For the Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, June 18, 2011

Gather five psychiatric patients for their weekly group therapy session, have their shrink mysteriously murdered, and then add a couple of cops to investigate the crime. Result: a play that pretty much flatlines from the get-go. Alana Kainz’s script, potentially interesting and intended to be darkly comic, trips itself up by using stereotypical characters (Susan, a girl who can’t say no to men; Jack, a phobic nerd), bad jokes (“She has more troubles than Donald Trump on a windy day”) and a predictable plotline (did one of these neurotic patients do the doc in?). Kainz knows the horrors that unchecked mental illness can produce: her first husband, CJOH-TV newscaster Brian Smith, was gunned down by a paranoid schizophrenic man in 1995. But she doesn’t incorporate nearly enough reality into her script to make it engaging. Paul Dervis directs the show which features, among others, an overacting Jerome Bourgault as the damaged Len and a funny Charlie Ebbs as the narcissistic Antoine.

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Padre X

Looking Glass Productions

For the Ottawa Citizen, June 18, 2011

War, Padre X tells us, is “the closest thing to hell a human being can experience on this earth.” Actor and writer Marc Moir stares into that hell, and we along with him, in his true story of a Second World War chaplain whose two greatest obligations were to God and his fellow soldiers. At the centre of this compelling show is the catastrophic Allied invasion of Dieppe, where countless men lost their lives and Padre X discovered the meaning of his. Moir’s depiction of the chaplain from small-town Ontario is nuanced and satisfying, a mix of the decent men once portrayed by film actor Jimmy Stewart and the memorable cadences of CBC Radio storyteller Stuart McLean. The show is too long, and the short intermission — feeling so out of place in a fringe performance — breaks the momentum, but Padre X’s story, like the legacy of the war, resonates deeply.

We all whine about how demanding our jobs are, what tyrants we have for bosses. Dying Hard could cure us of that forever. Mikaela Dyke, a riveting actor, has adapted for the stage six of Elliott Leyton’s first-hand accounts of miners and their families in 1975, whose lives were both supported and destroyed by Newfoundland’s fluorspar mines. Men went underground to earn a living only to wind up with silicosis or cancer or bodies crippled from accidents. Their wives, already caring for children, ended up looking after their husbands as well and stretching inadequate compensation cheques beyond the breaking point. Some of these people stayed positive, others turned bitter. None escaped the legacy of mining. Dyke’s characterizations are vivid and telling, and her use of verbatim theatre technique, in which interviewees’ exact words are used for the script, is thrilling. Only one — old Pat Sullivan — needs work: his accent is so thick that much of what he says is incomprehensible. While the show has some humour, and the fortitude of these people is inspiring, Rebecca Flynn has the final word: “We have a thick graveyard, a fat graveyard.”

Fringe festival tickets and information: 613-232-6162, ottawafringe.com.