Published on in the Ottawa Citizen on  May 18, 2015

Photo Julie Le Gal

Civilization doesn’t actually collapse in George F. Walker’s exceedingly dark, angry and at times very funny The End of Civilization but it gets a damn rough ride.

Part of Walker’s late-1990s Suburban Motel series of plays, the show (this is its Ottawa premiere) finds a middle class couple, the self-absorbed Henry Cape and his weary wife Lily, holed up in a dreary motel. They’re attempting to save money while Henry, the victim of corporate bloodletting, searches dispiritedly for a new job.

Living in the next room is a practical prostitute named Sandy who befriends Lily. Also on board: two police officers, the uptight Max and his smarmy but likeable partner Donny, whose investigation of a series of murders brings them to the Capes’ motel room. There, the two cops squabble as viciously as do the Capes.

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So who did kill Spalding Gray, the American monologist who died in 2004? Considering that he committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in New York, you’d think the question unnecessary.

Turns out the question is very much necessary according to Daniel MacIvor’s disarmingly idiosyncratic solo show about himself, Gray, a guy called Howard, and some pretty big issues including death, self-forgiveness and truth.

Principal among those issues is truth. The question of who killed Gray is, after all, a question about the truth, metaphoric or otherwise, of what happened, and as MacIvor makes clear, certainty about any situation or person is a moving target. While that’s hardly a stop-the-presses insight, the ways in which the playwright frames that target make for a fine 85 minutes.

The show, directed by Daniel Brooks, is a skein of stories and enacted pieces that link MacIvor, Gray and Howard in progressively inextricable fashion.

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When George F. Walker wrote his 1993 play about three 19-year-olds battling a life stacked against them, he imbued it with passion, anger, intelligence and a hedged faith in the future. This Algonquin College Theatre Arts production does all those elements proud.

Set in a garbage-strewn inner city park (design by Attila Clemann), the play focuses on sharp-tongued Tina (Cynthia Guard) and her perpetually befuddled, self-absorbed boyfriend Bobby (Mitchel Johnson). She’s pregnant, he’s the father, and neither one is exactly ecstatic over the situation.

The difference between the two: Tina has the smarts and self-awareness to make the best of a bad deal whereas Bobby – self-pitying but with a sensitivity and a vague desire for a better life that appeal to Tina – falls apart anytime anyone looks at him sideways.

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Photo by Barb Gray.  John Ng and Andy Massingham.

Enzo is a dog who makes his presence felt. He destroys a $250,000 kitchen. He attends to female dogs with joyous enthusiasm. He teaches, through sheer dint of being a canine, his human owners much about clarity, simplicity, open-heartedness.

Thing is, we never see this Italian greyhound. But then Daniel MacIvor’s The Best Brothers, in a rewarding and lucid production at GCTC, is, in part, about what we don’t  see[…]

Suit-and-tie-wearing Hamilton (John Ng) is the elder brother. An architect who knows more about designing the world than living in it, he speaks in perpetually clamped-down fashion, as though words, which if let off their leash could lead to the articulation of deeper things, are the enemy.

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Photo: Barb Gray. Published in the Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, March 5, 2015

At one point early in Obaaberima, writer/performer Tawiah M’Carthy’s courageous one-man show about sexual identities, we watch the main character Agyeman, still a young boy, slip into a dress. The action, mimed by M’Carthy, is transformative, lighting a glow in Agyeman’s eyes and lending a sudden strength and ease to his posture: this male/female, we realize, is who he really is.

Problem is, Agyeman doesn’t see himself through our eyes. So it takes another couple of decades, years that are fraught with confusion, wrong turns, even a prison term, before he understands that wearing a metaphorical dress while remaining a male – in other words, exploring his male and female sides and ultimately coming out to himself and to the rest of the world — is his only real choice.

The triple Dora-winning play follows Agyeman from boyhood in homosexuality-denying Ghana to adulthood in more-open-but-yet-not-entirely-so Toronto. Such coming-out stories are no longer groundbreaking, but M’Carthy enacts this one (he has said it draws on but is not about his own life) with such intimacy and skill that it becomes one we’ve never before heard.

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Photo: Marianne Duval

Director James Richardson has given us, as his thesis for an MFA in Directing at the University of Ottawa, a creative, focused and altogether compelling interpretation of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.

The insane asylum that Richardson and his cast of student actors conjure is a fevered and dangerous place, a bubbling pot of injustice and brutality that constantly threatens to boil over.

Except for Charlotte Corday (Emma Hickey) – the narcoleptic who rouses herself long enough to murder Marat (Jeremie Cyr-Cooke), the revolutionary idealist with a really bad case of the itches, as he rests in his bath – the stage seethes and jitters with the non-stop twitches and outbursts of the patients. If ever there was a warning to iron-fisted leaders, whether they be political, cultural or of any other stripe, that repression has a limited shelf life, this is it.

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Photo. Barb Gray .

Like its title, the latest, slightly unhinged show by A Company of Fools contains everything but the kitchen sink.

There’s Prospero and Miranda from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as well as that play’s shipwreck and island, that island being the setting for most of this play. Spunky, red-haired Anne magically appears from Green Gables. Ditto Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Puns, visual gags, slapstick humour, and a talking potato and carrot pepper the story. There’s a reference to the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and lines plucked from Shakespeare’s King Lear.

And, as the title promises, at the centre of it all are those red-nosed, trouble-courting clowns Pomme Frites and ‘Restes, the former as imperious as he was when he first appeared in the Fools’ The Danish Play years ago and the latter still as gullible but sweet as when he first clumped into view in the same show. They, together with Prospero and Miranda, were on a cruise ship (don’t ask) when it was swamped in a storm and all four were cast up on the island.

Chaotic? Yes, but also tightly ordered, smartly executed and one of the best things the Fools have done.

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