From left to right: Matt Baram, Naomi Snieckus, and Ron Pederson. Photo by May Truong.

Script Tease
Theatre Passe Muraille (16 Ryerson Avenue)
May 28–June 3, various times
$15–$20

Here’s how a Script Tease works: Ten playwrights submit the first two pages of a new play. Those pages are sealed in individual envelopes. Over the course of a week, three performers from the renowned improv theatre company The National Theatre of the World—Ron Pederson, Naomi Snieckus, and Matt Baram—open each envelope and read its contents for the first time in front of an audience. They are then tasked with immediately improvising the rest of the work over the course of roughly an hour. This year marks the second edition of the event, which starts on Monday and runs until June 3 at Theatre Passe Muraille. We spoke with three participants: performer Ron Pederson, and playwrights Scott Thompson (yes, that Scott Thompson) and Maja Ardal.

Ron Pederson

A founding member of The National Theatre of the World, Pederson performs regularly in their improv shows Impromptu Splendor and The Carnegie Hall Show. He also spent three seasons on MadTV and eight seasons honing his chops in Die Nasty, an improvised soap opera.

Torontoist: With all of the improv that you have performed, what’s special to you about this project specifically?

Pederson: At first, I thought it was just going to be an easier way to improvise because you have sort of a blueprint and a trajectory from the two pages. But as it turns out, when you read those two pages cold in front of the audience, you have essentially three or four minutes of reading it to process so much information.

What were some of the highlights of last year?

Every one had a different sort of magic to it. Mark McKinney—we had asked [the playwrights] to describe the setting so we can make a little set—and his was like a Eugene O’Neill description. It was like, “There’s a cot, and there’s a bucket, and in the bucket are bottle caps, and there’s a blanket.”

Is the goal to emulate the style of the playwrights themselves?

Essentially we’re doing the style that the playwright sets up in the two pages, the tone. But certainly the three of us get together and familiarize or re-familiarize ourselves with the playwright’s work, just so if we want to throw in a little motif that’s always in a Brad Fraser play or a Judith Thompson play, we can do that.

Any other playwrights that you would like to land for the project?

We’re pretty lucky that everybody that we’ve asked has said yes. Except, Edward Albee turned us down. We have a super long wish list. I’d love to see David Mamet’s two pages. If Woody Allen wanted to do it, we wouldn’t turn him down.

Scott Thompson

Kid In The Hall Scott Thompson has a lot on his plate these days. In addition to working on the sequel to his graphic novel, The Hollow Planet, he is readying a stand-up tour with fellow Kid Kevin McDonald for the fall and filming a second season of his webseries, Fruit Blog. Also, he just took first prize at the LA Short Film Festival for The Immigrant, which he both stars in and co-wrote. It will screen in Toronto in June as part of the Worldwide Short Film Festival.

How did you get involved in the project?

Thompson: Naomi just asked me. We did a show together called Wingin’ It, a kids’ show. We hit it off. And I’ve always thought about writing a play and I thought, “Well, I’m sure I can handle two pages.” But I think this gave me the urge to write an actual play.

Will it be a continuation of what you wrote for this, perhaps?

I don’t know. You never know. I mean if it’s really good, what they do, maybe I’ll just steal what they did.

How long did it take you to write these two pages?

I thought I would just take a sketch that I never finished and give it to them. But I decided to actually write two real new pages. So it was a little more work than I thought it would be. So you’ll feel a lot of the resentfulness in the writing. You’ll come out, “God, you can tell the writer didn’t realize it would be so much work.”

Do you feel any competition among you and the other playwrights?

Yeah, because they’re all like real writers, so yes, there is a competition. I’m always competitive.

Maja Ardal

A veteran of stage and screen, Maja Ardal has written, directed, produced, and acted in a staggering array of projects. From serving as artistic director of Young People’s Theatre to directing at the Shaw Festival, she will still always be known to a select few as Mrs. Potts on Road To Avonlea.

How did you get involved in the project?

Ardal: I’ve known Naomi Snieckus for over ten years. I actually directed Naomi at Young People’s Theatre. She’s been wonderful with me. I was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus in December and she’s been one of my most wonderful supporters with her inspiration and good humour and just being generally helpful. I’m in treatment. I don’t have any kind of morbid outcome, I think I’m going to come through this. When we were just hanging out together, she was visiting me, she said, “Oh my God, you’ve got to do a Script Tease.”

How hard was it to write only the beginning of a play?

I adore launching a play, and then the big struggle comes as you start to work through the play. If this was going to be a play that I continued to write, I think I’d be tearing my hair out, I wouldn’t know what to do next. It’s not like, “What are they going to do with my precious play?” It’s, “What are they going to do with my strange two pages?”

Do you have any improv experience yourself?

I’ve improvised a couple of times with The National Theatre of the World, but I don’t have the kind of skills they have writing on my feet. I go to Second City and take classes and all that kind of stuff, but these are my heroes, these folks. I mean, they really are fabulous at what they do.

360 Screenings
Secret Location
Friday, May 25
$60

You could call it a screen-age dream: to be able to touch, breathe, and interact with the world of one of your favourite movies. For instance, to feel the earth shudder at the approach of a brontosaurus in Jurassic Park. To request a song from Sam in Casablanca. To take a shower in the motel room in Psycho. So far, our own imaginations have had to fill in for the real thing. Until now, that is.

Ned Loach and Robert Gontier aim to make these dreams a reality for Toronto’s filmgoers. Through a mix of film and live performance, their project, 360 Screenings, is much more than a pair of 3D glasses. It aims to give audiences the smells, touches, sounds, and even the tastes of some favourite movies. They’re billing it as “Toronto’s first immersive cinema event.”

“There is a lot about film that lends itself to being recreated in a space,” says Loach, a lifelong film and theatre lover who knows his way around both art forms. “If it has a really strong concept of a universe, it lends itself very well to being recreated on a stage.”

With the inaugural edition of 360 Screenings happening this Friday, Gontier and Loach have been busy preparing a secret location, down to the props, music, food, and characters, to let their audiences literally step into the evening’s film—even if they don’t know what it is, initially.

“We want to create a sense of mystery. We’re really trying to hype that up,” says Loach. “The first half is spent just exploring and engaging and interacting with as much of the venue as possible. We want to break traditional expectations of an audience, touch as much as possible, move things around … if they didn’t know what movie they were going to be seeing before, they start to make the connections with what they’ve seen and recognize the characters, a crime scene, or the props.”

Ned Loach (left) and Robert Gontier (right) on set at the mysterious location of 360 Screenings.

“Immersive theatre” productions similar to 360 Screenings have been huge hits with audiences in Europe and New York for a few years now. Some examples include the British company Punchdrunk and their Macbeth-inspired Sleep No More, also a major success in New York; Michael Sheen’s 72-hour-long The Passion; the recently finished Babel in London; and Calgary playwright Melanie Jones’s Endure, now on a UK tour. Toronto has likewise had its share of interactive theatre, including Necessary Angel’s seminal 1981 production Tamara, which was staged in Strachan House. Lately, local companies have getting in on the trend once again. There’s a remount of Dance Marathon this month, as well as a brief run of Uncanny House’s Hansel and Gretel “performance installation” The Hunger, opening this Thursday. The timing of 360 Screenings is right on schedule.

“We’re not selling the film itself, we’re selling the experience,” says Loach. “We love what’s happening in London and New York; now we’re taking those ideas and putting our own spin on it.”

“It really resonated with us,” he adds. “We’re hoping it resonates with Toronto audiences as well.”

Loach, who recently left his job as an associate producer and special events coordinator at Soulpepper Theatre to focus on his new project full time, plans on structuring the 360 Screenings “seasons” as a theatre company would. He hopes to complete two more events in 2012, though eventually he and Gontier would like to bump it up to five per year, each show with a two-week run in one of a few local heritage buildings that can fit anywhere from 200 to 500 people at once. Sleep No More has had no problem fetching those numbers in New York City week after week with a $90 ticket, but 360 Screenings has the added appeal of good, old-fashioned escapism, Loach says.

“Anything is possible in film. You can really do anything now with the technology that’s available,” he says. “It’s a departure from real life, and we’re exploring that. We’re hoping to have people step into a different world we’ve created, and at the end of the night they can return to their real lives.”

Technically, there are only three characters in this photo from The Real World?. Photo by Cylla Von Tiedmann.

The Real World?
Tarragon Theatre (30 Bridgman Avenue)
Runs to June 3
Tuesday to Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 p.m. matinees
$21–$51

We’ll never quite understand why some audience members aren’t interested in sticking around to ask questions during post-show talkbacks. If your parking’s about to expire, or you have a very early morning, sure. But if you’ve stayed to the end of the play, then you must have questions about what you’ve just seen. This is especially true when the show is as full as secrets as Michel Tremblay’s The Real World?, in English translation by John Van Burek, which director Richard Rose has brought back to the Tarragon Theatre 23 years after his last production of the play there.

More on the talkback in a bit; but first, the plot. Aspiring playwright Claude (Matthew Edison, a successful playwright himself) has arrived at his parents’ house for dinner just as his travelling-salesman father Alex (Tony Nappo) is returning from a business trip. Father and son couldn’t be much more different (the former has a forced jovial manner, the latter is sullen and caustic), so Claude is clearly there for a reason other than his father’s company. When Papa goes for a bath, Claude asks his mother Madeleine (Jane Spidell) if she has read the draft of a new play he had left with her. She has, and she’s deeply upset by the fact that the family he portrays in the manuscript is a thinly disguised version of his own.

As Madeleine explains her many objections to the play, we begin to see alternate versions of her (Meg Tilly) and Alex (Cliff Saunders) performing scenes in the same living room space. So the play within the play (and there may be even more layers than that) takes place simultaneously, and we begin to understand that Claude has poured a lot of resentment and anger into his work. This becomes even clearer when his go-go dancer sister Mariette (played by Sophie Goulet and Cara Gee) arrives for dinner, and more terrible family secrets are slowly revealed.

The talkback after the show addressed many fascinating aspects of The Real World?—at least, for the half of the audience that stuck around post-curtain. While the play seems similar to barely disguised autobiographical family dramas like Euguene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, director Rose explained that The Real World? was actually written as a form of apology from Tremblay to his immediate family, who’d already voiced their opposition to his airing of their dirty laundry in earlier work. Claude is morally conflicted enough over his use of family history that we could buy The Real World? as a mea culpa from Tremblay.

Rose also said that Spidell, who played Claude’s mother in this production, had played Mariette in his 1988–89 staging. Spidell offhandedly mentioned that the earlier production staged “real life” and “play life” on separate sides of the stage. The “new” staging, then, seems to us to be one of the most fascinating aspects of the production. Seeing the two different realities rub up against each other without actually interacting (save for at a few subtle moments) on designer Charlotte Dean’s set—a note-perfect replica of a Quebecois 1970′s home—is never confusing. The connection and similarities between the two plays constantly reveal new truths about the family. And who’s to say there are only two realities? The play leaves open the possibility that its “real world” is just a later version of the play Claude wrote—or that it foreshadows a soon-to-come, differently balanced draft.

Either way, by the end of the show we’ve seen both sides of the debate over accuracy and family loyalty. Spidell’s Madeleine and Edison’s Claude do a creditable job of articulating those points. Nappo’s barely restrained smarminess (and later, shame and fury) shines through, while Saunders manages to instill some humanity in a character written (by Claude) to be irrevocably loathsome. Tilly’s determined Madeleine is an inspiring heroine, before her namesake starts to tear her down. Meanwhile, both Gee and Goulet make impressions with their turns as the strutting Mariette. That it’s still hard to judge right from wrong in the script-within-the-script is a clear sign the production is doing justice to the material.

Prentice Onayemi and Douglas Scott Streater helped Young Jean Lee form the shape of The Shipment. Photo by Paula Court.

The Shipment
Enwave Theatre (231 Queens Quay West)
May 9–12, 8 p.m.
$15–$45

As progressive as we like to think our society is, every once in a while there is a case (Trayvon Martin, for example) that exposes an obscene, overt act of racism. We mourn the victim, shame the culprit, and take solace in the fact that, by and large, we do not share those shameful opinions.

Then there are shows like Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment, which are obviously less tragic, but arguably more shocking—because they aren’t about dissecting someone else’s preconceptions about race, but constantly causing you to run up against your own.

In its Canadian premiere, The Shipment confronts the audience with presentations of blackness in modern entertainment: opening with a dance number, followed by a stand-up routine, a rags-to-rapper sequence ripe with black stereotypes, a rendition of Modest Mouse’s “Dark Centre of the Universe,” and concluding with a naturalistic-style scene at a cocktail party. The cast of five—Jordan Barbour, Douglas Scott Streater, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Amelia Workman, and Prentice Onayemi—has reunited for this production (they last performed it in December 2010), and years of international touring has resulted in a seamless blend of all these elements and a natural chemistry between the actors. Everything in this play works together in harmony—all to disorient the audience as much as possible. It’s a carefully constructed sequence of manipulations that create performances as unique as each individual audience member who is reacting to them.

New York–based playwright and director Young Jean Lee has craftily set up the play with pieces that purposely lure us in with performances we can easily, passively consume before hitting us on the head with more serious points. Though they seem disjointed, the scenes all work together to build to the final line of the show, one that hits a strong punch to the gut. As a Korean-American, critics have wondered what impact her cultural background would have on a play so specifically about institutionalized black racism. But Lee relied on her cast to provide the content, who could veto anything they felt uncomfortable with during the creation of the play, and used her own sense of discomfort and being “an outsider” to provoke the same reaction in the audience.

One of America’s most exciting and hyped theatre playwright-directors working right now, it’s a treat to have Lee’s work at the Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre, if only for a very limited run. We’re hesitant to divulge too much about the events that take place during its 90 minutes, lest we sway your reaction to the issues at hand. But what is clear is that as progressive as we, especially Canadians, believe we are when it comes to eliminating racial stereotypes, we don’t even notice how we consume the pre-packaged stereotypes shipped to us through entertainment. And don’t be surprised if this Shipment makes you gag a little.

Janet Porter and Peter Mooney love and hurt in Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries. Photo by Guntar Kravis.

Gruesome Playground Injuries
The Theatre Centre
(1087 Queen Street West)
May 2 to 13, Tuesdays to Sundays at 7:30 p.m., weekend matinees at 1:30 p.m.
$20–$30

We’ve all had our scrapes and bruises from the playground, and chances are the words we used to describe them at the time were “gr-ooooss” or “awwwesome.” But imagine if we never grew out of that ungainly period. In time, our injuries would be more appropriately defined as “gruesome.”

Gruesome Playground Injuries opens inside an elementary school nurse’s office. Doug (Peter Mooney) has a cut face from riding his bike off the roof of the school, while Kayleen (Janet Porter, in a role played by Jennifer Carpenter, from Showtime’s Dexter, during the play’s 2011 off-Broadway run) has just gotten over another case of the stomach flu. At eight years old, they find common ground—albeit a twisted one—in their maladies, and a friendship is born. In Rajiv Joseph’s script, we bounce back and forth to various key points in their relationship, which grows more complex as they age, as do their traumas, both physical and emotional. Even though they lose touch over 30 years of knowing each other, the one thing they can rely on to reunite them is their pain. They become, sometimes literally, each other’s lifelines.

The play isn’t the typical “are-they-or-aren’t-they” romcom we’ve come to know from Hollywood—though there is a bit of comedy, some sweetness in their younger scenes, and a surprisingly enrapturing romance. Mostly, though, there’s a sense of discomfort, urgency, and risk throughout Birdland Theatre’s production, directed by Stefan Dzeparoski. We wouldn’t describe it as pleasurable. But it is certainly strong.

Adding to this is the set design. Joseph Pagnan turns The Theatre Centre into the playground of our nightmares, scattering beat-up school items around until the stage looks like a post-apocalyptic preschool, or a scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Mannequins made of bubble wrap hang and cling to the edges of the stage, with different limbs glowing red for each scene. At first, the entire set-up seemed a little too much like Halloween decoration, but the rest of the design crew (Chris Stanton on sound, Gareth Crews on lighting, and Jordan Tannahill on video) brings it all together into a pleasingly haunting whole.

Doug and Kayleen are both extremely flawed. Neither is very likeable. Joseph’s script doesn’t reveal very much about their lives, aside from their ailments and their co-dependency. In theory, this would make for frustrating theatre, but somehow we end up rooting for these two underdogs. Chalk that up to Porter and Mooney’s commitment to their roles, and Joseph’s sense of structure and dialogue.

Joseph is best known for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, featuring Robin Williams in its Broadway run, which was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Many are looking upon him (Joseph, not Williams) as a major emerging talent in contemporary American theatre, and rightfully so.

Usually, when we hear lovers pledge “I’ll die without you,” it’s hyperbole. But in Gruesome Playground Injuries, it’s fact—and high stakes like that are what make this show worth catching while you can.

Nathan Barrett (front) and Daniel Karasik (back) pit youth against youth in The Innocents. Photo by Jordan Tannahill.

The Innocents
Tarragon Theatre Studio (30 Bridgman Avenue)
April 17 to May 13
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m.
$17-$22

You may have heard of this new little show called Girls on HBO. Hannah is 24, two years out of university, interns for a living in New York City (supplemented by her professor parents), and eats cupcakes naked in the shower while her roommate shaves her legs in the same room. By declaring herself “a voice, of a generation,” the show’s creator, writer, and lead actor Lena Dunham has been widely proclaimed our voice, of our generation—that generation apparently being the early-to-mid twenty-something with the luxury to set up shop in a bustling metropolis, immediately after graduation, to begin writing a book of essays and feel generally miserable while we “figure it out.”

Not that Toronto author and playwright Daniel Karasik is anything like Lena Dunham, but his play, The Innocents, speaks to that same “burdened by our gifts” theme. The lives of four twenty-somethings are intertwined when Aaron (Nathan Barrett) confesses to killing an old woman in an attempted robbery, and his wealthy father hires Stanley (Daniel Karasik), a 25-year-old wunderkind lawyer, to represent him. Stanley, Aaron’s ex Jackie (Amelia Sargisson), and a Globe and Mail reporter Laura (Virgilia Griffith) are consumed by the case as they struggle to understand why such a privileged young man would, almost happily, throw everything away.

With a slick all-white set from Rae Powell and low-fi sultry sound design from Tye Hunt Fitzgerald, paired with Karasik’s writing and the overall vision of Jordan Tannahill, The Innocents is a smarter, slicker, deeper Girls, only the sex scenes are emotionally painful instead of painfully awkward. Each character represents an aspect essential to youth—Stanley’s ambition, Aaron’s impulse, Laura’s sexuality, and Jackie’s lovesickness—that they must be able to contain in order to really “grow up.”

The real tension revolves around the clash between Aaron and Stanley, two boys of the same age and from the same background, but who could not have evolved into more different people. Their contrasts are not only philosophical and emotional, but in their bodies—Aaron is almost constantly in a recline, staring off into space, while Stanley leans tensely against the back wall, reflected in the set’s window, unable to get out of his own head. Neither is likeable. In fact, none of the characters really are. But, as is customary for a generation so familiar with controlled images, especially online, all are hiding crippling insecurities and weaknesses with carefully-performed fronts. And when those fronts are pulled away by Karasik’s smart script, they redeem themselves.

“We are so fucking lucky,” Stanley tells Aaron after an explosive argument—though that doesn’t stop them from making the wrong moves. But we learn that it’s not pure arrogance or stupidity that’s their problem. They’re just young, and luck doesn’t automatically bring wisdom.

The cast and crew are all around the same age as these characters, so overall there is a sense of freshness and commitment to the story. Especially essential to the production are Karasik and Tannahill, themselves twenty-somethings who have received more than their fair share of accolades at a young age: Tannahill as an acclaimed playwright and filmmaker, Karasik the recent winner of Canada Writes, who will stage his award-winning play Haunted in this year’s SummerWorks Festival. (A German translation of The Innocents is also currently running in Mainz.)

Stanley is the central figure in the show, leaving the others relatively less formed as characters. But it’s exciting, as fellow twenty-somethings, to see such recognizable figures on stage, presented by our peers, and see others willing to listen to them. Luck might not bring wisdom, but it does bring opportunity like this to express ourselves. Now we just need to explore areas beyond how miserable we are because of that luck.

Patricia Fagan, Derek Boyes, Gregory Prest, Nancy Palk, Mike Ross, and Eric Peterson make for a twisted family tree. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

You Can’t Take It With You
Young Centre for the Performing Arts
(55 Mill Street)
April 26–June 21, various dates and times
$22–$68

The 2010s have Modern Family, just as the 1990s had Full House and Family Matters. All of those TV shows are comedies that celebrate the quirks and unbreakable bonds within families.

In 1937, meanwhile, there was Moss Hart and George Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, You Can’t Take It With You.

The institution of the family has transformed greatly over the years, which makes Joseph Ziegler’s new production of You Can’t Take it With You, for Soulpepper, a little risky. The 1930s were steeped in tradition and formalities. Male suitors had to arrive at a woman’s home to “call on her.” Social class mattered to a couple as much as romantic chemistry or compatibility. The patriarch of the family had the final say on the family’s affairs.

But Hart and Kaufman’s Sycamore household was a groundbreaking one. Paul (Derek Boyes), the father, tinkers with fireworks in the basement with his friend Mr. De Pinna (Michael Simpson), while his wife, Penny (Nancy Palk), types up half-finished plays according to various themes (the “War” play, the “Sex” play, and so on). Their daughter Essie (Patricia Fagan) pirouettes throughout the house between baking batches of candy, as her husband, Ed (Mike Ross), accompanies her on the xylophone. Grandpa (Eric Peterson) quit his job suddenly 35 years ago, and he now spends his time attending commencement ceremonies, caring for pet snakes, and ignoring letters from the IRS. Alice (Krystin Pellerin) is the “normal” one—that is, the only one with a day job, and consequently, the only one who knows that her family is more than a bit different than most. This wasn’t a problem for her until she fell in love with Tony (Gregory Prest), the heir to the wealthy Kirby family business. Now it’s time for his well-to-do parents (Jon Jarvis and Brenda Robins) to meet her unconventional clan. Fireworks literally ensue.

Some aspects of the Sycamores seem anachronistic. For instance, their cheerful black servants (Sabryn Rock and Andre Sills), their income-free lifestyle, their patriarchal Grandpa doling out words of wisdom to family members and government employees, and their amused nonchalance toward a friend’s drinking problem.

But Soulpepper’s production corrects for this by letting Eric Peterson, as the sneaker-wearing Grandpa, take centre stage. His “carpe diem” perspective on life is one of the more progressive aspects of the show. Maybe it’s the 20-something, newly graduated perspective from which we’re coming , but it seems to us that modern audiences can get behind a mindset like that. Hearing Peterson—a veteran of the stage—deliver his lines with such glee was music to our ears. He’s downright sprightly as Grandpa, and clearly relishes the opportunity to play a character that mirrors himself—a man whose days are directed by his passions.

Performances by the others are similarly lovable—specifically, Palk as the free-spirited Mother Sycamore, and Pellerin and Prest as the young and flirty couple that’s sweet-but-not-too-sweet. Prest and Palk are particularly remarkable: the last time we saw them on Soulpepper’s stage was in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a family saga that is all tears and trauma.

Despite the mustiness of some of its tropes, You Can’t Take It With You is funny. Sometimes it’s funny like when your grandmother uses racist slang in her everyday speech, but often it’s funny because the Sycamores are a breath of fresh air. If this Soulpepper cast keeps up their energy, this 1930s classic will have a place in Toronto theatre seasons for years to come.

CORRECTION: 1:22 p.m. We originally wrote that Prest and Palk’s last Soulpepper production was Eugene O’Neill’s The Distance From Here. In fact, they last appeared in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Gemma James-Smith and Gil Garratt are clowns without class in The Game of Love and Chance. Photo by lucetg.com.

The Game of Love and Chance
Bluma Appel Theatre (27 Front Street East)
April 16 to May 12
Mondays to Saturdays at 8 p.m., Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m.
$24 to $99

The Game of Love and Chance is a 300-year-old farce made up of arranged marriages, mistaken identities, class dynamics, entrances and exits, and, as the title suggests, romance and risk. Plus some split leaps and pratfalls for good measure.

After a season of mostly heavy, conceptual theatre and dance works about politics and culture, Canadian Stage ended its 2011/2012 season on Thursday with Marivaux’s classic in a contemporary English adaptation and translation by Nicolas Billon. In theory, it’s a choice that’s out of left field. But with the direction of Matthew Jocelyn, the company’s polarizing artistic director, think again.

The set by Anick La Bissonnière is a bold, large-scale arrangement of white, red, and metallic accents, with an elaborate chandelier focal point—all of which have been seen on the Bluma Appel stage before. Though Game is lighter in tone than many of the company’s recent productions, there is still more emphasis on direction, design, and acting style here than on intricate plotline.

Most of all, the production is in keeping with Jocelyn’s decidedly alternative take on programming, which emphasizes giving Toronto audiences entirely new and challenging theatrical experiences on one of the city’s largest stages.

In the opinions of some (arguably most), Jocelyn has been faltering. And certainly, The Game of Love and Chance isn’t a perfect production—and it’s far from the best that Canadian Stage has presented this season. Even so, the crowd at Thursday’s opening was a relatively young and enthusiastic one.

The show itself, on the other hand, had trouble matching that energy for its 90-minute duration. At the start, a modern-minded noblewoman Silvia (Trish Lindstrom) is about to meet her potential husband-to-be for the first time. She devises a plan with her quivering maid Lisette (Gemma James-Smith), her sweet-toothed brother Mario (Zach Fraser), and her clever father Monsieur Orgon (William Webster, away from his usual spot on Soulpepper programs) to better observe his natural character. She and Lisette will switch places, but little do they know that the suitor, Durante (Harry Judge), and his attendant Arlequino (Gil Garratt) have planned the same scenario. You know the drill—chaos ensues as romance blossoms between Silvia and Durante, and Lisette and Arlequino, and it all builds up to a happy ending (or is it so happy?).

Lindstrom and James-Smith command the opening scene from opposite ends of the stage, as they articulate their characters’ opposing views of courtship and marriage. Upon the arrival of Durante (under the alias “Bourguignon”) and his fur-stole-clad attendant, the game is afoot—and so is Garratt, who begins what amounts to 70 straight minutes of calisthenics, as he struts, jumps, and bends his way around the stage.

Unfortunately, as rousing as these antics are at first, the actors seem to tire of them, and so does the audience. James-Smith’s girly shimmies and Garratt’s Energizer bunny physicality (impressive though it is) start to seem gimmicky. Judge and Lindstrom, whose characters are supposedly rational, fall victim to this too. Webster and Fraser, as puppeteers of the whole ordeal, are helpful anchors.

Some may argue that now is not the time for a comedy that hinges on the idea of arranged marriages and false pretenses, but that argument is neither here nor there (show me a romantic encounter today that doesn’t involve at least one false pretense). Jocelyn even adds a sour note at the end to suit our more modern, cynical tastes. He had a vision, and wasn’t afraid to take up the entire Bluma stage with it. He might not have succeeded entirely, but hey, he took a chance.

Jeremiah Sparks as Lanier, Neema Bickersteth as Adeline, Starr Domingue as Vonzia, and Mark Power as Levi in Robert Chafe's Oil and Water. Photo by Peter Bromley.

Oil and Water
Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst Street)
April 18–May 6, Tuesdays–Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday matinees at 2 p.m.
$30–$40

As we saw last month in Mikaela Dyke’s Dying Hard, for many years life in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, wasn’t easy. While the men working in the mines developed silicosis and lung cancer, which would later virtually kill off the community, the women picked up duties around the home amid harsh weather and isolated lives.

On now at Factory Theatre, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland’s Oil and Water by Robert Chafe smooths the brogue and rough exteriors of these residents to reveal the kindness underneath. In February 1942, the U.S. marine destroyer USS Truxtun went down off the coast of St. Lawrence, killing 203 people in the icy water. One of the few survivors, and the only one with black skin, was Lanier Phillips. Though the people of St. Lawrence had never seen a black person before (at first they even tried to scrub the colour off, thinking it was oil), they treated him without prejudice. This openness famously changed Phillips, who had put up with the racism of the southern United States and who would eventually become a civil rights leader and the U.S. Navy’s first black sonar technician.

This isn’t well-conceived drama—it’s all true. Phillips, whose story is now Newfoundland lore, died this past March as an honorary member of the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Director Jillian Keiley will soon take up the job of artistic director of English theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and her vision for Oil and Water shows why. It’s a layered production, continuously moving from the deck of the USS Truxton, to life in St. Lawrence at the same moment, to the integrated school riots in ’70s Boston, where Phillips eventually settled. Through this, we see the “Before” (Ryan Allen) and “After” (Jeremiah Sparks) version of Phillips as he reacts to the racism around him, whether from a fellow white sailor Bergeron (Clint Butler), or when his own daughter Vonzia (Starr Domingue) is injured by white townspeople stoning her schoolbus. The fragmented script suffers from a lack of coherency in the first act, but Keiley establishes unity through gorgeous Newfoundland folk and African American gospel songs, delivered by the talented cast of 10. While only a few may be involved in the action at one time, they’re all always present—watching from the sides, singing underneath one another’s lines.

Combined with Shawn Kerwin’s imaginative set, including a clever boat that’s a cross between two ladders and a rocking chair, Oil and Water doesn’t disappoint visually. Neither do most of the performances, especially Petrina Bromley as Violet Pike, Phillips’ fated caretaker, who gives her character a hilarious and touching balance of edge and heart, and a whole lot of Canadian dry humour.

Unfortunately, we weren’t so enamoured of the script’s structure. Act one is a disjointed combination of scenes, and takes a little too much time setting up the context. The second act sparks all the action—Vonzia experiences an traumatic bus ride, which prompts her father to explain his story in St. Lawrence. Until this point, there are hardly any connections to hold the scenes together. We drown in the story in act one, while the second act is a life preserver, giving us some clarity to hold onto.

And, in the end, we weren’t sure what to take away from the story. Does her father’s positive past with Newfoundlanders make Vonzia’s experience on the bus any less horrifying? Should the women and men of St. Lawrence be considered as angelic as they appear, simply because they’re isolated from the racist attitudes of larger cities miles away? Not to discredit Phillips, his accomplishments, or his story—it is worth telling, especially with Keiley’s vision and the idea of a nonlinear narrative. We just wish we were as inspired by Oil and Water as the province of Newfoundland was.

Razi Shawadeh and Bahareh Yaraghi resurrect Marina Nemat's loveless marriage in Prisoner of Tehran. Photo by Victoria Scholes.

Prisoner of Tehran
Theatre Passe Muraille
(16 Ryerson Avenue)
April 10–28, Tuesdays–Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.
PWYC–$35

In rare cases, a piece of non-fiction can be more dramatic than an invented story. When Marina Nemat published her memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, in 2007, Canada discovered one such work.

Nemat’s life story has become an international bestseller, and has established her as a voice for countless victims of the Iranian Revolution. It’s a tale that’s so terrifying, so sad, and so inspiring that it practically cries out to be adapted for the stage, to the extent that director and playwright Maja Ardal has now put it on Theatre Passe Muraille’s—though there were some understandable fumbles in the transition between the two mediums.

In Ardal’s adaptation, Nemat’s life of imprisonment is bookended by her periods of freedom. We see her as a young girl eating ice cream by the Caspian Sea with her grandmother, dancing with friends, and meeting her first love. The play ends with her working at a Swiss Chalet in Toronto. In between, we jump back and forth through two traumatic years spent in the infamous Evin Prison, where Nemat was held for alleged anti-revolutionary acts. We see scenes from her loveless marriage to Ali, a former guard at Evin, who saved her life. We watch her abandon her religion, as well as family members who refuse to acknowledge her ordeal. Bahareh Yaraghi plays Nemat, while Razi Shawadeh and Mirian Katrib cover the many other characters.

The details of Nemat’s story are too numerous to tackle in a simple plot description, so that’s where we’ll leave it. Suffice it to say that Ardal makes a valiant effort to capture the people, events, and complexities of the Iranian Revolution and the conflicts that arose from it. But much like the way a film version of a beloved book hardly ever does the original story justice, the impact of the staged Prisoner of Tehran doesn’t pack quite the blow that it should.

Shawadeh and Katrib work hard to manage a variety of characters—from the sweet to the sinister—but the pace of the action is so quick that their appearances feel shallow, like mere snippets. Especially in the character of Ali, who must feel as conflicted about the marriage as his adored-yet-unhappy wife, there are deep layers that seem impossible to reveal within the constraints of a play with a limited running time. This lack of dimension and Shawadeh and Katrib’s sometimes over-the-top performances have a tendency to make things seem cartoonish.

Julia Tribe’s set and costumes and Steven Hawkins’ lighting are simple and straightforward, much like Ardal’s direction. On the one hand, this lets the story speak for itself. On the other hand, it places a little too much responsibility on the script and performances to convey both story and context. Perhaps a more conceptual design would have filled in where character development falls short.

It’s a great thing to take such an important story from one medium to another, exposing it to a new audience and giving it new life. But with all due respect to the original text, a play is not a book. A theatre adaptation should take advantage of the stage’s unique elements and techniques to tell a story in a new way.

Theatre can, and does, handle stories like Nemat’s—but only when it’s used to its full potential.

Jeff Lilico, Sterling Jarvis, Maria Ricossa, and Audrey Dwyer don't mince words about racially homogenous neighbourhoods. Photo by John Karastamatis.

Clybourne Park
Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley Street)
April 2–28
Monday–Saturday 8 p.m., plus Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 p.m.
PWYC–$49

The purchasing and selling of real estate is much more than a financial investment—it’s a statement about one’s emotional maturity, interests, taste, and identity. It’s a commitment not only to a home, monthly payments, and regular maintenance, but to a larger community. And sometimes that community can pose a bigger threat to a successful transition than unreliable movers or unexpected roof leaks.

Chicago’s Clybourne Park is the neighbourhood in question in Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-winning script of the same name, on now in its Canadian premiere at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

Co-produced by Studio 180 and Canadian Stage, the play is inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, about the challenges facing a black family that moves into a conservative all-white neighbourhood. Norris splits Clybourne Park into two halves. The first takes place in 1959 in the home of Bev (Maria Ricossa) and Russ (Michael Healey) as they pack up for their move to the suburbs. They muse about ice cream flavours and national capitals before they’re visited by the town’s pastor, Jim (Jeff Lillico), neighbour Karl (Mark McGrinder), and his deaf wife, Betsy (Kimwun Perehinec). Karl, the only white character in A Raisin in the Sun, brings the shocking news that the family moving into Russ and Bev’s home is “coloured,” and encourages them to abandon the sale (in the presence of Bev’s African American maid, Francine [Audrey Dwyer] and her husband, Albert [Sterling Jarvis], no less). They refuse—not only for the obvious reasons—and continue with the move.

Act Two takes place 50 years later, in the same home. In the intervening decades, Clybourne Park has transitioned from predominantly white to predominantly black, and is on the verge of another period of re-gentrification. The cast picks up new characters as Steve (McGrinder) and pregnant Lindsay (Perehinec) intend to demolish their newly purchased home, much to the chagrin of Kevin (Jarvis) and Lena (Dwyer), who are petitioning the project to defend the historical integrity of the neighbourhood. Lillico and Ricossa play battling lawyers, unequally concerned over the lack of progress the group is making in discussing the agreement, while Healey is a maladroit construction worker.

Norris’s script is razor sharp, slapping the audience with hair-pulling comments about cultural propriety fit for an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Karl’s arguments are infuriating, yet we all know he ends up being right about the effects of the incoming family. Likewise, Steve is the villain for taking offense to Lena’s explicit distaste for a white family entering her neighbourhood. Parallels between Betsy’s disability and the PTSD suffered by Russ and Bev’s deceased son are cleverly woven into the first act, while crude jokes show no mercy to any cultural group in Act Two.

There are no heroes in Clybourne Park, only characters struggling with their burdens—literally buried or exhumed—and their failed attempts to “live in a principle.” The acclaim Norris has received for the script is clearly deserved.

There are many important conversations at work among the characters in both eras, but with Joel Greenberg’s direction, the topic of race bulldozes over the others. Though it’s clearly at the heart of the play, the emphasis is so loud and heated that the play’s softer side, seen most clearly in a closing moment between Ricossa, Lillico, and Healey, is lost.

The play’s Chicago setting is integral, but an installation in the Berkeley’s lobby based on a University of Toronto study about our own city’s income stratification, Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2005, helps bring the issues closer to home. Now that conversations around Toronto’s real estate and its dwindling affordability are as hot as the next novelty coffee shop, Clybourne Park has arrived at an interesting time for Toronto. As smart as the script and the performances are, we couldn’t say any of them significantly enraged us. Rather than getting frazzled over who was moving where for whatever reason, we were just proud of them for being able to enter the housing market.

Ins Choi performs his Subway Stations of the Cross inside St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church.

It is a traditional practice, done at many churches during the Lenten season: remembering the journey of Jesus to his crucifixion, as described in the Bible.

But Ins Choi does it a little differently.

The Toronto-based actor and writer—perhaps best known for his play Kim’s Convenience—has spent the past several weeks performing his latest work, Subway Stations of the Cross, at various churches and other venues in Toronto and surrounding areas.

And while Choi’s one-man performance reflects on the life and death of Jesus Christ—similar to the tradition from which he’s adapted the title—his version incorporates some unorthodox material.

“It ranges from Superman, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Chopin, and Mendelssohn, to the etymology of bread in different languages…to the stations of the cross,” Choi explains. “Fourteen stations of the cross to a few subway stations of the TTC.”

During each performance, Choi talks about Jesus being placed in a tomb (the 14th station), then switches to describing underground train stops named after saints (“the 15th station of the TTC from Downsview: St. Andrew’s Station”). It’s one of many links between Bible history and present-day life that Choi creates in his performance.

He describes the monologues that make up a large part of the show as “meandering, connecting thoughts surrounding Jesus.”

Choi says the idea was born from a poem he wrote in 2008. As he continued to work on it and turn it into a performance, the voice that emerged was one of a homeless man. Choi says that’s only appropriate since, according to the Bible, Jesus did not have a home for part of his adult life.

“I think if Jesus was here today, he’d be a homeless man,” Choi says. “And he may look like that guy on the street.”

On Good Friday, Choi (pictured at right) took the stage in front of a couple hundred people at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church in Kensington Market. He affected a slightly disoriented but thoughtful persona. He was wearing a rough coat, and his voice was gravelly.

Within the first few minutes, he had already sung a song in Hebrew accompanied by guitar, then broken into a rapid a capella version of Mendelssohn’s wedding march, which then turned into the theme song from Rocky, transitioned into Chopin’s famous funeral dirge, and then morphed into “The Imperial March” from Star Wars.

The remainder was just as unpredictable. One minute Choi’s performance was slow and deliberate. The next, he rhymed at lightning speed. The piece, which runs around 40 minutes, mixes music, monologues, and poetry, and includes singing in both Hebrew and Latin. There are moments of humour mixed into the solemnity. (For instance, the 17th station of the TTC: “from Finch, transfer at Bloor, transfer at St. George, overshoot once: St. Patrick.”)

Choi says he did not have concerns about taking material so entrenched in church history and adapting it into a more modern context. “Never did I think it was irreverent, taking something sacred and making it, for me, accessible,” he says.

Choi maintains it is crucial to ask what traditional values—like showing love or serving people—mean in a city like Toronto, and make them relevant to the audience. “We can’t do what they did a thousand years ago, or even one hundred years ago. It’s a different context. It needs people to adapt it,” he explains.

And while he says the piece is for all audiences, Choi thinks it is especially important for him to bring arts back into houses of worship. “I feel like the church is on the sidelines of mainstream culture,” he says. “The arts, movies, theatre— at one point, the church was at the centre of it. The Renaissance—they commissioned Michelangelo; they commissioned Leonardo. They were the producers of art back in the day.”

While the performances may be done for this year, Choi plans to continue developing the piece and hopes to eventually take it on tour across Canada. He is working on altering the script based on this year’s performances, and says he has been tweaking it over the last few weeks, making changes every time he brings it to the stage.

Good Friday’s version of the play ended with Choi creating a makeshift cross shape out of a microphone stand, coat, radio antenna, and bag of wine-soaked bread. He blew a shofar horn as he walked off the stage and out of the room, leaving the air ringing with what sounded like wailing.

So ended a performance that Choi hopes will inspire creativity in those who hear it. “It’s not preaching,” he says. “It’s not a lecture. I’m not telling people what to do. I’m not teaching them necessarily anything. That’s not my aim. It’s me, meditating.”

Photos by Krista Simpson.