Results tagged “summerworks2008”

It's your absolute last chance to catch something at SummerWorks before the Indie Theatre and Arts Festival closes up shop for another year. Last night, two of the more interesting shows at the festival had their closing night performances. Fewer Emergencies, a collection of three potentially related short plays by British playwright Martin Crimp, is a show unconventional even for absurdist drama that's as likely to be called a masterpiece as a piece of something else entirely. A Soldier's Story/L'Histoire du Soldat, on the other hand, is an extremely accessible show that combines storytelling, dance, and a chamber orchestra to tell an old Russian fairytale.

Winter Miller's In Darfur, playing now at SummerWorks, is set in 2004, when the world knew little about the genocide in Sudan. Maryka is a reporter for The New York Times who wants to break the story and doesn't care what she risks in order to do so. Carlos is a UN doctor concerned only about the safety of the community he serves. And Hawa is an English teacher who has experienced the genocide first-hand and may be the key to telling the world about the atrocities.

The Pastor Phelps Project: A Fundamentalist Cabaret is certainly one of the most talked-about shows at this year's SummerWorks Festival. Although the notorious funeral-picketing pastor's Westboro Baptist cronies didn't actually make it into the country, it certainly can't have hurt the show's ticket sales. A collective creation made up mostly from found transcript text (FOX News, The O'Reilly Factor, The Tyra Banks Show, etc.), the play explores the role Fred Phelps, Sr. has carved out for himself in popular culture.

For years, SummerWorks has been kid sister to the Fringe. Smaller, shier, not quite as well-known (if often more reliable thanks to its policy of juried play selection as opposed to Fringe's random lottery). But there comes a summer in every kid sister's life when she starts going through some "special changes" and suddenly all her older sibling's friends turn their heads when she walks by the pool in her tankini. We already started to discuss the direction in which new Artistic Producer Michael Rubenfeld has started to take the festival, which has now been re-branded as "Toronto's Indie Theatre and Arts Festival."

It's almost August, and some of us know that means it's almost SummerWorks. The juried theatre festival has taken a bit of a different turn this year, under the new artistic leadership of Michael Rubenfeld, and is branching out into music and performance art. In a shockingly tech-savvy move for the Toronto theatre community, it also has a blog. Last week, the blog started posting viral videos, including one where veteran Canadian actor/playwright Michael Healey yells for someone to "fuck his wide ass," and the video featured in this post, titled "Expression." In the video, playwrights Hannah Moscovitch, Tara Beagan, Claudia Dey, Rose Laborde, and Linda Griffiths discuss the travails of being "hot playwrights." The video, which culminates in a pillow fight, has already sparked a comments war on the fest's blog about its feminist implications.