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Wednesday July 10th, 2002
By JON KAPLAN
10 FRINGE FESTIVAL MOMENTS
The Fringe offers a lot of things to artists, including the chance to
workshop new material and see what works in front of an audience.
Just as importantly, the festival – given its lotteried
selection process – allows younger artists a chance to show
their wares to a public who might not otherwise get to see them.
A number of companies this year feature actors who are still in
theatre school. Sure, they get to perform in school productions,
usually in their later years at George Brown, York and Ryerson. But
the Fringe gives them a whole new audience, a group that reaches
beyond their teachers, family and classmates.
By coincidence, three of the shows I caught this past week feature
up-and-comers from Ryerson, and there's some good work in each.
Here's a rundown.
TROUBLED DREAMS
The device of a dream-inside-a-dream can feel trite and clichéd, but
Ryan Warrd gives it a few novel turns on the pillow in
Wiltonn Wakes Up For Work Still Caught Within A Dream. Warrd's
intentionally set himself the task of performing minimally, with no
more than a box and a series of sound effects as outside devices.
Everything else he creates himself in this one-man,
multiple-character show.
A little Kafka, a little mime, a lot of physical theatre and strong
characterizations combine into an engaging if intentionally
wandering, stream-of-consciousness-style production. If there's some
trouble with the show, it's that it goes on too long after making its
point; the audience wouldn't be shortchanged if it were 20 minutes
shorter.
Despite awakening time and again, Wiltonn can't escape a look-alike
demon, a marionette alter ego with spidery limbs who wants to invade
Wiltonn's body and destroy him. Why? We're never told clearly.
There's some background with a girlfriend who might be pregnant, a
father who left the family when Wiltonn was young, a possessive
mother and a few other plot points, but they're not as fascinating as
the immediacy of Warrd's onstage work.
In fact, given Warrd's highly physical and riveting presentation, the
narrative material sometimes becomes secondary.
He's cleverly dyed his hair so that it divides his head down the
middle, half blond and half dark brown. What better way to present a
schizophrenic figure, who when talking back and forth in profile to
"himself" becomes a visually different character but with some
disturbing physical similarities? Add two voices – one normal,
one raspy – and you have two clearly defined figures in one
actor.
Keep on eye on Warrd – he's got talent.
COOKIN' IT HOT
There's more Ryerson talent in Cast Iron, Lisa
Codrington's one-woman show about several generations of a
Bajan-Canadian family. It's part of a work-in-progress – as a
family tree in the program shows us, there are many more characters
in the tale than we meet in Cast Iron – but already Codrington
has a firm handle on the storytelling and characterizations that are
necessary to pull the huge story together.
She uses the frame of Libya Atwell, now an old woman living in a
Winnipeg nursing home, to present the narrative. Both
self-deprecating and demanding – she keeps reminding the
listener that she can't wait for her lunch to be delivered –
Libya is a striking figure. A younger relative travels from Ontario
to hear about the circumstances of his mother Gracie's death (she was
Libya's cousin), and Libya gives him more than he bargained for. It
takes a while to pick up the characters' patois, but the performer
and director, Elizabeth Helmers, clearly understand how to
differentiate the various people, giving each a unique voice and
physical presence.
The complex tale includes racially mixed marriages in the 19th
century, conniving over an inheritance, the family diabetic condition
and Libya's many uses of the titular cast-iron frying pan.
Codrington's wisely loaded the front end with comedy, and thus pulls
the audience up short with the serious moments that come in the final
few minutes.
The full production about this remarkable family, when we finally get
to see it, should be something special.
GODOT GAMBIT
Michael Reinhart has this thing for Samuel Beckett, and more
obviously for Waiting For Godot. Reinhart's script The Next Best
Thing – it closed last Monday – takes the theme and
much of the material from the Beckett existential classic and spins
it into a tale of four actors trying to put on a production ofŠ what
else? Waiting For Godot.
The best aspect of the piece is the work of Reinhart and Daniel
Jade Levia, who play the eternal waiters Vladimir and Estragon in
the planned production. As they rehearse – and wait to rehearse
– their lives come more and more to resemble those of the
characters they're playing. They argue, achieve philosophical
insights and can't seem to move far from the psychological and
physical locations they inhabit.
The pair have just the right feel for Beckett's characters. They're
funny, playful and alternately affectionate and contentious. Most
importantly, they capture just the right rhythms under Konrad
Nespiak's direction to suggest how fine they might be in an
actual production of Waiting For Godot.
The trouble with the show is the material around them. We also meet
the other two figures in Beckett's play, Pozzo (Michael
Lazarovitch) and Lucky (Peter Madden), who, as actors, are
trying to deal with what's going on in their lives. Michael –
he's also a character with that name – sells himself to a gay
man to raise money for the production, while Peter, ditto, isolates
himself from rehearsals and becomes as silent as his character.
Repetitious and too often self-consciously clever, the script goes on
and on while nothing really happens. Yes, that's what happens to
Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's play, but his craft isn't always
evident here. There's a fine line between suggesting repetition and
boredom to an audience and actually boring the viewer. And Reinhart
– young writer that he is – hasn't distinguished between
those two states.
There's that fine relationship between Levia and Reinhart to watch
if only a lot of the other stuff weren't happening onstage. And
happening. And happening.
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