Summerfest Daily Report - Sunday, August 12

By Jon Kaplan

The 11th SummerWorks ended on a note of celebration, even if the heat during most of the festival made both audiences and actors feel like we were in the middle of an equatorial jungle.

At Sunday's closing party, artistic producer Franco Boni announced the winners of the two SummerWorks prizes. And surprise! There turned out to be three awards.

Sarah Martyn's Sparta took the audience choice award, though among the shows that nipped at its heels were Sideshow Of The Damned, Our Father/Matador Love and yagayah. No question that the audience loved Sparta at the last performance earlier in the day, which happened to be the one that I caught. Most were on their feet, applauding it as if it were a Stratford Festival production.

The juried SummerWorks prize is a more considered award, with jury members seeing all the productions not invited into the festival - that would be 28 this year - and choosing the best. The winner gets a free slot in next year's festival. Last year's recipient, Mike McPhaden, won for Poochwater, and this year he produced the entertaining Flight 198.

This year's jury, theatre artists Caroline Azar and Clinton Walker, gave the prize to Matthew MacFadzean for richardthesecond, an inventive multimedia riff on youth culture, Shakespeare's tragic king Richard II and the search for human connection in a world of media bombardment.

And then the jurors went a step further. They were also impressed with HammerHead's production of Rabid, Kevin Rees-Cummings's skinhead fable, and decided to give it an award as well. Azar and Walker are personally sponsoring the company with a spot in next year's SummerWorks, paying the entrance fee out of their own pockets. That's commitment.

Attendance at the festival was about the same as last year, and would likely have been higher if the heat wave hadn't descended on Toronto. The top 10 shows in terms of attendance were Sideshow Of The Damned - with 93 per cent attendance - Our Father/Matador Love, Sparta, Five Fingers, Flight 198, McClure's Monologue, Malaysia Hotel, The Singular Life Of Albert Nobbs, East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon and richardthesecond.

Thinking back on SummerWorks, I realize it's easier to assess a festival that's a manageable 40-odd shows, rather than the city-wide, sometimes unwieldy circus that the Fringe has become. (Which isn't to say that the Fringe, with over 100 productions and shows that run 90 minutes as well as 60 minutes, is wrong-headed - it's just different in concept than SummerWorks.)

Take, for instance, the productions created by young theatre artists. I don't mean just-emerging artists out on their own, but rather pieces by high-school or university students. There are certainly some of the latter in the Fringe, but they get lost in the larger mix. In SummerWorks they stand out clearly, in part because artistic producer Boni invites a winner of the Ontario Drama Festival into SummerWorks.

This year's invited show, Travis The Carpet Cleaner Helps Fill The Bad Patches, was a cross between Ionesco and Grand Guignol, with a clever ending that literally moved the play out into the world of the audience. Another high-school group created Billy And The Monsters, notable for its monster costumes and cardboard pirate cutouts. University students presented Brecht's He Said Yes/He Said No and Sue Balint's Pagan Love Songs For The Uninitiated, one a pair of classics, the other the first play by a writer who a few years ago had a Dora-nominated production on a Toronto stage.

But the most exciting aspect of this young-artist facet of SummerWorks is the new Youth Reading Series, co-sponsored by SummerWorks, the Tarragon Theatre and Artword. I caught two of the three readings, directed by professionals and featuring an ensemble cast of actors all of whom - like the three authors - are under 20. The most impressive debut was that of Gorka Coria, a 17-year-old who was in the Tarragon's young-playwrights unit. Soccer Moms, his one-hour show about three women who leave their high-school dreams behind when they get married and have families, has three strong characterizations, a good sense of dialogue and some powerful monologues for the reminiscing mothers.

And then I have a few thoughts of my own. NOW celebrates its 20th anniversary next month, and I've been writing about theatre from the beginning of the paper. Not one of the three playwrights nor any of the actors were even born when I started writing for NOW.

That doesn't make me feel old. It just proves yet again that there's always a new generation of theatre artists ready to take to the boards.

And they will, certainly in next year's SummerWorks Festival.

Congratulations to the festival staff - including Boni, assistant artistic producer Ruth Madoc-Jones, production manager Michelle Ramsay, communications manager Sandra Alland, box office/front of house manager Sam Nicholds, volunteer coordinator Mary Wood, the lighting designers, technicians and front of house managers - for a successful festival.