visual puns, a sprinkling of philosophical declarations, and stream of consciousness musings about...
Billed as a contemporary reimagining of the ballet Swan Lake, Swan Song for Maria on as part of this year's Toronto Next Stage Theatre Festival is more enjoyable if one does not strain to decipher the parallels between the two works. This two-hander from playwright Carol Cece Anderson is, more overtly, a wistful tale of love and aging played out by Joe (John Blackwood), a rebellious writer of French-Canadian origin, and Jillian (Lili Francks), his actor/dancer wife. The couple, both creeping along in years are prompted to reflect upon their pasts and confront their future when it becomes increasingly...
Hiro Kanagawa's new play, The Patron Saint of Stanley Park currently on at the Arts Club, is about a harried mother, a troubled teenage daughter and a brainy ten year old son coming to terms with the death of the husband and the childrens' father on Christmas eve the previous year.
The two children are sent by bus to visit their uncle on Christmas Eve but they take a detour into Stanley Park to do their own private memorial to their father, who was a seaplane pilot that regularly flew past Prospect Point. They get caught in a major...
2010 is drawing to a close and we are still dealing with haywire news sources and mediums messaging messages of all sorts – not much conducive to a good night’s sleep or to enjoying seasonal holidays designed for celebrating peace on Earth.
Bevin Poole, Cai Glover, Vanessa Goodman, Robert Halley and Janine Kamonzeki. cred David Cooper
Jade in the Coal is about a Chinese immigrant coal mining community in Cumberland BC during 1900. It begins with vignettes of some common events in the miners lives such as working underground in the mine, sending letters and money back to families in China, gambling and eating. An underground explosion has killed many miners including the beloved father of Sally, the wife of Wu Kwun, the town's Chinese power broker. Sally and a young miner, Lew Chong, had hoped to marry before her father arranged her marriage to Wu Kwun. Wu Kwun has built a new hall and brought...
Collisions between dance and science or dance and technology seem de rigeur these days. In Vancouver, October 2010 saw the premiere of Co. ERASGA’s Shadow Machine, which professed to explore “the conflicting relationships humanity has held with machines and the industrial process since the first years of the industrial revolution.” VIDF 2010 gave us Kitt Johnson’s Rankefod, an “evolutionary solo performance in celebration of the origin of the species.” In the summer of 2010 the Plastic Orchid Factory offered the “contemporary dysfunction” of endDORPHIN, a work expressing an alienated, over-medicated 21st century neurosis through dance. Common to each of these...
