How exciting to leave a performance feeling energized and smitten, only to become embroiled in a long and animated show-inspired debate in the parking lot. Standing over the gleaming, rain spattered bulk of my mother’s car, watching for the meter maid, I couldn’t resist picking my (probably smarter) friend’s brain.
Medina Hahn contemplates whether Daniel Arnold is a dream man or a creep, photo: Stephanie Hall
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.
We don’t usually have spoiler warnings here at Plank but I feel obliged to provide one with this review because my problem with Raising Luke is the subject of a big reveal towards the end of the play. So, if you like to be surprised and plan to see this play, come back later.
Raising Luke, take Plank's advice, Claire and dump the MoFo; photo: Keith Barker
*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.
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.
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
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.
