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Fringe calling >>Technology figures prominently in fest plays
by AMY BARRATT The weather has been great so far and the party is in full swing around the Main. On the stages, there's no small amount of angst in this last Fringe before the millennium. Young playwrights are concerned about people relating more to machines than to each other, and about how we define people by the jobs they do. The following are mini-reviews of the Fringe shows I had been able to catch by deadline.
* From the creator of Tintin Untold and Eden's Moon, I wouldn't have been surprised to see a play called Napoleon in Space. But William R. Young's Josephine * Bonaparte is a straight period drama--with some laughs. It follows the relationship between the Corsican and the love of his life from their first meeting to her death. Young himself plays Napoleon, with an appropriately wild look in his eye and a cruel streak lurking just below the surface. Karen Suzuki, also the director, is an enchanting Josephine. The play is written in Masterpiece Theatre English--the characters say "shall" a lot--and features excerpts from the lovers' letters. Young needs to lose anachronistic expressions such as "cute," "in sync" and "okay" and a terrible joke about a frog. But these are minor details. This play deserves to be seen. * Steven Schnoor's Ahead of Myself is Jack Kerouac meets Spalding Gray. Using nothing but maps on an easel and some canned music, the writer-performer from Winnipeg spins a tale of bumming around the continent, always anxious to move on to the next experience. The experiences aren't all that unusual, but Schnoor is a riveting storyteller. Unfortunately, but true to the spirit of his piece, by the time you read this, Schnoor will already have moved on. Montreal was the first stop for him on a Fringe roadtrip that's taken him to Ottawa this weekend and on to points west.
* That show running overtime caused me to arrive late for Leaf in the Mailbox, thus missing, I think, a couple of important plot points. From what I did see, it seemed to have a snappy script with believable dialogue. Written by recent Dawson grad Elan Zafir, it's the story of an earnest young man named Ernest who has a cute, bitchy girlfriend and a crush on the sweet, frumpy girl who plays piano. Even if Zafir wasn't already gorgeous, he'd have women falling at his feet for penning that storyline.
* What a perfect segue into the next show I saw, Sarah Carlsen's love@last.com. This one has some really cool bits in it, including a detailed description of the character's sexual fantasy based on the "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" scene from The Sound of Music. Ultimately, the cool bits don't come together into a coherent whole (even by Fringe standards) and the staging, using multiple playing areas in and around the audience, only accentuates that disjointedness. * As difficult as it is to explain what love@last is about, that's how simple is the idea behind Courtesy Call. This little gem out of Seattle is about the telemarketer from hell. Playwright Andrew Maclean (who also directed) plays the disembodied voice with gusto. Ted Dowling as the ultimate harassed customer starts off at about 90 per cent, leaving himself little room to build. A couple of technical glitches on Saturday (the show has a trillion sound cues) didn't keep the small audience from loudly enjoying the show. * At deadline, I had seen SOS: Meat 'N Make Mary, Part I, and was eagerly anticipating Part II. Thanks to Emma Roberts' quirky, surprising dialogue, the hour flew by all too quickly. The cast is marvelous, especially Eric Goulem as the unemployed, about-to-crack Roland, and Deena Aziz, as the job interviewer who has a PhD she isn't using and claims to "sincerely appreciate (his) desperate eloquence." The plight of the 29 year old who can't get a job because he has no real experience, and can't start his life until he gets a job, struck a loud chord with the audience. Roberts, with the collaboration of director Peter Hinton, is on to something big here. Close to a hundred people attending the first performance suggests that SOS: Meat 'N Make Mary (both parts) could be a shoe-in for the Centaur-sponsored Favourite Play award. * For that real "hey kids, lets put on a show" Fringe feel, Wreck Election is the ticket. Pay Per Verse (Dayna McLeod, Skidmore and Alexis O'Hara) perform TV spoofs and wear silly wigs. Location in the "cabaret" venue means that liquor is available, and this is the kind of show that gets better in direct relation to the number of drinks you've had.
Remaining performances (June 2427): Josephine Loves Bonaparte: Venue 4; Fri, 4pm; Sat, 6pm.
Leaf in the Mailbox: Venue 2; love@last.com: Venue 4; Thurs, 12:15am; Sat, 9:45pm.
Courtesy Call: Venue 4; Thurs, 4:15pm;
SOS: Meat 'N Make Mary: Venue 1; Part 1: Wreck Election: Venue 4; Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 11:45pm |
* Dried Flowers is another show that has already moved on. This drama might have run the 45 minutes promised in the programme if the actress, Roseann Wilshere, had picked up the pace. Her Valium-induced performance last Saturday dragged the material out to an hour and destroyed it in the process. She relies on the cheap trick of different accents to differentiate the three characters, and her accents (Maritimer, French Canadian) aren't even good. The fine script by Maryjane Cruise has a real chance at the Best Text award sponsored by Chapters.
The cast--made up of Zafir and three other current or ex Dome theatre students--is excellent. In fact, with Lana Starchuck's Call Me, Meredith Darling's Garden of Edie and Leaf on the Fringe bill, 1999 is proving to be the year of the Domie. Catherine Lemieux's character in Leaf could scarcely be more different than the one she played in Call Me during its run at infinitheatre (she has been replaced in that other production for its Fringe run). The same goes for Andrew Farrar, who has gone from too-good-to-be-true to a loner loser who needs to get "a girlfriend whose last name isn't 'dot com.'"