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Thursday July 11th, 2002

By JON KAPLAN

(ALMOST) NEW FACES I wrote yesterday about some theatre students who are getting practical experience, in front of a potentially large audience, at the Fringe. But the festival is also a place to discover some other talents who until now have had a low profile, a different profile or have simply grown as artists during the past few years.

On the first day of the Fringe, I coincidentally had a one-two punch - in the best of senses - from director Nicole Arends. She's been working in the business for 16 years, her bio notes, and I've noticed her name on shows at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, where she's done some assistant directing. For last year's Fringe she directed Joan MacLeod's The Hope Slide, which didn't work as well as it should have. But this year she's done a fine job with a pair of contrasting shows - Norm Foster's ebullient yet touching 15-minute Louis And Dave, set in an old Buick station wagon, and Jose Rivera's Cloud Tectonics, a more difficult work of magic realism featuring fine performances by Roxanne Deans, Gabe Bettio - his best acting work so far - and Trevor Martin. As director of the Rivera, Arends carefully shapes the tone of the poetic, eerie piece, moving us from everyday realism to stylized fantasy and giving the philosophical speeches of the play a sense of the dramatic.

Patricia Yeatman is one of Toronto's most underused performers, and I don't understand why casting people don't see how she shines in comic roles. Sure, she's done the occasional Fringe, SummerWorks or Rhubarb! show, but most of her work has been out of town. In Rafe Macpherson's The Terrible False Deception, she appears as Woman 1, not the most detailed of descriptive titles. But she nearly steals the show as an actor appearing in a period production - Macpherson has written four scenes with the same staging but different dialogue each time - who handles as best she can the fact that no one appreciates her true worth. There's a slyness in her performance, an energy held in check, that makes the lines and the direction even funnier. The show doesn't work all the time - it's full of theatre in-jokes played to the hilt - but Yeatman knows when to pull back or give an extra spin to something that goes over the top. Please, somebody, give her some work in town.

Laryssa Yanchak is another actor who's worked in town for several years but not been able to show her performing chops to large audiences until now. I first saw her in U of T productions several seasons ago, in works like the Renaissance play Arden Of Feversham, as Turandot in Princess T. and as a sensual female Mephistopheles in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. She's had a crack at Shakespeare's Juliet - not many caught the production - and most recently has worked with the Toronto Irish Players. But Diane Forrest's Life & How To Avoid It gives her a chance to shine and garner some positive press and audience response. As an agoraphobe who keeps company with her collection of plastic bags rather than with people, Yanchak is sad, funny, touching and totally ingratiating. The script is another matter, though - it rambles and would be a better 15-minute stand-up routine than near-hour play, and the turnaround at the end of the play comes out of nowhere. But the production is worth catching for some funny lines and Yanchak's performance.

Rick Roberts is a familiar face to TV and stage audiences. The former know him for his acting work on Traders, L.A. Doctors and other shows, while this past season his theatre work has included The Piper and Adam Baum And The Jew Movie. Now he reveals another side of his talent as writer/director of Fish/Wife, one of the most inventive shows at this year's Fringe. Its focus is two Rosedale types at a dinner party, old friends who are about to prepare sashimi for offstage guests. In the process, they sort out problems with image, husbands, children, each other and their place in the universe. Don't cringe if I call it a philosophical clown piece - actors Marjorie Campbell and Lindsay Collins give the lines a high energy and some bizarrely aimed laughs, taking us on an unpredictable trip to the hearts of these two white-face, high-fashion, intellectually neurotic woman.

Ryerson grad Marie Beath Badian created something of a buzz last year with Two Blushing Pilgrims, a Fringe show she co-wrote and performed in. This last winter she toured in Andrew's Tree, a Theatre Direct Canada production you'd only have seen if you visited your child's school when the piece toured there. Her current Fringe piece, Novena, focuses on the relationship between an estranged father and daughter in a strict Filipino Catholic family. The comedy writing is more successful than the tragic, which lurches into melodrama more than necessary, but Badian's always a winning actor, with a sharp sense of how to deliver the laughs and how to touch an audience's heart. Hers is a simple, clean, understated performance, all the more believable for those elements.

BOX OFFICE BALLOTS There's a new element to the Fringe this year, a slot at each of the nine regular venues called Patrons' Pick.

The first show this coming Sunday, the last day of the festival, has been kept open for the production in each venue that does the best at the box office and, presumably, has Fringe audiences clamouring for more. Based on the highest attendance at each company's first four performances, Fringe management will schedule that popular work for an added show.

It has to be a 90-minute slot, scheduled for either noon or 12:30 pm, since the selected company might be in either the one-hour or 90-minute category.

The extra show benefits the nine chosen companies but also the Fringe itself - the performances are fundraisers for the festival, with the box office split between the groups and the Fringe.

It's not hard to see Top Gun! The Musical as the choice at the Factory Mainspace, or Job: The Hiphop Musical, getting the extra Tarragon Mainspace slot. Both have been hot commodities since the festival began.

The selected companies will be announced in Friday's Harold.

20-20 UPDATE
Don't miss Breaking Character, one of the fest's best shows, a terrific collaboration between playwright/director Alexis Bernier and actor Gina Clayton. The nuanced one-woman piece deals with an optometrist who realizes that she has the talent to see into her clients' souls. The last two performances have been sell-outs. But don't try to see the performance scheduled for Friday at 9:30 pm - it's been cancelled. There's still a show on Saturday at 3:30, and possibly - we'll know when the Patrons' Pick shows are announced Friday - a noon slot on Sunday.

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