This show is only half an hour long. It makes for a quick, light, and fun revitalization between your various Fringe activities.
Harken back on what you’ve been told about going on dates or interviews – when meeting someone for the first time, what do you say about yourself? And what do the things you don’t say, say about you? I’m talking about body language. Body language is just as important as (if not more important than) what you wear or what you say. This show takes body language as its medium and its message in the context of...
Hands Around by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by A. Koren, adapted by Dylan Coulter, is disturbing because, though first read aloud in 1900, it is relevant today in its far too realistic account of the messy, gory, sinister assortment that is love.
Set in 1980, Vienna, the story follows ten individuals as they power-play each other in the name of love. As Hands Around progresses, lips are kissed, promises are broken and betrayal becomes expected. There is not simply one perspective of love. One man believes that "all men, really, become disgusted by love." A married man admits to his...
NeOn (Ne.On) is about love and the way love has changed over the past seventy years. It follows the stories of a grandmother, two young women, and two young boys seeking the affection of the unattainable Miki. The stories are interwoven among time and space and the story goes through a series of fractured moments which the audience is left to piece together.
The production was touching: well conceived and executed. I really enjoyed the incredibly energetic role of Nathania Barnabe as Miki – the childlike goddess who refers to herself as “princess of the universe!” The slice of life feature also...
This play is a lament for the painful consequences that radiate in all directions from a violence-infused culture. It’s a reflection on frustration, anger, abandonment, hidden disabilities, and sexual violence. It reveals a struggle to understand the causes of pain across four lives: a dead American soldier, perhaps by suicide, perhaps involved in Abu Ghraib atrocities in the US/Gulf War; his wife, perhaps unloved, a young woman, now a therapist, emotionally abandoned by her father; the soldier’s artistically-inclined, identical, gay twin brother (wouldn’t they both be gay?) worrying about his life; and the father of the brothers, a Vietnam veteran...
Rich insights into the power of love, courage and ritual in the face of great trauma are at the heart of this drama. Its message of compassion resonates both with classical tragedies and with our own contemporary anxieties about terrorism. It is timelessly relevant.
The play is set in the Scottish countryside, beside a stream, seven years after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 in which 270 people died. Grieving the loss of their own family members, and suffering from the trauma of witnessing body parts, metal fragments, and bodies still strapped to their seats falling from...
Arts Umbrella—a perfectly intimate stage for this beautiful and tragic monologue that I think everyone with a family will relate to. A single airplane seat is perched at the front of the room/theatre, where sits writer and performer, Dolores Drake. She has nervously buckled herself in, ready to set out on her first plane trip to visit her granddaughter in Toronto. It’s been five years. Drake’s character is playfully chatty with the type of spice that we love.
Her portrayal of a hardworking and well-intentioned maritime matriarch is spot on. You will...
East Vancouver storyteller, musician and clown Jim Sands takes us on a whimsical trip through a day in the life of a not so attractive plus-sized German man-boy, Hansel. He is on a quest to find a girlfriend in Vancouver. Having a companion means everything in Hansel’s shy life. Firstly it will help our simple and sensitive character set his parents back home in Hamburg at ease, but also to reassure himself that there is a soulmate for everyone.
This one-man play was written and directed by Gina Bastone, and in 60...
"Spilling Family Secrets" was written, performed and produced by Susan Freedman in true Fringe style. It moved me to tears with its sincerity and love.
Susan Freedman is spilling her family secrets but in doing so she is giving us a glimpse into her parent’s life and their love affair through the letters they wrote to each other while apart during the depression of the 1920/30...
A Brief History of Romantic Love could easily have been called "A Survey of Sexual Excess." A virginal young man falls in love with his own image in a forest pool in the manner of Narcissus, while a young woman wanders the world sleeping with every man she meets. In later life the same woman gives birth to fifty children, including sestuplets, septuplets, octuplets and Siamese triplets. Along the way, the adventuresome youngsters encounter a giant penis, tantric bunraku sex puppets, and a witch who steals men's semen for nefarious purposes.
Out Innerspace Dance offered by far the most dynamic interpretation of the love, sex, and death themes that were the subject of the VIDF's free performances this year. David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen have a powerful rapport, and their vocabulary is intricate, intimate, and refined. The performance lived up to the company name, in that movements implied a physical and an emotional space simultaneously.
