Photo: Andrew Alexander

An old man, clearly drugged, shows up at a police station wearing a Santa hat and military uniform. A meat hook skewering a lawyer’s business card hangs around his neck. This is the jumping off point for The Butcher by Nicolas Billon, playing now at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. It’s a pretty enticing teaser to begin with, but the real success of the play is the fact that it found its way into the hands of an impressive artistic team. From direction to design to acting – there are a lot of reasons that The Butcher just works but at the heart of it is a shared vision.

To reveal too much of the script is a disservice to future audiences, so suffice it to say: This is a play that is not what it appears to be at its inception. Playwright Billon weaves an unexpected and affecting story that weighs in on some heavy ideas, while rooting them in well-crafted characters. It’s the characters that drive the play, and here the cast rises to the occasion.

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Audiences at Anton in Show Business, from Three Sisters Theatre Company, get to glimpse the backstage drama as a group of misfits try to stage Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. But as economic pressures and personal narratives unravel, the show becomes the background track to their quirky antics. The play parodies the New York theatre scene through a throng of one-dimensional characters, satirizes equity in the theatre, and makes digs at the impossibility of artistry. It’s a play that leans into its sense of irony, and it’s built for the audience who knows a thing or two about the realities of living and working in the arts.

The play unfolds on two levels. On one level, the characters are trying to put on The Three Sisters. On the other, they are aware that they are simply portraying characters who are putting on a play. The play employs this “metatheatrical” guise principally to satirize the convention. It is gimmicky by design.

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A woman creeps her way onto the stage, holding a tattered book in her hands. The pages are so well-loved that the book is falling apart. She extends it to her audience and her mouth curves into words that might explain the book. But how can you put into words something as nuanced as our reaction to a piece of great literature?

Particle, co-created by Kristina Watt and Martha Ross, is a rumination on inspiration itself. This year, audiences have a chance to capture the World Premiere of this production at the undercurrents theatre festival.

At the centre of the play is Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, but where you might expect a straight-forward adaptation, 100 Watt Productions sets its sites on the impossibility of wholly capturing the impact of art. Yet, through the lens of this cleverly conceptualized, metatheatrical production, Particle succeeds in inviting the audience to experience a delicate moment of shared understanding.

The stage layout features a prominent projector screen to its right where images of rolling waves are projected—a nod to the book that is at the heart of this production. The play features some basic set pieces, for example, a desk with a small bell and some clutter directly center, or a coat rack that stands at stage left. It’s all intentionally vague; the set is simply a play-ground for the characters. And these characters aren’t what they seem.

Actress Kristina Watt uses costumes (including exaggerated noses, lab coats, glasses and more) to take on various characters, and yet, these characters are heavily symbolic in nature. They are exaggerated and far from realistic—they are characters that Watt wears like a coat as she tries to home-in on the meaning behind Woolf’s enigmatic novel. Underneath the characters is another nameless, tenuous character that is just as present on stage, finding moments of silence to simply stare back at the audience. There’s a complex balance between what’s real and what’s not that Particle manages to capture, a credit to director Martha Ross. …

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Photo: Black Theatre Workshop

A chorus of ancestors pour down the aisles from the back of the orchestra and converge on stage, all the while their wordless song grows in intensity. From within that rising chorus of ancestors, Rainey Johnson (Lucinda Davis) mimes holding her infant daughter in her arms—a bundle of cloth that is pulled away from her. Rainey loses her young daughter, and the chorus of ancestors encircles her, their a cappella melody meet Rainey’s pain with a mournful song. Even the very first scene of the play will send shivers down your spine with its ability to be so deeply emotive, and yet so beautifully constructed.

The new season at the NAC has opened with Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, and it sets a high standard for all that is to come. It is an immersive theatrical experience that blends theatre, dance, and song. The result is a seamless performance that is haunting in its depth of portrayal of the human experience of grief. What’s more, the play is equally lighthearted, finding humour and joy even in face of terrible pain. This is the power of Governor General Literary Award winner Djanet Sears’ impeccably crafted production.

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