SummerWorks Web Report - August 10, 2002

Some audiences think theatre festivals are notorious for the preponderance of one-person shows. These viewers feel they won't get their money’s worth or maybe they’ll have to sit through yet another semi-autobiographical monologue that they won't relate to.

This year’s SummerWorks has its share of solo pieces. I count seven, my favourite being Stan Rogal’s Portrait Of Ophelia, Drowned, a clever look at Shakespeare’s heroine caught in the river where she offed herself and trying to make sense of her past and present life. It’s also hard to overlook performer Reni Kratka’s exhilarating contribution to the production.

But the truth is, I get an extra little thrill from a well-honed ensemble performance, the kind of show where people play perfectly with each other, and those little interpersonal interchanges – often unspoken – give something special to the production.

It happens in Theatre SKAM’s The Black Box, in which the Victoria-based company – Lucas Myers and Matthew Payne are West Coast actors, while Camille Stubel now calls Toronto home – play off each other so well that at times they seem to be wearing one another's skins, thinking each other’s thoughts, in a three-part tale about our fascination with flight. There’s another part of the equation, though, and that’s writer/director Amiel Gladstone, who’s given as much thought to the transitions between the stories as to the narrative itself. He has the audacity to open the show in the dark – a mystery in itself – and then explicates that and other puzzles as the piece shifts back and forth from tale to tale.

The ensemble playing is one of the central attractions of the OOmph!! Group’s Exhibit, a postmodern dissection of the early life of Tennessee Williams and his autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie. There are some moments when I didn’t quite understand how the text was used, but the playing off of fact and fiction each other was frequently fascinating. Conceived and written by Sean MacMahon, who performs with Chad Dembski and Ryan Rogerson under Natasha Priest’s direction, the production works best for those who have some knowledge of The Glass Menagerie. But there’s a theatricality to the whole – MacMahon glows with white-hot heat – and a high-energy combining of voice, movement and sound (created by the company, mixed and recorded by Steve Gordon-Marsh) in an always hypnotic fashion.

But no company I’ve seen in the festival juggles more balls as strikingly as bluemouth inc.. Their multimedia piece Something About A River begins a year-long, three-part journey with The Fire Sermon, and the fact that it’s an off-site show for SummerWorks shouldn’t keep you away. Nor should the fact that it’s being presented at a soft-core porn movie house, the Metro XXX Cinema (677 Bloor West, at Clinton). It’s a totally appropriate venue for the first section of a show that looks at different sorts of concealed ambivalences; in this case, the ambivalence revolves around our attitude toward sexuality.

The company specializes in multidisciplinary work, as I discovered when I saw Ceasefire, their 2001 SummerWorks piece. In that show the audience was invited onto the stage with the actors to watch a man in a cage playing a clarinet, films projected on the actors and intense movement-based work.

Something About a River plays with the metaphor of what’s hidden beneath the ordinary and everyday, and as a symbol for that idea the company’s chosen Garrison Creek, which runs – mostly buried – beneath Toronto. (I know someone whose basement’s been flooded by the creek, which occasionally swells and rises above ground level.) The Fire Sermon is performed near the upper part of the creek; a winter show will take place near its centre, and a spring performance is planned for the creek’s mouth.

It’s an ambitious undertaking, and should be splendid if the other two parts are as strong as the first. Performers Stephen O’Connell, Sabrina Reeves, Lucy Simic, Robert Tremblay, Glenn Christie, sound designer Richard Windeyer, lighting designer Jud Martell and Byron Wong, who’s credited with additional imagery and music sources, have created a rich mix here, a series of interrelated stories that aren’t easily taken in on a single viewing. They make great use of the venue and what can be done there – the Hollywood-style murals on the walls, trailers from 50s horror films, let’s-all-go-to-the-lobby-style cinema commercials, evocative new video clips – to look at what we think and feel about sex both overt and covert. Again, the actors are adept at making a statement via movement as well as by what they say, so there’s added potency.

Even if I didn’t get all the layers of material, there’s something special about the project. It’s still haunting me a week after seeing the show, and I can’t wait for the other two parts, or the whole three-part staging in the fall of 2003.