Playwright Stephen Massicotte’s storyline is appealing if predictable: boy (Charlie, played by Nicholas Maillet) meets girl (Mary, played by Emily Walsh) just as World War I breaks out. They fall for each other, ride around a bit on a horse (in this case, a wooden prop that no amount of imagination can turn into anything but a wooden prop), share tender moments, and eventually come to the end that too many young couples do in wartime.

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Photo by Andrew Alexander. Hannah Kaya (Brooke) and    Donna (Geneviève Sirois).

Where would we be without our stories? In more trouble, it seems, than we already are. Sories – certainly when they’re about our own lives – are how we dilute pain and celebrate the good stuff by sharing the tales with others. By sharing difficult past events we can also separate those events from ourselves enough to put them into perspective and move on.

That’s pretty much how it works in How It Works, Daniel MacIvor’s play about a dysfunctional family’s stumbling toward the light or at least toward a brighter shade of dark. And despite some problems on opening night, Plosive Productions captures well this story about stories.

MacIvor, weaving flashbacks into his narrative, tracks the increasingly complex interplay between four people: Al (David Whiteley), a cop looking for a settled life; his perceptive, beer-chugging, girlfriend Christine (Michelle LeBlanc); Al’s uptight ex, Donna (Geneviève Sirois); and Brooke, Al and Donna’s drug addicted, 19-year-old daughter (Hannah Kaya).

It’s a potent mix of characters, each damaged in his or her own way but all accessible to any theatregoer with even a modicum of self-recognition.

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Reviewed Thurs., Sept. 13. Posted September 17.

Photo: Wayne Cuddington for the Citizen. Paul Rainville and Kate Hurman.

OTTAWA — It’s not exactly breaking news to say that communication often has little to do with words. But playwright Rick Chafe and the Great Canadian Theatre Company say it so eloquently in this alternately hilarious and touching show which opens the new GCTS season that their message bears almost endless repeating.
Chafe’s story, which he based partly on his experience with his own father, is richly textured emotionally but has a simple enough storyline.
An aging man named Ernie (Paul Rainville) has had a stroke, leaving him with yawning holes in his memory along with aphasia, a speech impairment. He can converse readily but balls up some words, calling his apartment a “square” thing for example.

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For the  Ottawa Citizen. Photo: Andrew Alexander  “I am Sean Harkin and I am someone!” declares a young and seriously troubled character at an early point in Marie Jones’ tragicomedy Stones in His Pockets.

It’s a brave declaration of selfhood by this youth who, in that moment, speaks for so many of his fellow countrymen in contemporary Ireland. And, like other attempts by those countrymen to drag themselves from the mire of economic dislocation, cultural appropriation and defeatism, Harkin’s proclamation is doomed to be little more than words.

All of which makes Jones’ play, shrewd and frequently very funny, ultimately a dark meditation on her native Ireland. That juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy demands subtle intensity and focus in a production if the play is to strike its intended sparks. That doesn’t always happen in this show, which opens The Gladstone’s new season.

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This show is presented by Third Wall Theatre by the  Stichting Vrije Val/Muziektheatre Frank Groothof Production    in association with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

Why couldn’t Van Gogh, who killed himself in 1890 at the age of 37, have integrated some of the joy of the sunflowers he painted so exuberantly into his own tormented life? That’s just one of the many questions Frank Groothof’s compelling one-man show provokes.

In Ottawa for a single night at The Gladstone Theatre,  the 75-minute production traces Van Gogh’s life from boyhood through the years of exploding creativity and growing obsessive behaviour to, ultimately, his death. Groothof plays both the painter and his younger, devoted brother Theo using a cap and increasingly agitated body language to depict the former and glasses and a gentle demeanour to capture the latter.

Recorded music from the 19th century and images of Van Gogh’s figure studies, portraits, and marvellous land and city scapes displayed on a large screen dovetail with the narrative.

It’s not a perfect piece of work. One wishes for a touch more insight into Van Gogh’s childhood, and Groothof, whose native tongue is not English, does muff lines. But like Van Gogh and his art, the well-paced show is both layered and passionate.

Ottawa playwright and actor Pierre Brault has, over the past dozen or so years, established himself as a singular and important figure in theatre both in Ottawa and beyond. One-man shows like 5 O’Clock Bells, about jazz guitar legend Lenny Breau, are wonderful pieces. So it feels heretical to say that Blood on the Moon is no longer the startlingly compelling piece it was when, after debuting at the 1999 Ottawa Fringe Festival, it was expanded and mounted at the National Arts Centre, toured extensively and, in 2007, was adapted as a Gemini-winning film for Bravo television.

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