Three ways to tell a story

Reviewed at the Fringe: A Chinese/Canadian co-production, a one-man show and a depressing solo narrative

CULTURE CLASH: Crossroads

Crossroads, the fruit of a collaboration between Concordia University and China’s National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, is a wonderful first glimpse at the possibilities of these kinds of partnerships. The story’s framework has two bumbling guards transporting a disgraced General, who stop at an inn run by two particularly nosy owners. A simple story, but what a way to tell it. Featuring bold costumes and vividly painted faces, the brief hour of comedy and mistaken identity was packed with swordplay, martial arts, double takes and exaggerated death scenes.

Director and actor Shijia Jiang moved the story forward in a careful ballet of stylized action and broad comedy. Her role as the impish wife of the innkeeper, along with Nicholas Santillo as her hus­band and Robert Montcalm as a macho hero were standouts in a fun show worthy of fuller development at the professional level. The scant opening night crowd clapped like twice their number, and it’d be a blast to see it again with the energy of a full house behind it (MAI, 3680 Jeanne-Mance).

As you must do to make great work, comedian Dan Bingham risked a lot in his autobiographical show Adopt This! And it’s lovely to be able to say it paid off huge. Bingham’s “meta-stand-up” looks at the man behind the microphone and the one-liner, taking us into the funnyman’s less-than-funny childhood spent with adoptive parents, and his eventual meet-up with his birth mom and family.

Growing up as an adopted kid, says Bingham, made him feel like a different species, with anyone a potential relative: “Dear God, please don’t let this toothless prostitute be my mother!” It’s funny, as you’d expect, but between laughs there’s a lot of vulnerability. More than that, it’s a polished, well-acted story (Portuguese Association, 4170 St-Urbain).

Transplanted Texan Veronica Russell discovered a memoir of dirt-poor life in rural Texas at the turn of the last century, My First Thirty Years, and has crafted it into a solo narrative of considerable starkness called A Different Woman: A True Story of a Texas Childhood. Edna Gertrude Beasley’s story (Dickens couldn’t have chosen a more character-descriptive moniker) is as joyful and life-affirming as her name suggests, though “tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied.”

You can hardly blame her misanthropy: the 90-minute, intermission-less one-act takes us from her earliest memory—a brother holding her down and trying to rape her when she was four—up to her graduation from university and beyond, as her miserable life is rendered in excruciating detail.

With a sweet sneer rarely leaving her mug, we hear Beasley talk about domestic abuse, bestiality and incest in a family of 13 children. In her later life as schoolteacher to unruly farm kids—beat­ing them and even toting a gun to class to manage the brats—Beasley’s unsparing in her contempt for the ignorant poor. As we see her, the admitted “self-absorbed intellectual” has achieved consid­erable distance from her humble beginnings, and her story has the makings of a gritty and fascinating drama. But Russell’s reading, with mannerisms that mean to signify a serious performance (silent guffaws before a story to cue us she’s about to share in a deliciously snarky moment), is a show of mirthless and largely unshared laughter. Worse, I didn’t believe her (Espace Berri, 4001 Berri). ■

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