Here’s what is going to happen. For 80 or so minutes Bruce Horak is going to stand on stage and paint a portrait of you; by you I mean the whole audience, but it will feel like it is just you. While he is painting your portrait, he’s going to tell you a long beautiful story that interweaves his life story, information on visual impairment and blindness, some Canadian art history, some instruction on art making, facts about the Group of Seven, philosophies and many theories on what happened to Tom Thomson on July 8, 1917.
The creative...
An Original Painting circa Opening Night (photo by Kristina Lemieux)
The Arts Club is producing Venus In Fur by David Ives. A hit Off-Broadway that transferred to the Great White Way where it garned significant acclaim (including a Tony award for the female lead), this play offers its audience an intriguing 21st century take on a novel from 1870.
We meet Thomas (Vincent Gale) first - a playwright and first-time director who is attempting to adapt this same novel by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch for the stage. Thomas has seen a number of young women that day who are all vying to play Vanda and none are satisfactory. As he starts to walk out...
After its second show on Thursday night, the nine-person cast of Inside The Seed gathered onstage at the Culture Lab to discuss the show's creation. As a new script by playwright Jason Rothery, Inside The Seed is receiving its premiere production as the second show in the Cultch's 40th anniversary season. Led by Artistic Producer Daniel Martin, the audience engaged in a lively discussion about this topical production.
To kick off the discussion, an audience member wanted to know more about the playwright. Though Rothery was not in attendance, Martin explained that the producing company Upintheair Theatre has...
Selected cast of Inside The Seed (photo by Daniel Martin)
You should go out and see You Should Have Stayed Home. There are some things we, as Canadians, assume will never be obstructed; our freedom of speech, our freedoms of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, our freedom from arbitrary detention or imprisonment and the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.
I was working at a summer stock theatre in Ontario when the G20 took place. I vividly recall being in a production meeting on Skype with a designer in Toronto. The meeting ended abruptly when the noise of the violence on the street became...
Two intrepid PLANK reviewers attended opening night of Penelope by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. Inspired by The Odyssey, the play tells of four men who are the last of 100 suitors come to woo Penelope as she waits long years for her husband to return. The men have set up a makeshift bachelor camp in the bottom of a drained swimming pool and now each tries to outdo the others as they believe that today is the day that Odysseus will come back to claim his wife (and kill them for their impunity).
After snagging a few snacks and filling out the survey questionnaire,...
When I see a play like Other Desert Cities, I realize how very different American culture really is. In Canada, our politics just do not have the same strongly opposing points of view. Red versus blue, Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals. And in this Arts Club production, created by a Canadian artistic team, I wonder if we can ever truly understand the depths of this dichotomy.
On its face, Other Desert Cities is a family drama set in the heat of Palm Springs, California on Christmas Eve 2004. Liberal daughter and novelist Brooke Wyeth has returned from the East Coast to visit...
Cast of Other Desert Cities (photo by David Cooper)
Presented by 1265 Productions, Writer's Block is a new script written and directed by Nathaniel Roy. The show is 40 minutes in length featuring three actors. Its description is: "A Canadian soldier, an Afghan insurgent, and an Afghan civilian must write letters on convalescences after an "act of god" takes the lives of their families."
Pretty straightforward, right? And it is. We know from the beginning that two characters are siblings of the soldiers who were killed. We understand that they are struggling with accepting what has happened and their seemingly assigned task to write a letter home to their respective...
"Unpossible!": Rarely do I ever permit myself to be so willingly deceived. Perhaps so far as to say, "visually violated." Travis Bernhardt's magic and illusion show lives up to its title, or, as he would have prefer, the bar has been lowered for this show.
Bernhardt's slow and methodical style encourages the crowd to follow along yet still leaves engaged audience members enraptured. Wait until the ending when he does this thing, and then another thing, before, somehow, his demonstration wraps...
Genre Definition = Funny · Intellectual · All Ages
You are an extra. Your call time is 8:30pm, location the Picnic Pavilion. You are handed a costume consisting of a hood made from a black garbage bag and a plastic mask. You are working for a cookie. They are making a movie, or trying to anyway. Is it high art? Is it porn? Can it be both?
This is Not a Porno is described as a “site-specific interactive roaming show” and true to its word, it tows the audience around various locations on the island, sometimes at the end of a rope. There...
It was very dark as we were led down the path towards what I could only have assumed was the stage. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what Meanwhile was about since the play I was supposed to check out had canceled on me. I wandered over to the next theatre tent where I knew Allyson would be standing, waiting for her show to begin.
“Looks like no porn for me tonight. The show is canceled today. I will have to pick it up tomorrow.” I said.
“We can see Meanwhile together. They allow a maximum of two people per show....
