[I started writing this post over a month ago. Then the whirlwind of a production that is Don Giovanni took all my time. Now it is very late, but I am still determined to write about the five plays I saw at SummerWorks.]
The Safe Word was presented at The Theatre Centre, and as such was the only play I saw that wasn't at Theatre Passe Muraille. It was written by Nicolas Billon, and directed by Lee Wilson. It's a play about relationships, sex, and growing up.
In The Safe Word, a man (Daniel Briere) moves into a communal house where no one reveals their real names, and instead are granted nicknames from the other housemates. The man is named Smitten after he first meets his female roommate, Mildred (Samantha Espie), while she is in a towel and she claims he is a smitten kitten. Their chemistry is palpable, and their dialogue is sharp and cutting. Mildred is a grad student studying Byron, she is cynical, smart, and seemingly uninterested in Smitten. The other roommate is an older gay man from Eastern Europe, nicknamed Boris (Randy Read), who plays a lot of chess. These three roommates spend time together, exchanging barbs and revealing bits of themselves to each other.
Each character has a monologue about one of their earlier sexual experiences. Mildred mourns couches. In high school, people would start out making out on couches, but now that she's older, that step gets skipped completely, and people go straight to the bedroom. And in the bedroom, there are expectations. Boris talks about being a gay teenager in Eastern Europe however many decades ago. Somehow, he attracted the attention of the most popular girl in school, but was obviously not interested. He couldn't figure out how to turn her down without revealing his secret, so he asked her what she hated most, and when she answered chess, he decided to become immersed in chess.
Later Mildred discovers Smitten editing his online dating profile and offers to help Smitten out with his profile. Smitten goes on a few dates with a very hot woman nicknamed Catnip (Ieva Lucs). On the first date they go to a club, where the music is so loud, there's no chance for a conversation, all they can do is dance. When Smitten returns home drunk and flying high after his date, Mildred is jealous, then repulsed when Smitten makes a move on her. On Smitten's second date with Catnip, they sit in a cafe, and Catnip texts and ignores Smitten for a few minutes before he decides to leave. No sooner is he out the door, than Catnip texts him "How badly do you wanna fuck me?" and he's right back in the cafe again. Later they meet up in a hotel room, where Catnip admits that she is married, and shows Smitten her rape kit. She has a powerful monologue where she lays down the rules, and tells Smitten he can take it or leave it. Smitten is crushed, he was interested in this woman, and a relationship. One of Catnip's rules is "no kissing" and Smitten's response after hearing all the rules is that kissing is a deal breaker for him. Catnip responds, "If you want me to kiss you, you'll have to order me to." Catnip also tells him if she utters the safe word, he is to stop immediately. The safe word is his real name. The scene ends there, and later we see Smitten arrive back at his house, hollow. Mildred is awake, and he sits next to her on the couch. She begins the normal conversation of insults, but Smitten stops her and tells her that his name is Matthew, and asks her to just call him by his real name. When she does, he tells her, "My name feels safe in your mouth."
It was a good production, it made good use of the space, and the sound and lighting designs were effective. I thought the actors handled their roles well. It was funny, cute, and sad, all at the same time.
Exit, Pursued by a Bear is the title of a play presented in Theatre Passe Muraille's Mainspace, and one of the most famous stage directions of all time. This play featured a live band onstage (Ronley Teper's Lipliners), and several puppets.
In Exit, a young street performer woman (Adriana Disman) meets a homeless man (David Schaap) while she is pretending to be a statue. He tells her about his idea of forming a union for homeless people. She doesn't understand, and neither do I, why a union might be necessary for homeless people. She begins to visit him often, and they forge a relationship. He reminds her of her father, who was a stage director, and died while planning a production of A Winter's Tale. I'm unclear as to why their relationship exists, and why the homeless man reminds her of her father, other than the fact that her father was a member of Equity. It's hard to get behind a play, when you can't get behind the main relationship. The young woman is stalked by a bear in her dreams, and wants to escape it. Yet the bear is also intrinsically linked to her father, who once told her that he preferred to think of himself as a Papa Bear, rather than a descendant of apes. To escape the bear, she attempts to cage it, and to kill it, but she only truly overcomes the bear when she stops, puts on a red tutu, and dances with it. It was a beautiful moment, but that doesn't mean I understood it.
The bear puppet was controlled by two people (Anders Yates & Leah Fay Goldstein), and it was magnificent. It was undoubtedly the best part of the production. There were also several salmon puppets, and the members of the band wore salmon headbands for a sequence. The shadow puppets had potential, but were poorly executed.
Strange Mary Strange was in Theatre Passe Muraille's Backspace, which was a great space for such an intimate performance. Strange Mary Strange was incredibly well written by Evan Tsitsias, and wonderfully acted by Sarah McVie, Emma Mackenzie Hillier, and Catherine Rainville.
All three actors were portraying Mary Strange at different parts of her life. Catherine Rainville was Sexually Curious Young Mary, Emma Mackenzie Hillier was Sexually Promiscuous College Mary, and Sarah McVie was Trying Hard to be Sexually Normal Present Mary, being haunted by her past selves.
I enjoyed this play a lot, and thought it was exceptional. It was also incredibly uncomfortable and tense. When she was very young, Mary Strange went on a trip to Rome with her parents, where she saw a beautiful, masculine statue that flicked her sexuality on like a switch. After that she was always trying to find ways to scratch her itch. Her mother reprimanded her, and told her that polite girls don't scratch there. When she was in college, Mary Strange turned to prostitution as a way to scratch her itch. Part of this was problematic to me, as Mary tells the story of how she got into prostitution. She was gang raped by five men while she was passed out, who took a picture of the event, and left her the picture and a hundred dollars. Instead of pressing charges, Mary sends a note to one of the men that says, "Who's next?" Part of me realizes that Mary has every right to be in control of her own sexuality, but rape is never okay. In the present, Mary is engaged to Gary. Normal, trustworthy Gary. She is trying very hard to be normal, but she is obviously a hypersexual woman, haunted by her odd, hypersexual past. In the climactic moment, young Mary reveals the most disturbing part of Mary Strange's past, where she essentially forced her father into molesting her. The three Marys argue amongst themselves: Young Mary didn't know it was wrong, but her father did. I think blame is useless in this situation. Shortly after this disturbing event, her father leaves Mary and her mother. Short of taking Mary to a child psychologist and being honest about the situation, I think that leaving is the best thing the father could've done.
So, yes. It was an incredibly uncomfortable play, and the audience was tense and silent as it trickled out of the theatre. It left us speechless.
The other play I saw in Theatre Passe Muraille's Backspace was Still Life, by lemonTree creations. It was a collective creation piece, and the dialogue was unscripted. On the one hand, this gave the dialogue a natural feeling, but it was also awkward. The monologues were well written, but they were frequently upstaged. In one situation, a monologue was being given while two men stripped to their underwear in the background, and in another, a couple was reuniting and reconciling in the background. The lighting design by Michelle Ramsay was probably the best part of the play.
Still Life is about a gay bashing that took place two or three years ago in Toronto. I remember when this happened. I was working at Buddies in Bad Times at the time, and falling in love with that theatre and this city. I was shocked that gay bashings could still occur in this city, and that the perpetrators have never been caught or brought to justice. I knew Still Life was about that event. I wanted very much to like the play, I wanted it to be good. I knew it had a good message, and I tried to give it a chance. Even while I was watching it, I was telling myself, "It might get better, maybe by the end, the whole thing will have come together." Unfortunately, that was not the case. It was rough, and overly preachy. It was constantly upstaging itself. The characters were not particularly interesting. "It was about a gay bashing" is the most elaborate synopsis I can come up with for Still Life.
Little One was by far the best play I saw at SummerWorks. It was staged at Theatre Passe Muraille's Mainspace. It was written by Hannah Moscovitch, an up and coming Canadian playwright, and directed by Natasha Mytnowych. Kimberly Purtell's lighting design was eerie and evocative. Michael Gianfrancesco's set and costume designs were simple and perfectly suited to the story.
Little One is about two adopted children, Aaron and Claire. Aaron (Joe Cobden) tells us the story of when his adoptive parents adopted a second child, Claire (Michelle Monteith). Claire is a disturbed and dangerous child, with a dark past. She was found abandoned, and the adoption agency named her Claire, when she was unable to reveal her name to them. Aaron's parents put a lot of pressure on him to be a good older brother to Claire. He has to be careful to not say certain things, and not take offense to things that Claire says. When Aaron's goldfish goes missing, Claire claims she flushed him because he was dead. Aaron is unconvinced, and believes Claire flushed him alive. Claire becomes obsessed with the neighbours across the street, the man and his mail order bride from Asia who arrives with a Hello Kitty suitcase. When the bride, named Kitty, murders her husband, and is found by the police sitting outside the bedroom with the dead man inside, muttering "I love you" repeatedly, Claire's interest only increases. One day, Claire walks towards Aaron holding a knife, Aaron asks her what she's doing with it, and if she'd give it to him please. Claire stabs Aaron, and, as he does every time Claire does something that makes him uncomfortable, he calls out, "MOM! It's okay Claire... MOM!" Aaron is rushed to the hospital, and Claire's psychiatric appointments are increased. As "a reward for handling being stabbed so well," as Aaron puts it, his parents give him a cat, which he names Sushi after his dead goldfish, but mostly he calls her Little One. Aaron is very protective of Little One around Claire, but eventually Little One goes missing. Aaron is very suspicious of Claire, who claims to have nothing to do with it. Eventually she tells him that Little One is under the across the streets neighbours' porch. Little One was hit by a car, and Claire tried to treat her by feeding her whisky. Little One died of alcohol poisoning. Claire constantly repeats, "It was just a cat." But Little One was not "just a cat" to Aaron, and he is unable to forgive Claire. He begins asking Claire what her real name is, and she refuses to answer. Throughout all of this, their parents are willing to forgive Claire for everything. As a bonding exercise, they decide that the family should go camping one weekend. Aaron and Claire are expected to share a tent, which Aaron diametrically opposes. In the tent, Claire tries to take off Aaron's pants. He freaks out, and Aaron our narrator, steps out of the scene and tells us he went to his parents and they realized that in all their attempts to protect Claire, they didn't realize they might need to protect Aaron from Claire. After that, Claire gets sent to a mental institution. But then we go back into the tent, and see how the rest of the scene played out. Claire tried to take off Aaron's pants, and when he freaked out, she told him she was just joking around. Then she told him her name was Kitty. He told her he wasn't mad, and everything would be okay. Then he went to his parents and as good as told them that Claire had molested him.
I found this play heart wrenching and the characters sympathetic. Aaron did what he had to do to survive, but Claire was just a deranged child who didn't understand her own actions.
The play made great use of the space, with a young girl (Kaylie Lau) playing a small piano in the downstage right corner of the stage. Aaron was confined to the stage, but Claire spent time on the catwalks around the audience, and walked directly into the audience at the end. The writing was phenomenal. It was extremely well cast and performed. I would see this play again and again. I'm sure there would be new things to discover each time.