Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell NAC English Theatre Presentation By Trina Davies Directed byPeter Hinton
Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell is a story about love between two geniuses – the famous inventor of the telephone and a woman of exceptional intellect and strength.
Mabel Gardiner Hubbard (later Bell), who lost hearing to scarlet fever when she was five years old, coped with a world of silence with enormous willpower. Thanks to her curiosity, intellect and love for life, she achieved what a woman of her time would rarely dream of. …
This Flight Tonight, Songs of Joni Mitchell, Bear & Co. Directed by Eleanor Crowder
The single most impressive aspect of This Flight Tonight is the number of musical instruments that the four-member cast play with ease. Each one handles a minimum of three different instruments from piano, drums, electric or acoustic guitar to mandolin, banjo, harmonic, flute and Irish harp, as well as such rhythm emphasizers as a tambourine and maracas.
The 20+ songs selected from the more than 200 in Joni Mitchell’s huge repertoire include some of her best-known works, such as Both Sides Now, Chelsea Morning and Big Yellow Taxi, and several that pinpoint significant moments in her life, such as Blue Motel Room, or of an era, such as Woodstock. …
Silence brings to the spotlight the romantic life of the husband and wife behind the invention of the telephone. The opening night of the 2018–2019 season found the National Arts Centre turning the spotlight on a Canadian icon and his wife, Alexander Graham and Mabel Hubbard Bell, in the play Silence. This Grand Theatre (London, ON) production, brought to life on the national stage by director and former NAC English Theatre Artistic Director Peter Hinton, eschews simple biography and hagiography to focus on the romance between Alec and Mabel, of their endearing courtship and often difficult, but always loving, marriage. …
Cliffhanger by James Yaffe. Directed by Joe O’Brien. Playing at the Ottawa Little Theatre to Nov. 3
Cliffhanger is at best an indifferent play, and whatever strengths it does possess are not well-served by Ottawa Little Theatre’s current production.
Playwright James Yaffe’s apparent intention was to write a dark comedy-thriller about the world of academia while also attempting to bolster it with the more serious intent of examining the true meaning of ethical conduct. …
Cliffhanger By James Yaffe Ottawa Little Theatre Directed by Joe O’Brien
As the plot of Cliffhanger unfolds gently, it seems that playwright James Yaffe — a respected humanities professor like his protagonist — is presenting wishful thinking about the fate of an unpleasant, incompetent department head and a particularly nasty failing student.
The “Mr. Chips” type prof has plenty of time (too much) to philosophize about ethics through the 1985 comedy, which never makes it to mystery thriller status. In the current Ottawa Little Theatre production, the leisurely pace is partly attributable to the writing and partly to the directing style of Joe O’Brien. …
Le tigre bleu de l’Euphrate is a solo show capturing the emotional, agonizing final night of Alexander the Great, as he lays dying of a fever.Written by Laurent Gaudé and brought to life in a beautiful performance by Emmanuel Schwartz, the performance is a monologue and meditation as the first man to make a serious effort at conquering the known world faces his own demise. Over the course of the hour and a half–long show, Alexander reflects upon both his mortality and immortality, slipping into despair as disease claims him, but finding solace in his military exploits that will make him as immortal as the soil beneath his feet.
Le tigre bleu isn’t simply a history lesson though. While it does spend some time recounting his campaigns in Persia, his founding of Alexandria, his battles in the Indus River Valley, and his life in Babylon, it is a much more introspective look at Alexander than offered in history books. We can’t know what Alexander was thinking in his final hours, so playwright Gaudé creates an Alexander grappling with guilt over the countless lives lost on his grand campaigns, but also one assured of his everlasting fame from those same battles that haunt him at the end of his life. …
The Last Spartan. Written and performed by Pierre Brault
Sleeping Dog Theatre
Pierre Brault’s signature style is to deliver a compelling one-person show in several voices. His material is invariably well researched and his switches in character always well distinguished.
In The Last Spartan, first presented to great acclaim at the Ottawa Fringe in June, he tells the story of Dorion. A disgraced Spartan, he is being given the opportunity to redeem himself by defending a playwright who dared to mock the gods and challenge Spartan values. Redemption for Dorion is dependent on his losing the case and thereby reaffirming all that Sparta holds dear.
In Ancient Sparta, bravery and military power were consider of primary importance. To die in battle was honourable. To retreat was disgrace. Dorion had been declared a “trembler” when he was among the group who surrendered to Athens. During the four years he lived in Sparta’s rival city state, he learned to appreciate the values that predominated in Athens (the seat of democracy) where education and cultural pursuits were highly valued. …
Fierce directed by George Walker.Black Sheep Theatre and Criminal Girlfriends
Two women damaged by life bond as they reveal their secrets in a therapy session fueled by drugs and alcohol.
Intense, occasionally funny, with fluid dialogue, Fierce might work were it not for the fact that one of the women is a psychiatrist. It is extremely difficult in my opinion, to buy into the possibility that a qualified professional who has met this patient only once before would crumble so quickly.
Surely she would have mustered her defences over years of overcoming her unsavoury past, more than a decade of academic effort to become a licensed medical specialist and subsequent experience in dealing with manipulative patients?
Despite the fact that both performers deliver strong characterizations, they must surmount the challenge of the contrived situation and the fact that, even though it is turned upside down, audiences are basically eavesdropping on a warped therapy session. …
Fierce by George F. Walker. A Black Sheep productions
Gladstone Theatre to Oct. 13
You have to be careful with George F. Walker. The outward trappings of his plays can be so dramatically enticing that they can fool you into thinking you’re watching something good.
This prolific Torontonian knows how to set up a situation bristling with potential. And in the case of his recent play, Fierce, now at the Gladstone, it has to do with a psychiatric session that is driven off the rails by the patient. So yes, the idea is promising.
Walker also has an engaging ear for language, and his writing crackles with the kind of naturalistic dialogue that can seduce us into the world of his plays. It can be argued that playgoers aren’t getting a real world here; rather they are being ushered into Walker’s own restless landscape of the imagination. But no matter — major Walker successes like Zastrozzi, Theatre Of The Film Noir and Nothing Sacred show that it can be a weirdly credible landscape, albeit anchored to its own skewed reality.
But what of the credibility factor when it comes to Fierce? Let it be said immediately that this Black Sheep two-hander features outstanding performances from Pandora Topp, as an uptight psychiatrist named Maggie, and Emmelia Gordon as the patient who turns the tables on her. These two are compelling, but they are nonetheless attempting a salvage operation on problematic dramatic material. …
Pandora Topp as Maggie and Emmelia Gordon as Jayne in a scene from Fierce. Photo courtesy of Black Sheep Theatre.
Ultimately, we’re all orphans, aren’t we?
Sure, we carve out a place in the world, cultivate relationships, maybe try shielding ourselves from the truth of our loneliness with drugs or booze. But in the end we’re each of us alone.
At least that’s the position of Maggie in George F. Walker’s new two-hander Fierce now at The Gladstone.
Turfed from her home at a tender age to grow up on the streets – “discarded” is how she describes it – Maggie (Pandora Topp) is a tightly wound therapist with an apparent grip on her life. But an undermining sense of abandonment and alienation has never left her. “I don’t really know who I am,” she says at one point. …
