The Surprise

Martin Dockery, Brooklyn, N.Y.
ODD Box

Reviewed for the Ottawa Citizen

The Story: Martin Dockery – who’s lightened our lives  with Wanderlust, The Bike Trip, in years past- rockets through another true-life adventure in his usual riveting storytelling style. This time it’s rooted in his trip to  Vietnam and Cambodia to meet for the first time his two Vietnamese siblings, both decades younger than he. The story is a series of surprises, none more memorable than the wrenching conclusion.

Pros:   Dockery’s gifts, here in full flight, include not just an extraordinary sense of dramatic pacing but an eye for character, place and the funny or poignant or just unexpected element in an otherwise unremarkable event. This tale of family, love, other cultures and our essential aloneness in life feels as true as anything he’s ever done.

Cons:   Dockery’s high-energy shows can be exhausting, but who’s complaining?

The Story An Italian raised in Texas decides to stake a claim in New York City show business. Since she needs to work while awaiting her big break, she lands a job as manager of a high-end steak house, providing the fodder for Carolann Valentino’s first-class, true-life, one-woman musical about following your dreams and the idiots who clutter the highway between you and your goal.
Pros Valentino, a firecracker of a performer, sinks her teeth into the audience as though it were a prime rib steak and never lets go. Her parade of characters – a ditzy hostess, obnoxious customers, a clueless fellow manager – are boldly delineated, and you feel as though you’ve been given a ringside seat in this restaurant where dysfunctional humanity is the main course. Valentino also serves up terrific songs including a funny and lewd variation on Moon River.
Cons What there are don’t matter.
Verdict Delicious.

Burnt at the Steak

Carolann Valentino Productions, New York City
Academic Hall

The Story :  Playwright Jayson McDonald tackles identity, privacy and societal disintegration with this sci-fi police story for two actors. He also frequently waxes poetic, a less than desirable move. Without revealing too much of the interminable plot, the story takes place at some future time when a virus has given people the mental ability to share memories. That’s helpful when a constable who’s particularly proficient at rummaging through the heads of others (all played by the second actor) goes searching for a missing woman. If you attend the show, you’ll learn the outcome.

Pros :  With the current flap about police access to our private digital lives, McDonald may have hit a topical nerve. There’s also some fun speculation about accessing memories of events that have not yet happened.

Cons:   The script comes off as prime-time television fare, and the actors aren’t up to the demands of their roles.

Verdict A case of unfulfilled potential.

The City That Eats You

Squirrels at War, London, Ont.

Arts Court Library

Reviewed by Patrick Langston

A Mind Full of Dopamine written & performed by Rory Ledbetter

Rory Ledbetter, a masterful storyteller with a big stage presence, rockets us down the dark side of the gambling highway by recounting a gambling addiction that consumed him and left him shockingly deep in debt. He blames no one, not even himself, for the addiction – it is, he explains, the thrilling rush of dopamine, that trigger in the brain over which we have no control, that hooks the gambler. Ledbetter intersperses his narrative with harmonica riffs that give us a chance to catch our collective breath during his pell-mell performance. One problem in an otherwise gripping show: Ledbetter is an enthusiastic guy, but that translates into shouting his lines – inappropriate for a small venue like the Arts Court Library.

Plays at Arts Court Library