Stage lights up

>> Hedda Gabler meets the 20th century,
Houdini defies death, Zarathustra
speaks and other theatrics

MISINTERPRETED: Cutler’s Teaching As You Like It

by AMY BARRATT

Patricia Summersett is one of the hottest young actors on the Montreal scene, but can she play Hedda? Jeremy Hechtman obviously believes she can: the MainLine Theatre’s artistic director, in a departure for the company that is known more for campy, spoofy fare, has cast her as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, opening Jan. 29. Hechtman’s production will use Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s adaptation, first performed at the Shaw festival in 1991 and later reworked for Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. The MainLine production moves the action from the turn of the last century to the 1950s.

If you’re wondering where an actress goes for a challenge after she’s done Hedda, Summersett’s next role will be in Sam Shepard’s one-act musical (or operetta, if you prefer), The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife. This will be part of an evening of one-acts presented by SideMart Theatrical Grocery at the Théâtre Ste-Catherine starting Feb. 28. The other two-thirds of the evening will consist of a solo show written and performed by Graham Cuthbertson, and another by Patrick Costello. Andrew Shaver will either direct or co-star with Summersett in the Shepard play (stay tuned).

Next up on the main stage at the Segal is a new musical, Houdini, opening Feb. 10. Not to be confused with The Great Houdini, an original musical in Yiddish performed at the Segal in 2000, this new work is in English and features a brand new book, by Ben Gonshor, and music and lyrics by Elan Kunin. New York-based actor/singer-songwriter Kevin Kraft stars as the escape artist.

Speaking of music—or not so much—La Casta Flore is the French version of Glorious, a play about the musically challenged Florence Foster Jenkins who, thanks to sheer chutzpah and a family fortune, squawked her way to Carnegie Hall in the 1940s. La Compagnie Jean-Duceppe’s production, already playing and running to Feb. 9, stars the inimitable Pierrette Robitaille.

The Centaur’s winter tires get turning on Jan. 29, preview night for Half Life, an import from Toronto’s Necessary Angel Theatre Company. This is the same award-winning production of John Mighton’s play, directed by Daniel Brooks that played here at the 2005 Festival de Théâtre des Amériques. Set in a retirement home, the play is about memory as well as the loss of it. The story focuses on a romance between two residents, Clare (Carolyn Hetherington) and Patrick (Eric Peterson) and the reaction to it by their adult children.

Centaur follows that up with a new play by local playwright David Gow (Cherry Docs, The Friedman Family Fortune). Relative Good recalls the recent film Rendition, as well as the all too real ordeal of Canadian Maher Arar. A Canadian citizen of Middle Eastern extraction is detained by American authorities at New York’s JFK airport and discovers a post-9/11 world in which certain people are presumed guilty until proven innocent.

When Trevor Ferguson’s Zarathustra Said Some Things, No? premiered off-Broadway in 2006, it received raves for Montreal actors Brett Watson and Lina Roessler. The show finally comes home, with the same cast, when infinitheatre presents it at Théâtre La Chapelle starting March 15. Set in a Paris hotel, it’s about a couple damaged by addiction and abuse who form a suicide pact.

Another local writer, Mike Czuba, steps up to the plate as Tableau D’Hôte presents his new play The Elusive at Geordie Space, Feb. 14–24. A piece about “the mysteries and lies that surround love,” it stars Brad Carmichael, Kim Doucet, Nancy Boulanger and Adam Leblanc and is directed by Murray Napier, who is now retired from John Abbott College, but remains beloved by the many actors who passed through his theatre workshop there.

World premieres on the French side this season include Ce qui meurt en dernier, a new text by the renowned Normand Chaurette (Les reines, Le passage de l’Indiana). Fact and fiction are blurred in this Jack the Ripper tale set in 1988 London. Directed by Denis Marleau and starring Christiane Pasquier and Pier Paquette, it’s at Espace GO Jan. 15–Feb. 9.

The 11th annual Wildside festival continues to Jan. 19, and promises to be one of the strongest yet. In addition to Teaching As You Like It (see sidebar), audiences can catch two more Fringe reprises, Attila Clemann’s …and stockings for the ladies, and a revamped The Girl With No Hands, by Talya Rubin, directed by Jodi Essery. The Cyclops is a fantastical new script by Paul Van Dyck (Sahara Crossing), performed by the playwright along with Neil Napier, Alison Louder and Tamara Brown. From Victoria comes Jake’s Gift, a one-woman piece in which Julia Mackey portrays a WWII veteran who returns to Juno beach on the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

Warning: this play
may contain fiction

>> Keir Cutler’s Teaching As You Like It
returns to Wildside

Ever since 2000, when his first solo show, Teaching Shakespeare, joined the circuit, Keir Cutler has been “teaching” Fringe audiences about one thing or another. But this past summer, it was the teacher who learned an unhappy lesson: you can’t necessarily count on theatre audiences to distinguish fact from fiction. That’s when a letter of complaint to the Winnipeg Fringe—and cc’d to ChildFind Manitoba—suggested that Cutler’s latest creation was “a textbook for sexual predators.”

The Montrealer’s Teaching As You Like It had, by this time, played seven Fringe festivals, to universally positive reviews. Directed by perennial Fringe favourite TJ Dawe, it is a remarkable piece of work about a substitute teacher who at first seems like a harmless dork but slowly reveals himself to be a self-rationalizing paedophile. (It is highly recommended viewing at the Wildside Festival, which got underway earlier this week at the Centaur).

The show sold out its run in Winnipeg and was held over. A week later, Cutler got a copy of the letter. The writer, who said she had been attending Fringe plays for years, claimed—among other things—that Cutler’s show “promotes the idea that sexual predation of underage girls is acceptable,” and that the play is “insidious and potentially damaging.”

Stunned, angry, and not a little frightened, Cutler’s first response was to ask the Winnipeg Fringe to contact the letter writer and say that he was considering legal action. The Fringe received a second letter of complaint soon after from a second woman who got both Cutler’s name and the title of the play wrong. Cutler’s theory, which of course he cannot prove, is that this woman was urged to write by the first letter writer, who felt it would strengthen her case.

It is the copy of the original letter sent to ChildFind, a national organization that focuses on finding missing children and, according to its Web site also, “committed to promotion and advocating for the personal safety of children and youth,” that really worries the artist. He wonders if he is now in some database of potential, or actual, offenders.

“When you take it to that level,” says the actor, “it’s no longer opinion, it’s slander. I’ve so far decided not to take her to court, but she has put me in a defensive position. It’s not as if I can prove the play isn’t doing what she says it’s doing.”

Cutler has a couple of theories as to how someone could so tragically misinterpret his work. First of all, there’s the huge number of solo shows at any Fringe and many of them are personal accounts drawn directly from the performer/writer’s life. That has never been Cutler’s modus operandi, however. “I’ve played a sadistic priest, a slimy lawyer, an inept Shakespeare professor. I knew I was dealing with a controversial subject, but it never occurred to me that someone would think that was me on stage. I think reality TV has affected people’s ability to understand irony and theatre itself.”

Teaching As You Like It plays this Saturday at 7 p.m.,
Sunday at 3 p.m., Jan. 16 at 7 p.m., and Jan. 19 at
9 p.m. See centaurtheatre.com for full schedule.