High Tide performed by Morgan Johnson

A poetic, near mystical experience of bonding with the sea and the earth in general, this performance presents the work and the person of Rachel Carson, who launched environmental thinking in the 1960’s

The actress appears to be someone who does not have too much experience but it’s the words that are important and they make you want to learn more about Carson. As a performance, it might have benefitted from some images of the sea projected somewhere on that space that seemed so large and high with a single performer but luckily it only lasts 45 minutes and that is perfect.

A flight into transcendence and a moment of calm in all the frenzy of the Fringe.

Plays at the ODD box in Arts Court.

Great Battles in History

Performed and written(?) by Mark Shyzer

If one knows German, the family name of this fellow could be problematic but no matter. This is the perfect Fringe anti-theatre where Jeff mumbles, fumbles, works his way through a musical performance that was meant to be but doesn’t quite make it because the people involved haven’t turned up, and in any case Jeff the narrator, director, actor can’t play the Ukulele, can’t sing and he hates musicals. An event that appears to deconstruct theatre (musical theatre really)   by giving us a slightly campy vision of the great battles of history and singing songs off key to highlight those moments. Actually, this is not about history, its about  theatre and mainly about Jeff’s transgressive vision of the world who tells us he doesn’t need all these established models because he has new ones and doesn’t have to find evasion in those soppy heroic romantic performances that musicals and historical narratives  usually are. He has his own models and he is fine because he knows exactly who he is. All kidding aside, that is a lot more profound than you could imagine. Clever and annoying!

Plays at Arts Court

Howard Petrick is not a trained actor but he is a living piece of history, an honest to goodness hippy /hobo from San Francisco and Mineapolis, who comes out of the left wing labour movement and is transformed into an anti Viet-nam War activist in 1960’s. No set (a chair and some lights) no costume, no props, no esthetic theatrical set up, just Petrick in all his earnest feeling, vast experience as a speaker for the union movement with all his stories, which pour out of his mind non stop for an hour. He rode the rails, he hopped the freight cars, he looked for work throughout the US and ended up with a vivid story of a monstrous wrestling match which tops of all his tales, all of which are all based on real experience. His stories also paint a gallery of characters with colourful names, itinerant men who created a sub culture of out of work men, forced to move around to find a job . Some reach the point where this kind of moving about becomes a style of life that they can’t or don’t want to change. It’s a fascinating portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s and all the more interesting because it is based on authentic experience.

This show is a  prequel to his earlier show Breaking Rank, where he tells us how he was drafted into the American army and continued protesting even when he was a soldier in Viet-nam.

Never Own anything you have to paint or feed

Written and performed by Howard Petrick

Plays at Studio Leonard Beaulne

No doubt that Alexander Gibson is an effective story teller especially where it comes to his own personal experience but I think this show is mainly about his experiences as a first time elementary school teacher and the obstacles he had to overcome. It is not about teaching French. So don’t be confused. In fact I wish his one man performance had erased all the references to teaching French and just chosen to tell us about  the character’s  experiences with  these children who are funny and disruptive and who constantly challenge him, as the ghost of his mother intervenes in his head and keeps telling him how to deal with it all

What was very distasteful for me was his relationship with the material he was supposed to be teaching. It showed first of all that the character  knows nothing about “second” language teaching. Evan at that early age there are pedagogical techniques that have to be mastered and there is a minimum level of linguistic competence one would expect from a teacher so that he does not ruin the poor sensitive ears of the little ones. At that age they pick up sounds, pronunciation, rhythms and accents so easily. Plus the fact that the story-line  emphasized the negative reactions of his class, which shows no doubt that the teacher  was not doing it properly. I could go into much detail but there is no point. Maybe a show of this kind would fly in a place where there are no francophones around but in Ottawa it is almost an insult to the attempts of serious French teachers who are dedicated to French Immersion, even if the children are very young. Not knowing what you are doing is not funny. its sad!  The  mimicry is fine but there is  something naive and childish about this performance that shows us why it missed the point.

Plays in the Arts Court Library. This year that venue has been rearranged so that we can actually see the performance space beyond the third row. Good job Fringe.

Is it a spoof of a horror show? Is it a tribute to Edgard Allan Poe’s writing  and the general atmosphere of his literary world?  Is it a field day for the sound effects person? It’s a bit of all of that but mostly this is an experiment in staging one of the most important English language short story writers of the 19^th Century. What shines is Poe’s prose  that is taken directly from his short stories,- chopped down a bit with the juicy parts remaining. It’s all  narrated by the actors and it is all from Poe except for the ending where the characters eventually take things into their own hands….  A bit of Pirandello’s revenge perhaps. Since it  all appears to be coming from Poe’s nightmares  things  are not straighforward , that is clear. However, much of the physical movements  as well as the repetitive sound effects (muffled screams and weak screetching ) appear to work against the text because if they seem to be  spoofing the text, the spoof is not well done. .  The spoof has to be clear and come from a heightened form of performance… Even the choking and strangling were not melodramatic enough to be intentionally phony. They looked like a limp form of  realism  or amatures fooling around and that is certainly not the effect they wanted to create.  And then, just to clarify things, why not bring up a little poster/screen on the side announcing the title of each story just as the TROIS COUPs from French theatre resound in the background, announcing the next text.

As for the actors. they  make their way through it with reasonable skill. A good fringe experiment that highlights all the problems that confront a director when he takes on a literary work such as this one and then tries to give it a personal touch and a new spin.

The Poe Show  Plays at the Studio Leonard Beaulne

Written by David Beecroft, directed by Stewart Mathews

With Jeremy Piamonte, Sarah Duplancic, Hannah Gibson Fraser, Anna Lewis

A Vanity Project production (Tim Oberholzer)

bring it up to the 21st century.