Trevor Abes: Writer

Category: Theatre

July 16, 2022

Review: Joan & Olivia: A Hollywood Ghost Story (Ebb & Flow Theatre)

Enemies can serve as a façade just as well as they can speak for your soul, for how you choose to carry yourself in the world. And there are few contexts where this dichotomy is in starker contrast than Hollywood, where rivalries are rarely as straightforward as they are portrayed to be.

From left to right: Georgia Findlay, Crystal Casera, Mackenzie Kelly and Nicole Moller.

Golden age, Oscar-winning actors (and sisters) Joan Fontaine and Olivia De Havilland sit high on the all-time list of these rifts with their lifelong quarrel. It began innocently enough with hail-pulling and wrestling matches; but devolved into Joan referring to Olivia’s new husband, novelist Marcus Goodrich, by saying, “All I know about him is that he’s had four wives and written one book. Too bad it’s not the other way around;” and Olivia sending a telegram to Joan about their mother’s impending death instead of calling; and also, many years later, referring to the recently deceased Joan as ‘Dragon Lady’ due to the “astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”

Intent on tapping into some of that raw familial animosity, Joan & Olivia: A Hollywood Ghost Story, the latest offering from Ebb & Flow Theatre, presents us with a generational family drama that uses the supernatural as a springboard into meditations on sibling rivalry.

Joan, played by playwright Georgia Findlay, and Olivia, played by Nicole Moller, are ghosts doomed to spend eternity in their childhood California home, where young sisters Celeste, played by Mackenzie Kelly, and Molly, played by Crystal Casera, have recently moved in. The quartet soon break off into master and protégé pairs as the actors play their rivalry out again through M&C’s eyes.

The chemistry between Joan’s playful irreverence and Olivia’s posh iciness is what initially roped me into the show. Enhanced by Findlay’s knack for repartees, as well as plenty of sophisticatedly integrated cinematic and biographical references for the knowing, the ladies quickly establish a rhythm fueled by shared history that keeps things moving along at a colorful and engaging pace.

The reason they offer worthwhile portrayals, beyond physical features and sharp Mid-Atlantic accents, is that they get at the consequences of cuts that were cleaner than they should have been. Extreme decisions, like sisters shutting themselves out of each others’ lives, taking their toll over time in the form of moral worldviews too narrow to keep many loved ones around. The amount of spite, jealousy and revenge they hurl about can be overwhelming, especially when the younger sisters lean into their own because of it, hammering home the point that habits compound whether healthy or not.

The hopeful turn Ebb & Flow bring to this classic story is embodied by Molly and Celeste, also constantly feuding, in that they still have time to strike a truce before life gets too far gone. They don’t get too much help from their spectral housemates, experts as Joan and Olivia are at holding a grudge, but they do manage to steer the overall conversation far closer to self-honesty and reconciliation than the real-life actors ever achieved. There is something deeply satisfying about revisionism that points out the most obvious but somehow also the hardest fact for some to accept, which is that no difference is insurmountable.

Molly and Celeste, living in the present day, mirror Joan and Olivia’s verbally violent dynamic with a richer palate to express their rage for one another, one more expansive than Olivia and Joan had as women in the early-to-mid 20th century. While J&O drape with dignity the rifts they can’t but recognize as irreconcilable, perhaps bottling in their excess energy, M&C have no such qualms, shoving one another and screaming in each others’ faces to alleviate their tension as instantly as possible. M&C’s physicality generally, free-flowing and often stretched into awkward positions, also stands in contrast to J&O’s tightly wound dispositions, adding to the tension between the different generations separating their sisterhoods.

Tying everything together, I found the costumes added a vibrancy to the story, their lush colors and contrasts lending grace and brightness to the darkest moments, and a sense of refinement to the funniest, all the while enhancing and blurring the age and era differences as relationships develop.

Though I may not have referred to it til now, Joan and Olivia, as well as Molly and Celeste, are somewhat complementary to each other, allowing their love to show, however faintly glimmering. Dramaturg Matt Eger makes delicate use of these flickers, spreading them out to keep our hearts rapt in the back-and-forth between affection and loathing until the curtain drops.

I also appreciated the literary flourishes in the script, most notably the moments of interlaced dialogue where speakers in different conversations speak one after the other, infusing the proceedings with poetry. Findlay also rounds off the generational differences between the protagonists with gorgeously intricate turns of phrase that have J&O sounding posh as can be, and more minimal exhortations, beautiful in their simplicity, that place M&C firmly in the age of mass media.

From a bird’s eye view, Joan & Olivia: A Hollywood Ghost Story is an example of how you can balance entertainment with quality storytelling that speaks to grander themes without sacrificing either. It earns its place in the lore of its starring sisters by rising to the task of adding drama to one of Hollywood’s foundational stories.

Joan & Olivia: A Hollywood Ghost Story is on tonight at 6:15pm for one more show as part of its run at the Toronto Fringe. Tickets here.

July 10, 2022

Review: Iphigenia in Splott (Skipping Stones Theatre)

The amount of room you keep free for people you don’t like says a lot about you. How far from your views on politics, sex and gender, religion, life and death can you wander, curious and receptive, before you won’t hear another word, regardless of who might be speaking, and what they may have been through?

Breanna Maloney as Effie.

If said space is expansive, your capacity for empathy is likely just as generous. If it’s a little tight, you may find it easy to dismiss other people’s life choices and life plans, except for a chosen few whose ideologies reflect the world you want to see.

Enter Skipping Stones Theatre, a Toronto collective dedicated to storytelling that aims to create/expand/entice your appetite for neurodiversity and understanding of mental health. Their latest, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Splott by Gary Owen, is a solo show best described as an exercise in social change by catharsis. 

Our lone protagonist, Effie, played by Breanna Maloney, is a poor, heavy-drinking, foul-mouthed and promiscuous woman for whom mainstream British society has little room to spare. She is a reference to U.K. austerity measures from the mid-2010s that spawned the politically fabricated and widely popularized notion that those most affected by the cuts – the poor and the mentally unwell – were to blame for their misfortunes.

Effie’s brashness, initially off putting in a punk middle finger kind of way, very quickly shifts into a shield between her and the outside world as we learn more about her obstacles and motivations. Her best medicine for what the highs of sex and drunkenness fail to numb – limited job prospects, unreliable social services – is a ‘fuck you’ to whoever’s within earshot. Passivity and acquiescence are no balm for a systemic lack of opportunity, one where those who can walk to a decent life have been swayed by those in power to expect her to grow wings and take flight there, and look down on her for not being able to.

Her abundance of self-preserving volume and aggression, set against her borderline-naive eagerness to feel and be understood, gradually saturated my headspace with her humanity, such that I could see the impact of it cleansing a narrow-minded patron of their belief that people like Effie are unworthy of their aspirations. At the very least, Maloney’s work does a lot of the heavy lifting in that direction, true to the company’s mandate. This is the social change the play is crafted to induce, by force of feeling, yes, waves upon waves of it, but also plenty of humor stemming from Effie’s blunt retorts, and a number of poetic conceits that elevate the whole work for me into the kind of theatre that endures because it not only represents the underrepresented, but does it with a sense of craft. One of these conceits, the superhero-ish ramifications of certain people being in Effie’s debt, is worth more in enchantment than the price of admission.

The play’s aforementioned exercise develops more organically than I’m making it sound. I slowly let go of self-awareness at the mercy of Effie’s tireless, expletive-laced tirades as space-time might be constricted by a favorite song. She says and does as she likes, while having mastered, by the precarities of her situation, the essential survival skill of not caring what most people think of her. She pursues what she wants, fearlessly and shamelessly, and when she is afraid or ashamed, she is able to stride through the flames of it accepting her flaws with open arms. All of this equals a mesmerizing character, and outside of the theatre, a human being with incredible potential. This is why Effie’s succession of tragedies, many of which she is basically fated to endure, stun as effectively as they do, and are liable to slide the ground from beneath your feet to make you revisit who’s deserving of your good graces.

Lighting Designer, Chin Palipane and Movement Consultant, Alice Cavanagh are adept at maximizing the intimacy of the moment, while also offering a sense of structure with their choices to this otherwise starkly presented play. The starkness, of course, is intentional, with Director Sean O’Brien astutely aware that Effie will more than capably fill up the almost bare stage on her own.  Combined with Maloney’s gift for bringing not only Effie but her whole community to life with but one body to work with, Iphigenia in Splott manages to break through its U.K. confines with a deeply felt portrayal of social inequality and the colossal strength required to climb out of it.

The show runs until July 17th as part of Toronto Fringe. Ticket info here.

November 20, 2021

Review: Internet Girlfriend (A Bit Much Productions)

One of the blessings of digital theatre is opening yourself up to a blending of art forms. While some companies choose to leave the camera still and let the performances do the talking, others embrace the sense of play and structural possibilities and run with it.

With Internet Girlfriend, from A Bit Much Productions, we get just that, a theatre/film hybrid that is as much moving pictures as it is moving bodies that will likely expand your vision of what it means to watch a play.

The story centers on the relationship between Daisy (Megan Adam), a Youtouber working her way through life sharing ideas and growing pains on camera, and Connor Beck (Leo Mates), a singer-songwriter of considerable renown who’s regularly on Youtube’s front page.

The thin line between admiration and hero-worship quickly comes to the fore when, after we’ve followed Daisy into adulthood, she receives a video call from Beck, who she’s vlogged about as a long-time fan, and she is instantly at the mercy of his approval. He doesn’t ring in at random, either; rather, it’s suggested that he builds up to that moment to grant it a sense of authenticity, a hint of nefariousness to it all, but barely enough to notice.

Over subsequent calls, and a very short amount of time, the two build a virtual rapport and end up living together. But again, as viewers, we are given tiny reasons to pause if we care to notice, reasons that seem to be escalating into a fight-or-flight situation. This time, they concern Beck’s language toward Daisy, which I’d describe as establishing superiority veiled in cutesy tones (note his use of the word ‘weird’), and saying all the right romantic things (which he clearly doesn’t mean) to someone so taken with him she’ll default to believing him no matter what he says. Once they’re living out of Connor’s flat, the power dynamics at play come into fuller view.

To get through to people, I think a work of art about abuse should say so in a multitude of ways without spelling it out and devolving into a P.S.A. Internet Girlfriend abides by this view, such that you may not know what’s going on until you take the time to add up every hint of trouble.

Adam excels at the delicate job of guiding us to this realization, because Daisy’s struggle to differentiate between the world on screen and the world outside is also our struggle. As critical consumers of media, we all know to lead with skepticism before we’re presented with tangible proof, but that’s of course not always the case. We all get carried away. The adoration Adam fills Daisy’s eyes with transforms the red flags she’s surrounded by into scenery, right up until we can’t ignore them any longer. In this way, the audience has a chance for their moral compasses to kick in before they’re kicked in for us.

Mates, as the other half of this two-hander, provides us with a performance that does what it’s supposed to, which is to be vile, slimy and see-through, to summon up in us everything we know to be holy and good, because all we can do is watch his character embody the exact opposite.

Once the pair are in Beck’s flat, his transgressions begin to tap us on the head a little harder, always nudging Daisy in the direction of his preferences, convincing her that her suffering is self-inflicted, while constantly reminding her that their relationship is special and worth cherishing. And it devolves into much worse from there. While Daisy’s idealization might jumpstart our critical faculties by dulling them, Beck’s objectification of her, first as an undertow, then conceited and unconscionable, should bring to mind a long list of powerful men who chose to inflict trauma over remembering the feeling of the ground beneath their feet.

Going back to my point on hybridity, this all unfolds through a mix of live-action shots and confessional-style YouTube videos that lend themselves to the feeling of getting to know someone. The proximity of Daisy and Connor’s facial expressions, they in front of their laptops, us in front of ours, tricks us into thinking words like ‘relationship’ and ‘intimacy’ are appropriate descriptors, when what we’re seeing are just representations made convincing by patchy narratives our brains went ahead and filled in. I applaud this choice, this immersion into the digital, not only on account of its timeliness, but also the fact that the play wouldn’t be as effective if carried out on a stage in its entirety. This is theatre of the Internet that managed to entrench itself in my ethical engine and reinforce how precious and flawed it is when people let you into their lives.

Hats off to Director Melly Magrath for tying everything together with a sense of awe at human connection, in spite of the monsters one must contend with along the way.

Hat off also to Adam and her writing, as there are numerous lines throughout the show that encapsulate their respective moments with a flair/precision you cannot teach. You’ll know them when you hear them.

I’ll stop short of spoiling the crescendo and denouement, but they strike me as tidily and realistically executed, imbuing Daisy with the awareness and newfound consciousness one would hope to gain after such an ordeal. 

Internet Girlfriend runs until November 28, 2021.

20% of the proceeds will be donated to The Redwood Shelter.

October 9, 2021

Review: Liminal Spaces, A Digital Play Trilogy (Alma Matters Productions/Nowadays Theatre/MXL Live Loft)

If most of this review’s readers are anywhere, it’s a safe bet to say that they are between who they were around March 2020 and who they will become as they find their way back into the post-pandemic world. There is transition in the air, a sense of unresolved inbetweenness, with all the internal rejiggering and hard decision-making that entails.

It’s this struggle of holding on to who you are in a moment of uncertainty, when past principles seem to lack any clear direction, that the Liminal Spaces trilogy taps into. Brought to us by Alma Matters, Nowadays and MXL Live Loft, these one-act plays, filmed National-Theatre-archives-style, approach the grey area between the black and the white with a refreshing lack of definite answers. Rather than being prescriptive, promising to help to figure life out, come what may, the plays seek to thrive in spaces where the path forward isn’t paved but created by the first step you decide to take.

DISCORd

A piano prodigy, played by Sarah Marchand, dines alongside a famous musical director, played by Anand Rajaram, who wields his power to prey on those whose ambitions he could make a reality.

Rajaram imbues his role with subtlety and finesse, giving off tons of slimy tension, as one might expect from such a figure, but cut with a sense of weakness and insecurity that explains but never justifies his behavior. It’s the kind of performance that stays true to the trilogy’s title, in the sense that we aren’t given the option to dismiss the character outright. Rather, we are asked to consider the human beneath the monster, reminding me of the open-mindedness people like Daryl Davis have made a career out of.

Marchand, for her part, brings an awareness to her character, Jane, such that victimhood could only ever come second to her life’s goals as composer and performer. Jane’s reactions to the maestro crossing line after line are both arresting and dignified – including a private scream that releases her and the audience’s tension at just the right time – but she is not above taking advantage of how she’s being taken advantage of, calling the maestro out in the hopes of landing a career-defining role. She navigates broadly accepted social rights and wrongs to her own ends and thus remains herself throughout.

Hats off to director Jonathan Shaboo and writers Jax Smith and Helene Taylor for weaving and realizing such a complex and timely world delivered through the (at least on the surface) quietest of conversations.

MOTHER

A woman doesn’t feel well, thinks she might be dead, or at least dying, and wishes to speak to her son to feel better. Next to her, her deceased mother tries to comfort her and remind her that she must do all she can to convince herself she’s alive.

The ailing woman, played by Aida Keykhaii, teeters between existence and non-existence, wrecked by the fear of not being able to conclusively pin down which is which. Is it the imagination that keeps us here, engaged with the days? Otherwise, without the right story unfolding along with those days, how can we really know for sure?

Keykhaii’s unease toward these questions, a product of reality as she battles cancer, are enough to make anyone understand that latching onto what you value is what keeps you steady through the cyclicality of life. And when I say latching, I mean being unapologetically selfish with what you have been lucky enough to love. I mean acting in such a way that you can look back on your time and be proud of what you overcame in the name of that love.

Keykhaii’s tearful flailing for solid boundaries, for certainties to rest within, is a roadmap to not only survival, but to self-emergence, once you realize that those boundaries will change for reasons beyond your control, but there will always be more to discover and erect, in this life and the next.

Writer and director Mohammad Yaghoubi, who is also Keykhaii’s husband, chose to leave it all on the stage with this one, allowing me to find peace with how the world I know now, my personal universe, will not be the one I inhabit in the future, in spite of the vivacity of the impressions I hold dear.

MPDG

Nathan, a playwright, played by Nathan Taylor, struggles to make headway on his next piece after a scathing review, by Kelly Nestruck, no less, a detail dropped in so unexpectedly it had me howling with laughter. He is as blocked as they come, unsure how to work around the assumptions – literary, sexual, emotional – holding him back.

It’s a love story he’s keen on crafting as the dilemma grows clearer: Does he revisit the traditional boy-meets-girl trope his audience craves, or does he allow equality and the frustration and anxiety of how a love is made up as you go to muddle his ultimate offering?

I found the structure by which this conflict is laid out to be both ingenious and thoroughly entertaining. On the one end, we have Nathan (the character), and on the other we have Manic Pixie Dream Girl, played by Annick Sheedy McLellan, an envoy from the Narrative Gods sent to curb Nathan’s vision toward the happily ever after, whether he likes it or not.

The pair switch back and forth, between characters and characters embodying Nathan’s characters, with an immediacy and command of their craft that is only amplified by Raf Finn’s musical adrenaline and directors Taras Lavren and Justin Otto’s contrasts of space and colour.

Taylor and McLellan play off each other like fall and the smell of rain. It’s a gift to behold their dynamism, confidence and absolute comfort with their respective artistic choices. This is why, of the three works, it stands out as the most singular. It is suffused with a sense of play, takes the most chances and has the most to lose and to gain.

MPDG presents the question of how to exercise authority over one’s story as a negotiation between who you are and how you are seen, between what you feel to be true and what hearsay dictates you to expect. It asks of us to take a stance somewhere along the plane of this give-and-take, remembering that any claims of immutable fact are in fact mobile by necessity, change being the only constant.

This is why ending the play with a summation of what we’ve just witnessed makes perfect sense. It underlines the work’s conscious support of Nathan the character’s muddled but realistic romantic vision in a world that prefers the comforts of fantasy, though perhaps it could have been pulled off in a less moralizing, clinical, academic way. That said, the work remains the kind of fun worth paying to have.

Here’s to more collaborations like this one, where artists bet on their processes’ ability to translate the history of their time into a deep desire to be human.

Catch the show until October 15 through here. Twenty per cent of all ticket sales will be donated to the CDA Institute Afghan Refugee Program.

August 18, 2021

Review: UnTuned (Golvareh)

It’s hard to prepare for life’s highs and lows when you think too highly of yourself to expect them. You will bet on yourself, but you won’t hedge the pursuit of that dream with a surer, albeit less satisfying, option. It is the dream or nothing. 

With Sarah Saberi’s UnTuned, we find ourselves on the nothing side of things for the story of a struggling musician and immigrant to Canada on his 40th birthday as he video calls with family and friends back in Iran.

Amir Hosein Taheri, as Massoud, the musician, brings a lighter air to the angst of unfulfillment, cracking jokes, often at others’ expense, to distract himself from confronting why his art did not work out as expected. His sulking posture and indifferent face, even at the happiest of moments, kept reminding me of Camus’ The Stranger, except somehow laced with hilarity, which is no small feat.

I think Massoud succeeds at keeping us interested in his lack of creative and romantic achievements because he can’t help brushing up against it, forcing himself to react. There are constant opportunities for self-reflection, most of which he swats away, but yet, he keeps answering birthday calls in search of more. I call that spirit and he has it in droves, even though he can’t always recognize how it shines through everything he does.

At its base, this play about failure in love and work is supported by love itself, made all the more intense by the distance between Massoud and his callers, though they are side by side on the screen. That mix of relief, longing and joy you get when you Zoom the right person is the fertile soil from which this story comes to light.

One pivotal scene concerns Banafsheh Taherian, as Atefeth, Massoud’s high-achieving friend, who stood out to me as an example of artifice adding to rather than subtracting from authenticity. Atefeth is a hyperbolic extension of everything Massoud might wish for, so much so she’s almost perfect, a statistical rational anomaly in a world of people all up in their feelings barely getting by. Her jovial effortless exceptionalism teaches us how very seriously Massoud takes her as a measuring stick for his own accomplishments, though he’d never admit it, setting him (and us) up for how unexplained expectations are always guaranteed disappointments. 

Another key scene involves Farzaneh Soheili, as Bahareh, who offers us a heavy dose of badassery as, one by one, she throws Massoud’s put downs right back in his face. She pulls this off with vigor, questioning the foundations of the meaning in his life, savouring the pulls from her cigarette with a stiff upper lip as an action star might. The pair makes for a crescendo I found to be a satisfying payoff to Massoud’s broody soul-searching.

Every caller in UnTuned succeeds at reflecting Massoud back at himself at an angle he’s too stuck to tease out on his own. From his mother (Fariba Jedikar) to his sister (Faranak Kalantar) to his job interviewer (Ashley Mauerhofer), there are intimations of the great promise he can’t seem to reignite. And Saberi, as Director, does well to end things with a nod to self-care suggesting he may never be able to, and that’s OK, so long as he can have his own back once the inevitability of change comes calling.

If you’re interested in a character study that cycles you through the full scope of human emotion, you made it. You’re here.

Watch UnTuned as part of Toronto Fringe’s Digital Fringe here until August 22 at 11:59 pm ET.

June 26, 2021

Review: Cooking for Grief (Alma Matters Productions/Theatre ARTaud)

The incredible usefulness of knowing what to do with trauma when it lands in your lap is not usually part of the curriculum, in or out of school. It’s a skill often learned in the aftermath of an unfortunate event, one you aren’t familiar enough with to see a way out.

In my limited experience, I take therapy to be an admission that life is made up of the seemingly insurmountable, but you can be taught how to differentiate between the impossible and the unbelievably hard. Engaging in any kind of therapy, clinical or not, is taking a firm stance on the normality of uncertainty – of things occasionally falling outside of your control – without giving up on workable solutions toward who you want to be moving forward.

That enduring grip on who you want to become, despite the bullshit (self-inflicted or from the outside world), is what comes through the strongest for me from Breanna Maloney’s new play, Cooking for Grief.

The play centres on a group therapy session with four characters at various stages of coming to terms with who they are and how they heal. Though there are in-depth storylines covering alcoholism, physical abuse, and death, there is a sense that hardship isn’t as essential to their self-definition as it once was. These individuals are not rookies to the ordeal of picking themselves up when nobody else is around.

Anand Rajaram, as Jerome, for example, projects the even-keeled disposition of someone who had to fight years to forge it out of strings of bad decisions. The peace he exudes as the leader of the therapy session is a balm for the other people in the room. I’m calming down just thinking of him. I feel his patient insistence on nudging the rest of the group away from self-loathing and unaccountability and toward the aforementioned workable solutions is full of the love we all dream of.

Aris Tyros, as Rob, is pretty enrapturing as someone on the opposite extreme of Jerome’s, someone who reacts without thinking and tries to gather knowledge amidst the wreckage he leaves in his wake. It’s his brashness, like someone running toward the fire, that kept my attention. What makes him even more convincing, in my view, is how Rob is intelligent and eloquent about his misfortunes and addictions, such that he can make himself feel better by painting himself in a better light. He is too smart for his own good, and it is a reward to watch as Jerome, Tori and Monique reflect his bs back at him, and he deflects it back at them, until eventually someone busts a gasket and a breakthrough ensues. This happened over and over with the cast, making me forget that I was watching a cinematic staged reading as opposed to a full-fledged production.

Banafsheh Taherian, as Monique, has to me the standout moment of the play when she recalls her son’s car accident, which leads her to find relief in wine. The shame and infinite love in her voice as she relives the experience take us there, making it easy to imagine the scene in vivid detail, which amplifies her story’s impact by having us fill it in as our minds prefer. Monique devastated me with her utter heartbreak and shook me into an acute awareness of all the extra affection I could be showing the people in my life.

Maloney, as Tori, fills the role of group shit-talker with aplomb. Her self-assurance is hard-won, after considerable strife, and will knock you down to size if you’re inconsiderate, but it’s never dismissive; rather, it comes from the knowledge that overcoming trauma often requires directions you may not even know you need.

Bringing it all together, Director Sarah Marchand, Playwright Breanna Maloney and Dramaturg Merlin Simard have assembled for us an intimate, messily authentic look at the great joy and tragedy of having people who mean more to you than anything.

The show has been extended until July 3, 2021. Tickets are available here.

November 10, 2019

Review: Swim Team (Nowadays Theatre with Alma Matters Pruductions)

Swim Team Poster

Swim Team introduces us to an Iranian all-women swim team as they train in a town with no pool. The play—produced by Nowadays Theatre in collaboration with Alma Matters Productions—is an act of worship to the imagination and the barriers it can remove. It’s also a stirring metaphor about gender inequality for presenting a world where women’s rights can fall into the fantastical territory of make-believe.

The cast are on a whole other level of play here. Think about the imaginative demands placed on their characters. They swim by acting out the motions on a dusty patch of land, using towels and wringing out wet hair to keep up the suspension of disbelief. It’s enough to make you feel young again, when limitations on what might exist weren’t really an obstacle. 

But at the same time, having to occupy a space of make-believe just to participate in a sport is a powerful metaphor, one that seeks justice for oppressed women by imbuing their struggle with absurdity. As in, it’s absurd for the team to have to disavow their humanity and fictionalize their own existence to jump into some water. As in, it’s absurd that women need to strive to make something from nothing in a country where they’re already second-class citizens. The team doesn’t mention state-enforced ideology much at all, which made it harder for me to ignore its shadow in the background.

Roya (Banafsheh Taherian), the swim coach, carries the memory of students drowning on her watch with palpable anxiety. It makes for good fuel to drive her to whip her current team into shape but feels too high-octane for the task. The excess energy she could be using to forgive herself for losing the students is piled onto her new ones, generating an imbalance where something has to give, and I was on board to find out what did.

Roya and her three-person team occupy a hierarchy of strength, such that she seems tougher than Nary (Tina Bararian), who seems tougher than Katy (Mahsa Ershadifar), who seems tougher than Lili (Aylin Oyan Salahshoor). This is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it lends a sense of order to the story, one that speaks to the regimented country they live in, the geometry of the imaginary pool they swim in, and just makes things that much tighter symbolically. It’s also a strategy that offers many chances for disruption, such that characters often change rankings. Sharing how would just spoil the story.

The details surrounding the team’s imaginary swims had me laughing the hardest. Stuff like drying off a diving board, taking deep breaths after each stroke, or making sound effects with a tub of water to mimic a toe in the pool. It’s such a roundabout way to participate in the sport, it’s as if I was watching a living Rube Goldberg Machine. I was also laughing because I couldn’t recall the last time I tried anything without filtering it through some sense of what could and could not be.

Playwright Jaber Ramezani plants little nuggets throughout to further comment on fantasy’s relationship with reality, and on his characters’ ability to imagine the lives they want into existence. For one, I became familiar with characters’ motivations as they interacted during practices, but they actually share very little about their personal histories. This combo adds up to intimacy that is somehow both authentic and fabricated. I was left thinking that we are the stories we tell ourselves, as well as solely responsible for how good we get at believing in them.

There is also Lili’s unacknowledged arm pain, which might seem disjointed but fits into the same line of thinking. Her pain is not worthy of belief as far as her coach and teammates are concerned; therefore it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Lili goes along with this erasure, replacing her pain with the truth that best serves her, that there is water in the pool. This malleability of self has a revolutionary kick to it. Lili and her team assert their autonomy and go about their business by playing God, picking and choosing the sensations and situations that deserve a life of their own. 

What ties it all together for me is how even the difficulties of friendship contribute to the team’s air of refuge. In spite of how annoyed Lili gets by Nary’s teasing, she misses her when she’s not around. And even though Lili calls her names, Nary returns to her side. Regardless of the dispute, they stick together, tight as confidants, extending each other the benefit of not having to self-censor to explore who they are. By the end, this bond borders on the sacred.

Swim Team is a bountiful offering of child-like wonder that speaks to the realities of Iranian women without overt politicization. I was combing through the layers of its deceptively simple story long after the curtain fell.

  • Swim Team runs at The Theatre Centre (1115 Queen St. West) from November 8-17.
  • Tickets are available online, in person, or through the box office at 416-538-0988.

Poster provided by the company.

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November 8, 2019

Review: But That’s Another Story (Briane Nasimok and Christel Bartelse)

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After only three performances, a new storytelling series is packing them in at the Free Times Cafe. It’s called But That’s Another Story and it gives space to a wide cross-section of genres, including fables, comic essays, and more contemporary works. Its producer-hosts, Briane Nasimok and Christel Bartelse, are two well-established voices in the Canadian performing arts. Nasimok is a Canadian Comedy Award winner who appeared in classic 1980s films like Gas and The Funny Farm. Bartelse is a Canadian Comedy Award nominee known for her internationally-acclaimed one-woman shows.

Read my full review on Mooney on Theatre.

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October 30, 2019

Review: Mînowin (DanceWorks)

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Dancers of Damelahamid’s new work, Mînowin, is a mesmerizing session of song and dance about reconnecting with ancestral Indigenous knowledge, easing the struggles of Indigenous people, and exploring how progress is a continuous process of imbalance and renewal. Staged in the cozy Harbourfront Centre Theatre, this DanceWorks production flirts with epic themes in the most intimate of spaces.

Mînowin translates to ‘the act of clarifying direction’, which is right in line with the company’s reason for being. According to Margaret Grenier, Executive and Artistic Director for the Dancers of Damelahamid, “I treasure dance as the most significant inheritance I have from my ancestors. For myself, dance, song, and story have provided a protective environment to address the limitations placed on our Indigenous peoples and to create a healing space”. In other words, the company’s articulated direction, the best way to go about its life, is to continue their peoples’ long lineage of reflecting experience and tradition through art.

Dancers of Damelahamid have been restoring traditional Indigenous songs and dances for over 50 years. That history continues here with a series of dances based on teachings from the Gitxsan people, a matrilineal society from the Northwest coast of British Columbia, from which the company also hails. Gitxsan translates to ‘people of the river of mist’.

Mînowin’s most resonant example of connecting to the past, in my estimation, is the dance that centres on orcas, a Gitxsan symbol going back thousands of years. Five of the seven dancers swim through air onto a dark stage. Four of them wear fins, while the fifth holds an orca puppet, each rigged with bright lights the blue of pristine coastal water. Their calming glow, coupled with the repetitive nature of the choreography—which builds on a single rhythm and a small number of steps—left room for nothing else in my attention. The wonder of it was a bedtime story brought to life.

Margaret Grenier’s choreography achieves this entrancing effect pretty well throughout. It’s what speaks most of healing to me, how each dancer seemed so effortlessly lost in music and movement to the point of forgetting hardship, if only for a while. The more I watched, the more I felt some of that medicine was transferred to me.

The themes of imbalance and renewal come about in dances built around related images, each distinctive in their own way. In one, a dancer drops dead and somehow returns to life, the tension of it thick enough to slice. In another more symbolic example, dancers lie on the floor and balance on their stomachs like compasses in need of calibration.

Praise must go to set and visual designer, Andrew Grenier, projection and lighting designer, Andy Moro, head of interactive new media, Sammy Chien, and dancer and head of regalia, Rebecca Baker-Grenier. They have created a living, breathing world for Mînowin to exist in. I was thoroughly swept away by all the multimedia magic, including a giant multi-coloured lightning bolt, and huge white wolves and a stampede of horses running across the background. The same goes for the costumes and their lively patterns and lush primary colours. The ever-present rustling of tassels on the garments was soothing like waves reaching shore.

My guest, Erika, pointed out the challenge of maintaining the authenticity of the songs and dances against the risk of their repetitive nature growing tedious for modern audiences. We agreed that Dancers of Damelahamid faced the challenge head on. They employ technology and solid production to lend a digitally dazzling perspective to their traditional artistry.

At its root, Mînowin is an act of survival, a bid to preserve Indigenous culture by reinterpreting it for the present moment. I, for one, won’t be forgetting it any time soon.

Details:

Photo of Mînowin provided by the company.

Sourced from Mooney on Theatre.

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October 25, 2019

Review: The Apologist (Cleen Theatre)

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Colleen Osborn’s The Apologist , a Cleen Theatre production, is a two-hander comedy/thriller that follows a unique premise: what if it was socially acceptable to pay someone to apologize for you? What would the consequences of existing in such a world be? Set in the Imperial Pub’s back room, we are treated to a considered meditation on these ideas that manages to be both hilarious and legitimately tense. 

Evan Walsh plays Cliff Manners, a.k.a. The Apologist, a professional apologizer who will express sympathy on behalf of anyone unwilling to do it themselves. The character Walsh has given form to is commendable for his warped sense of vulnerability. Since Manners is well-practiced and able to perform being sorry so well, the kick in the gut that comes from fessing up to a mistake no longer holds sway with him. Because he cannot have shame in his line of work, having to show regret for everything from white lies, to infidelity, to crimes against humanity, there’s no morality to reign in his behaviour. He comes off like a livewire, charming on the surface, but cocksure on the edge of causing irreparable harm under the impression of just doing his job. We meet him delivering an apology to a woman from the people who recently ran her dog over.

Carmen Kruk plays that woman’s roommate, Marsha, whose quirky, fragile exterior evolves very slowly into the fanaticism of Stephen King’s Misery. What Kruk does so well is emote, allowing facial expressions to do the heavy lifting, lending a sense of care and craft to her performance. What those expressions capture feels like a split personality, where psychosis intermittently overcomes Marsha’s kind and generous mind like a TV finding and losing reception. Kruk’s enunciation work is another point in favour of craft. There’s virtuoso flair to how she derives a laugh or a chill from stretching a word out or emphasizing the wrong syllable.

The Apologist is funnier than work this creepy tends to be, and it’s creepier than work this funny tends to be. Osborn’s writing chops offer her actors all the necessary tools to make this happen, including puns, made up words, snappy turns of phrase, and lots of emotional reversals that served to pull the rug from under my expectations at every turn. She also backs up the play’s name by getting philosophical about the nature of apologies. The characters spend a lot of time discussing what merits an apology, the importance of who delivers it, and what authenticity means in a world where mistaken tones in text messages can have life-changing consequences. Their back-and-forths are fruitful in that they leave arguments in the air to stew unresolved, pointing to the play’s unspoken but ever-present truth: an apology can only be validated by the person who receives it.

Director Chelsea Dab Hilke works wonders with such a small space. The set is built around two chairs and a chest in the center that delineate a round race track of sorts, one the actors take full advantage of to enhance a line. Sometimes it’s to create distance from and a barrier between each other to sharpen a show of emotion. At others, there’s a threat of violence and the desperate need to flee. Their dynamism is evidence of some first-class blocking work. The chairs’ proximity carries airs of a therapy session, of a level of intimacy we aren’t usually privy to beyond our own. I was unsettled by this, the possibility of some grand secret always seemingly about to drop. I also found the symbol of circularity a complementary choice, signalling that characters like these are destined to keep running into each other—Manners, who doesn’t differentiate between a real apology and an impeccably performed one, and Marsha, who is perhaps unstable enough to no longer be able to tell the difference.

Where the play gets a little careless is its run time. The second half drags on because the twists and revelations happen too early, such that the plot doesn’t have much juice left to propel the story to the end. Kruk and Walsh fill in the gap with plenty of passion though. I was too caught up in their characters’ concerns to notice. When it comes down to it, The Apologist is an entertaining, substantive endeavor that blends genres into art greater than the sum of its parts. 

  • Runs at the Imperial Pub (54 Dundas East) on Saturday, October 26, at 4pm and 8pm. Tickets here.

Poster of Evan Walsh provided by the company.

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October 7, 2019

Review: Broken Tailbone (Nightswimming Theatre/Factory Theatre)

New review in Mooney on Theatre. Had a lot of fun dancing my way through this one. On til Oct 13. Read it here.

Broken Tailbone_ Photo Credit Erin Brubacher 2 (1)

Photo by Erin Brubacher.

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September 30, 2019

Review: Non Gratas (Alma Matters Productions)

My latest review for Mooney on Theatre.

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Non Gratas, A Latinx Comedy Show With a Lot of Melodrama, is an improv comedy show that does its name proud. Produced by Alma Matters, and staged at Bad Dog Theatre Company, it’s loosely built around two young Latin American women who become friends after immigrating to Canada. As they struggle to connect with a new culture, they highlight the gap between two stereotypes—Canadian humility and Latinx passion—with jokes that kill but also let me into their devastating longing for home.

Marta (Mariela Pabón Navedo) is a newcomer from Puerto Rico, hungry for love and friendship, who’s been having a rough time connecting with everyone she meets. That is, until she runs into Maria (Patricia Tab), an Argentinian experienced with the culture shock of new arrival. Maria not only finds a friend and roommate in Marta, but also someone to save from the pains of finding your footing as a foreigner.

Each woman sees herself reflected in the other, the first time they recognize themselves in another person since arriving in Canada. Here, they feel like personae non gratae, both unwelcome and misunderstood. They explore this notion not so much through a plot, but by developing their relationship through different improv scenarios.

One recurring segment is a simple back and forth, where Marta and Maria trade off lines built on a central theme. It’s kind of like stand-up comedy with the added jolt of improv. The first of these segments explains how showing emotion is a daily part of Latinx life. The duo conveys this through sweet, poetic exaggerations that perfectly encapsulate the issue. Selected gems include how, in Puerto Rico, it’s normal to get your heart broken on a daily basis, and how, on any given morning, Argentinians may fall in love with someone they saw at a bus stop.

On another back and forth, contrast is exploited to maximum hilarity. Marta has a breakdown and deciphers a lover’s text out loud in front of co-workers during a business presentation. Juxtapose her hysterics with Maria, who quietly poses grand philosophical questions about feeling like parts of her are missing when friends and lovers move on. My favourite is the surreal, “Where do trees go when they want to leave?”

At one point, it turns out the duo have been dating the same Kyle. This leads to them riffing on being Canadian and our well-known typecasting as somewhat dull, polite, and self-effacing apologists. They find nuance in this overplayed subject by concentrating it in Kyle’s love for fishing, and their exasperation at how anyone could find something so boring so interesting. Maria sums up the Canadian-Latinx divide when she asks, rather memorably, “Why it is so hard for men to understand that, sometimes, I just need to argue with someone?”

Non Gratas also includes a number of karaoke performances. It’s another avenue for Tab and Pabón Navedo to depict Latinx effusiveness, this time as a way to exorcise your frustrations by letting them out on stage. The performances are moments of abandon and disinhibition. Open invitations to join in a glorious cacophony of bad singing and dance my troubles away.

Marta’s unrushed, deadpan delivery and Maria’s fretful, anxious musings play off one another from moment one. The dynamic adds a backbone of sharpness to material. It goes a long way to making up for the occasional weak line, or moment of dead silence, which comes with the improv territory if you ask me.

Monica Garrido, member of Sketch Comedy Extravaganza Eleganza, warmed us up with stand-up that showcased her confident, goofy style. She told stories of growing up religious in Mexico as a closeted lesbian and how that compares to a more diverse but no less skewed Canadian existence. One where, she notes, Mexican people are considered brown, whereas in Mexico, they’re just Mexican. Her writing is concise, her timing surgical, and her dance moves during the karaoke segments unrivaled in terms of funkiness.

My guest, Jonah, thought Non Gratas did justice to the strength it takes anyone to bridge two cultures. Though the show brims with laughs, they are often a coping response to how hard it is to make a life far from home. The characters open the tap to that feeling and never turn it off. “I couldn’t help but wish them well,” he said. His one note, given the show’s 45-minute run-time, was that some scenarios would benefit from greater length.

Tab and Pabón Navedo—who perform as a duo under the name Non Gratas—keep the electricity of uncertainty in the air. The show truly feels like it’s being created as they go, minus all the stops and starts you’d expect if that were actually the case. A lot of this has to do with their fearlessness in the face of “yes, and”. But it’s also tied to how the show’s big-picture subject, our need for community, boils down to winging it, introducing yourself to a stranger, and seeing what happens.

Details:

Photo of Mariela Pabón Navedo and Patricia Tab provided by Alma Matters Productions.

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