Summerfest Daily Report - Monday, August 6

By Jon Kaplan

We expect heat in these dog days of August, but nothing like what we've had for the start of the SummerWorks Festival. What with the infestation of aphids on the festival's first day and temperatures that have frequently gone over the 30-degree mark - they're calling for 34 degrees both today and tomorrow - it's not been the most comfortably time for running around at a festival.

And it's not always comfortable indoors, either, from a temperature point of view. Before SummerWorks began, I was most worried about the Upstairs venue at Factory, right under the roof and used during the winter season as a rehearsal space. Despite some wonderful shows there last summer, it was a sweatbox for actors and audience alike.

This year, thankfully, things are better in the space. There's a window air conditioner, and the fans that appeared partway through last season have returned. Now audiences just have to rely on the individual companies to decide to keep the fans on during shows. When they do - and you sit within the sweep of an oscillating fan - you're guaranteed of relative comfort.

All the venues have some degree of air conditioning, with Artword feeling the coolest these days. The Factory Studio is underground, and that helps with temperatures, too.

Still, it never hurts to take a bottle of water into any of the spaces. That applies most of all to the Cameron House venue, home of VideoCabaret. The Cameron itself is giving you a helping hand here, since the bar is open and you can bring your drinks into the theatre at the back.

Though the space is air conditioned, the machinery is right near the stage and some actors dislike the white noise of the air conditioner. At a few early shows there was a projection problem for some voices with the machinery going - that seems to be corrected now - but one or two groups still opt for an air-dead zone. The temperature is manageable when the house is small, but when it's nearly sold out, like the opening of Morwyn Brebner's double bill Our Father and Matador Love, expect to sweat.

But it's worth the lost liquid - you won't spend a funnier hour at SummerWorks. Brebner, who burst onto the local scene two seasons ago with Music For Contortionist, knows how to dish up outrageously funny dialogue and prickly, quirky relationships like no one else writing in Toronto.

Matador Love began life as a Rhubarb! piece a few years ago, and it's revived here with the same director, Kate Lynch, and cast, Catherine Fitch and Tony Munch. The pair play the most mismatched couple who've ever been on a blind date - he's a macho stud who's picked her name out of the phone book, and she doesn't for a minute believe a man who claims to be a matador on the underground bull-fighting circuit. She thinks dates are about lying and hoping to get laid, while he tries to convince her that such serendipitous meetings as theirs might have a more profound and long-lasting importance.

Matador Love is paired with a new piece, Our Father, in which the actors play siblings - as frequently at each other's throats as the dating pair - on their way to visit the dying father who left them two decades before. Again the dialogue is caustically funny but with an underlying human truth, with Munch and Fitch a perfect pairing of comic talents. Add Lynch's assured eye for humour and you get a wonderful piece of theatre.