Kevin Hanchard as Martin Luther King.  Photo: David Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — We’re in a run-down motel room in Memphis. It’s the night of April 3, 1968, and we’re watching Martin Luther King, a few hours after he has delivered his “we’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and has reaffirmed his vision of the promised land.

It’s also a few hours before he will be assassinated on the motel balcony.

The Shaw Festival’s tiny Studio Theatre provides the venue for its gripping production of Katori Hall’s award-winning play, The Mountaintop, and it helps contribute to a sense of claustrophobia and containment. There’s a startling moment when King, beautifully portrayed by Kevin Hanchard, attempts to leave the room — but when he throws open the door, he finds his way blocked by a monstrous snowdrift. Are we getting a dose here of the magic realism that encircles Hall’s brilliant re-imagining of the events leading up to a real-life tragedy? Perhaps. On the other hand, as Alana Hibbert’s cheerfully resilient chambermaid reminds King, Tennessee is prone to snowfalls, even in April.

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Juno and the Paycock.  Photo. David Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — It’s only a cameo appearance, but when the remarkable Jennifer Phipps shows up in the second act of Juno And The Paycock as a bereaved old Irish mother mourning the son who has become a victim of the Irish Civil War, you can hear a pin drop.

Phipps is with us for only a few moments in the role of the mourning Mrs. Tancred, her head held high despite everything that’s happened to her, but that’s all the time she needs to communicate not just grief but stoicism and resilience in the face of terrible loss. It’s always at the most personal level that we can become really aware of the price exacted by human conflict, and this venerable Shaw Festival veteran delivers.

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Glengarry Glen Ross. Photo Maria Vartanova.

One wonders whether that born-again conservative, David Mamet, ever feels like disowning Glengarry Glen Ross, the play that won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Probably not, given that Mamet’s exploration into the slimier recesses of capitalism continues to earn him hefty royalties.

Still, given Mamet’s current political views, there’s undeniable irony in the continuing power of Glengarry Glen Ross, particularly when it gets a production as good as the one served up by The Acting Company at the Gladstone. The show asserts its credentials immediately with that classic opening scene in a Chinese restaurant and the spectacle of a washed-up real estate salesman, a man whose best days are long gone, desperately trying to get back in the game.

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Alexander Gibson’s one-man show about the trials and tribulations of an elementary school French teacher is one of the joys of the 2014 fringe. The script, written by Gibson and Matty Burns, is intelligent, funny and socially aware. And Gibson’s performance, beginning with a breathless monologue (in rhyming couplets, no less) and continuing with a succession of comically illuminating moments, is a tour de force. The guy is a genuine charmer.

Fringe: Portable # 3 — Not Just another French Class.

An SDT Production

Arts Court Sudio

Normally, it would be enough to report that Joyride is a car wreck of a show, devoid of a modicum of true inventiveness. Trouble is, one of its co-creators is Oregon’s Chase Padgett whose wonderful Six Guitars was a highlight of the 2014 Fringe. So one expects more from him than this witless piece of sophomoric excess. Padgett’s partner in crime is an irritating bundle of mannerisms named Stacey Hallal. We first encounter her floundering about the stage like a beached whale while Padgett makes electronic sounds on a keyboard. Then she moves into the audience to portray an emotionally unstable pest who keeps disrupting Padgett’s mind-reading session. By this point, we’re discovering that the feebleness of a sketch’s set-up is rendered even more feeble by the banality of the pay-off moment. Among other treats, if you can call them that, are the sounds of copulation — pants, groans and assorted shrieks perfomed in darkness to the accompaniment of further electronic noises — and the spectacle of a slack-jawed hillbilly repeatedly botching up a televised tribute to the wonders of the rutabaga. Oh well, there’s nothing like mocking the lower orders to remind us of our own brilliance and superiority.

A Stacey Hallal Production

Arts Court Theatre

There’s a possible corpse in Martin Dockery’s absurdist play, Paco V Put To Sleep, along with an ice cream salesman in a state of existential torment, and a pair of parents whose inexplicable emergence in son Dick’s shabby apartment suggests they’re in flight from something unspeakable.

No one’s really connecting here — starting with the feckless Dick and the zombie-like Paco who are first encountered staring at an empty TV screen because they’re incapable of dealing with the problem of a busted remote. That’s not their only problem. They’re out of food, and there are hints their electricity is about to be cut off. Their conversation goes beyond the random and the pointless and the surreal. Even shared cliches of speech, and there are many of those here, become an ineffectual glue to communication. That’s also true of the other characters who eventually show up, talking over each other and past each other, while continuing to occupy their own malfunctioning limbos.

There’s Pinter here and Ionesco and Beckett, a smidgeon of N.F. Simpson, even — for anyone who knows A Delicate Balance — a significant touch of Albee. Director Dave Dawson, working with a responsive cast, creates a fine fusion of sound and silence, managing the play’s elusive rhythms and atmospherics with skill and understanding.

It’s a quirky but rewarding hour of theatre — but why oh why can’t the Fringe and Black Sheep Productions supply playgoers with a proper cast list? It’s a recurring problem with the Fringe and an annoying one.

A Black Sheep Theatre productions

Directed by Dave Dawson

Arts Court Theatre

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Photo: Emily Cooper

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — The chief reason for seeing the Shaw Festival’s revival of The Philadelphia Story is the presence of the incandescent Moya O’Connell in the role of Tracy Lord, the captivating self-absorbed heiress who finally learns to be a human being on the eve of her second marriage.

Philip Barry’s comedies can be hazardous undertakings, requiring a particular tone and cadence in delivery, and rippling with the kind of nuance and subtlety that helps flesh out a particular social strata. Barry was writing about the rich — indeed, some would say he was in love with the rich in plays like The Philadelphia Story and Holiday — but that didn’t stop him from gently mocking the pretensions of the very world he embraced.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

That’s how Theresa Rebeck once described the things that interest her as a playwright. And she certainly delivers them in spades with her 2007 comedy-thriller, Mauritius, which has romped onto the playbill of the Ottawa Little Theatre in a confident and entertaining production.

The words fly like bullets in Rebeck’s script. And they’re laced with profanity — lots of profanity — which we quickly discover is essential to the rhythms and cadences of the dialogue. One could be churlish and suggest that much of Mauritius sounds like warmed-over Mamet, but that would be unjust, particularly since we’re enjoying the company of its assorted schemers and low-lifers so much. So let’s assume instead that Rebeck — who served an impressive apprenticeship writing television scripts for the likes of N.Y.P.D. Blue — has penned an affectionate homage to David Mamet, with a special nod to his play, American Buffalo

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