AN EVENING OF SIN

Ottawa’s burlesque scene is alive and well at the Ottawa Fringe. An Evening of Sin, Ottawa’s monthly burlesque show, are exploring a number of themes throughout their run at the festival—from Glitz & Glam, to Gorelesque, Nerdlesque and more—and they are not for the faint of heart.

Though the company have been known to present a Vaudeville-style variety show led by the dashing Retro Joad, here you can expect burlesque, burlesque and more burlesque. The show is all about tease, and features performers who are committed to naughty behaviour in the nation’s capital. Expect feather boas, pin-up hairdo’s, glitter, and of course, sequined pasties.

Though flirtation reigns supreme, the performers also dabble with silliness and a touch of satire. The performance itself does not actually offer very much variety (either stylistically or intersectionally—as you might expect from a modern burlesque performance), which is somewhat disappointing. Still, if you are looking for a late-night show that is unabashed, fringy, and fun there is a good chance this is the performance for you.

Academic Hall.

written and interpreted by Martin Dockery / Ribbit RePublic

Two friends have stepped away from a yearly Holiday party for just a moment – or have they? After discovering a small box, with only a switch and a warning label, the plot doesn’t just thicken; it warps, and doubles back on itself so that the audience cannot be certain that the progression of time on stage is linear.

This play reveals its central theme early on. It’s about memory and of our tenuous grasp of reality. And though this has been introduced to us early on, Dockery still hooks his audience and takes them on a journey that they did not see coming. Dockery is adept at using the illusory reality of the stage to toy with his audience, and Inescapable does just that. In Inescapable, repetition is used as a tool that unveils an alternate reality between these two characters, one that they can’t fully grasp.

There are a few elements in the plot itself that work against the stage-world that Dockery has imagined, which ultimately tarnish the illusion. What’s more, the staging here works against the actors. However, there are also so many things right about this show. Jon Paterson and Martin Dockery have an electric rapport on stage. The dialogue is dizzying, the characters are funny, and the plot is the thing of a hallucinogenic vision.

Photo: Andrew Alexander

Madge is young, idealistic, and beams with enthusiasm as she arrives to her first day of work for the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. She is an Analyst, and is ready to take the department by storm. She is driven by the perennial motto of the public service: “Fearlessly advise, loyally implement.” However, the world that she arrives into is not as she imagined.

The Public Servant, created by Theatre Columbus, is smart, relevant, and expertly imagined. Director and co-writer Jennifer Brewin has welded together two seemingly disparate ideas: The public service and entertainment. And it works. The play juxtaposes the mundanities of the life of the public service with physical comedy in a performance that is funny, ironic, and relevant.

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Leo Szilard is one of those impressive historical figures who you probably have never heard of. That is, unless you are performer Jem Rolls who seems to be a walking encyclopedia dedicated to Szilard. Rolls’ one man show is biographical storytelling and delivers a fantastic amount of information at an impressive pace.

And so, who was Szilard?  A Hungarian, Jewish physicist, and what many might call a genius.  He was a bombastic personality, oftimes loathsome and hidden in the footnotes of the works of more famous scientists,  philosophers and politicians. He inspired the science that led to the first theories of the Atomic Bomb, and then kept the key that would unlock the science to himself to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis in the late 1930’s.

Jem Rolls delivers a truly impressive history with zeal and inflections that call to mind a British Steve Irwin. The performance is more along the lines of performative lecture than theatre. The story is fascinating and immaculately researched, and Rolls inserts humour by reminding us of his performance’s own structure, and his intentions to convince us that Szilard was as much a hero as he was a physicist.

Though Rolls’ passion for the subject matter is palpable, the density of information ended up being a barrier. Ultimately, despite some issues with pacing, the story leaves you wondering why you’ve never heard of Szilard before. If you asked Rolls, I imagine that he would say, “Mission accomplished “.

Three women from three seperate histories–different countries and eras entirely–intersect in Ground Cover Theater’s Displaced. Each has reached a moment where leaving their homes for the greener pastures of Canada has become essential to their survival. And though their stories are independent from one another, here, they have been woven together in a story that portrays the trials faced by lone women who arrive to Canada as refugees.

Mary (Katie Moore) flees the Irish Famine in the 1840s, Sofia (Anna Mazurik) arrives from Germany in the 1940s after her Jewish husband dies in a camp, and Dara (Emma Laishram) must leave Afghanistan to avoid persecution after refusing an arranged marriage. And though their stories are disparate, playwrights Natasha Martina and Sue Mythen use overlayed monologues and corporeal sequences to indicate a shared theme amongst the three women. Each leaves terrible tragedy behind, and struggles in a new life as a persecuted outsider. …

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This year, the St. Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary by putting the “fringe” in fringefest. Featuring over 100 performances in venues that pepper Montreal’s downtown, the Montreal Fringe Fest is boundary-pushing, multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual, and fearless. With shows running until June 21, the two-hour trip from Ottawa is well worth it.

2056: A Dystopian Black Comedy

In the aftershock of a religious-based war, society has organized itself into hard-gotten peace. In 2056, unilingualism and atheism are more than simply a choice: They are mandated, and there is a harsh penalty for disobedience. Two characters, Knut (Sebastien Rajotte) and Madalyn (Humberly Gonzalez), have been sterilized (both in body and in belief) and forced to cohabitate in a derelict apartment on the outskirts of a contaminated city. Both characters repress their mother-tongues for fear of being found deviant even in their own home. But a small slip and the audience soon finds out just how far the puppet strings go. …

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