Toronto

*The Play:* Marla’s Party, an offbeat domestic comedy by Darrah Teitel.

*The Panel:*
*Alison Broverman* is a Toronto-based playwright and arts reporter.
*Andrew Templeton* is a Vancouver-based playwright and accidental reviewer

Marla's Party, nothing like a family reunion to make you realize you're nuts!

Through his Gracing the Stage newsletter, Steve Fisher is an institution on the Toronto performing arts scene. We’re thrilled to provide Steve’s mini-reviews on this year’s SummerWorks Festival.

The Girl with no Hands, photo: Christophe Jivraj

When will you flee? This is the central question of Doug McKeag’s anxiety comedy, Doom 2012. This one-man show is an exploration of the catalogue of misery that awaits us if we don’t learn to read the signs. Although it references Biblical revelations, promises of rapture and Mayan calendars (from where the date 2012 originates) its main focus is on much more scientific or “rationale” predictions of doom such as global warming, peak oil and disease pathologies.

Doom 2012, more proof that people from Calgary are scary.

The Show:
Talk 60 to Me is a verbatim play constructed by Oonagh Duncan from hours of interviews with 60-year-olds from all over Toronto.

Talk Sixty, they think about sex and Alison is curious.

We earn love through time. We’ve all experienced love at first sight or an instant connection with someone but to have a true relationship with another person you need to experience things with them; to share joy, loss, trauma, even redemption. We are creatures of experience and memory.

Pelee, don't get too close; photo: Ed Gass Donnelly

The Panel:
Alison Broverman is a playwright and arts reporter. She has a bee block in her backyard.
Andrew Lamb is a Toronto-based director. You should go see In Darfur, the play he has directed for the Summerworks Festival.
Daniel Krolik is an actor and man about town.

The Beekeepers do some decorating, photo: safe solvent

Tories in Cuts to Arts Funding Shocker

Andrew Templeton

Canadian Actors’ Equity Association has responded to the news that the Tories have cancelled their second arts funding program in less than two weeks. Last week the government axed PromArt (a program of travel grants to artists and arts organizations administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade). This week, they’ve announced that Trade Routes would be coming to an end.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

It has been a long standing joke among my friends that if I’m serious about getting out of this playwriting gutter, I should write a play about the First World War. Because Canadians of a certain age – the types who have season tickets to regional theatre companies – love the First World War. In response to our aging demographics, I’ve considered moving it up a notch by writing about the Second World War instead.

No, it's you.

The “one-hander” is a standard of any theatre festival where the budget is slim and the shows are many. Any show that relies entirely on the skill of one performer requires an actor that is at once endearing, fascinating and impressive.

Rendezvous with Home, photo credit: Michael G Pierson

*The Panel*
Alison Broverman is a playwright and arts reporter. She fears a zombie apocalypse most of all.
Ann McDougall is a playwright and storyteller. She fears nuclear fallout where everyone mutates and slowly dies, but not before they go crazy and kill each other.

Cosy Catastrophe, Vancouverites bring blood and poop jokes to Toronto.

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