Author: Iris Winston

A writer, editor, reporter and theatre reviewer for more than 40 years, Iris Winston has won national and provincial awards for her fiction, non-fiction and reviews. A retired federal public servant, she has seven books in print and writes regularly for local, regional, national and international newspapers and magazines, including Variety and the Ottawa Citizen. Iris lives in Almonte.
Balanced Direction by Chantale Plante, makes Lost in Yonkers Both Comic and Genuinely Moving.

Balanced Direction by Chantale Plante, makes Lost in Yonkers Both Comic and Genuinely Moving.

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Elements of Neil Simon’s life often appear in his plays. While his 1991 drama Lost in Yonkers is not as closely autobiographical as the earlier written Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound trilogy, his family is clearly a good part of the source material for this memory play.

Yonkers, which won the Pulitzer, several Tony awards and a Drama Desk award, ran for 780 performances on Broadway and became a successful movie in 1993, has been revived on a number of stages across North America recently. Once declared Simon’s best play, current responses have not been universally positive.

Perhaps this is in part because it is set in the early 1940s and fewer members of today’s audiences have as clear an understanding of the era and the hardships it presented for so many. The play itself, in combining serious issues of family dysfunctionality, mental health and poverty with comedy and Simon’s signature one-liners, is harder to categorize.

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This is our Yourth: drugs, sex, foul language and self delusion: more than a little dated in 2 011.

This is our Yourth: drugs, sex, foul language and self delusion: more than a little dated in 2 011.

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Drugs, sex, foul language and self-delusion, combined with a sense of entitlement. These are the  underpinnings of the world depicted in This is our Youth.

I thank my lucky stars that it was not my youth. Perhaps this is why Kenneth Lonergan’s 1996 drama — set in New York during the Reagan era in 1982 — does not resonate with me.

Admittedly, the dialogue, heavily padded with the f-word and worse, rings true for this threesome of Upper West Side drifters from wealthy backgrounds living through the dropout generation of the 1980s. And, by the end of the play, there is a sense that they have overcome some of their moral confusion, if not their destructive drug habits.

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I Remember Mama: For the sake of authenticity, the use of live and dead animals on stage by Phoenix Players was not appreciated.

I Remember Mama: For the sake of authenticity, the use of live and dead animals on stage by Phoenix Players was not appreciated.

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The memories that remain a lifetime are not always of world-shattering events. They can be of something as simple as having a chocolate soda with a special person or as unpleasant as an encounter with a bullying aunt.

In John Van Druten’s 1944 drama I Remember Mama, based on a fictionalized memoir by Kathryn Forbes, these are just two of the incidents that Katrin recalls. Seen through the mirror of childhood, Katrin Hanson, the eldest daughter, looks back over the years, picking out the moments that defined her mother’s strength and warmth.

The episodic nature of the story line suggests that I Remember Mama could have been more effective as a movie (1948) or a television show (1950s) than as a stage play in 2011.

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Mamma Mia, popular showcase of ABBA songs is still making the rounds to enthusiastic audiences.

Mamma Mia, popular showcase of ABBA songs is still making the rounds to enthusiastic audiences.

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One of the most popular musicals ever, audiences around the world have been enjoying Mamma Mia since it first hit London’s West End in the spring of 1999.

By this time, it is doubtful if anyone does not know the story of how the musical came into being or the details of its cleverly contrived storyline.

Built around the songs that the super popular Swedish group ABBA made famous in the 1970s, Catherine Johnson’s book winds the light-hearted plot into a showcase for the songs and nostalgia for the period.

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And Slowly Beauty: a homage to the transformative power of theatre that does not invite involvement.

And Slowly Beauty: a homage to the transformative power of theatre that does not invite involvement.

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The very amusing opening scene, the brilliant set and the beautifully choreographed movements indicate that And Slowly Beauty…is to be a special piece of theatre. And there is much to enjoy about the English-language premiere of Michael Nadeau’s stylized drama, written in collaboration with a French collective in 2003 and now translated by Maureen Labonté.

But the early charm wears a little thin long before the conclusion two hours later — there is no intermission — and the saga of middle-aged crisis interspersed with excerpts from Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a little too much in love with itself for too much of the time.

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White Christmas is less successful as a stage performance.

White Christmas is less successful as a stage performance.

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Crossing from one medium to another works best with first-class material. For example, the novella Gigi by Collette became a delightful movie at the hands of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe in 1958. Despite the high quality of the movie, the stage versions, musical or play, were less successful.

When the original is not top notch, the result is even less likely to be entirely successful. The 1954 Paramount movie, White Christmas, had very mixed reviews (to put it mildly). Therefore, when David Ives and Paul Blake delivered a stage version, they were faced with numerous problems.

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Maggie’s Getting Married at Kanata Theatre. Norm Foster has fun with the family!

Maggie’s Getting Married at Kanata Theatre. Norm Foster has fun with the family!

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Are the crashes of thunder in the Kanata Theatre production of Maggie’s Getting Married the director’s way of ensuring that the audience doesn’t miss any verbal bombshells in the dialogue? Maybe such a device could be justified in a drama with an obscure plot line and archaic language. But for a Norm Foster comedy?

Foster, often called Canada’s answer to Neil Simon, generally writes sit-coms, simple in language and often simplistic in plot. His plays offer the comfort of familiarity. Via light comedies, sometimes with serious undercurrents, audiences see themselves, their neighbours, aspects of their lives — exaggerated just a little.

Such is the tone of Maggie’s Getting Married, first performed in 2000. Set in the Duncan family’s kitchen on the night before the wedding, the focus is on sibling rivalry, pre-wedding jitters and family quirks.

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Whispering Pines. Re-evaluating the past and dealing with the present.

Whispering Pines. Re-evaluating the past and dealing with the present.

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Whispering Pines is a tale of personal and political betrayal — before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A layered mix of poetic language, set against a stark background, realism interspersed with symbolism, time shifts and disparate locations, this drama attempts to pack in a great deal but remains unnecessarily obscure.

In part an attempted justification of espionage and lies, in part the age-old revelation of an eternal triangle, Whispering Pines declaims rather than whispers, and demands rather than touches the emotions. While a number of interesting ideas are on offer in Whispering Pines, their weight drags any passion out of the production, as does Brian Quirt’s direction.

In Act I, set in East Berlin before the fall of the wall, playwright Richard Sanger seems to be trying to draw a picture of innocence through art and music, personified in Renate, a painter, and her lover, Bruno, a singer. The third member of the group is a Canadian academic, Thomas, apparently searching for truth (or love).

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Salt Water Moon, this five-part saga of the Mercer family is not totally involving.

Salt Water Moon, this five-part saga of the Mercer family is not totally involving.

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On  a moonlit night in 1926, a young man returns from the city to claim his girl after a year of separation.

That would be a romantic beginning if Jacob had not run off to the mainland without a farewell and Mary had not settled for a secure future for herself and her younger sister by getting engaged to the relatively well-off but boring Jerome, the local schoolteacher.

Then there is the issue that Jerome is the son of the man who humiliated Jacob’s father and stealing the son’s fiancée would help to reset the balance against the father.

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Ira Levin’s punchy Melodrama, Dr Cook’s Garden, stands the test of time.

Ira Levin’s punchy Melodrama, Dr Cook’s Garden, stands the test of time.

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A different take on the apparent perfection of another of his dramas, The Stepford Wives, playwright Ira Levin exposes the weed killer Dr. Cook uses in his garden, the village where he has been the sole physician for more than 30 years.

In Greenfield, the sun seems to shine all the time. Here, only the undeserving and imperfect die young. The rest are nurtured into a peaceful old age by the caring Dr. Cook — the man who has been a second father to Jim Templeton.

But, when Jim returns to celebrate his graduation from medical school, he discovers a problem in Greenfield that could have dire consequences.

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