Lovely Lady Lump,
Lana Schwarcz (Melbourne, Australia)
Arts Court Theatre
Lana Schwarcz is a stand-up comic, so it’s not surprising that her solo, autobiographical show about breast cancer is a comedy. She tells jokes to an unseen radiation technologist during treatments. A flakey art therapist for cancer patients gets spoofed. Cancer itself is pilloried when Schwarcz, reversing roles by embodying the disease, depicts it as a second-rate performer in a comedy club who tells jokes like, “When I was a kid, I was really good at hide-and-seek. Sometimes people didn’t find me for years.” Schwacrz is open about herself, revisiting the terrible moment when she got her diagnosis, exploring how disease can threaten your self-identity by turning you into a body part, and then putting that part in the context of a whole person by baring her breasts on stage as she re-enacts the endless radiation sessions. Many have found the show at once hilarious and tear-provoking. Finding it neither, your reviewer mostly hoped it would end soon. You decide for yourself.

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Small Creatures Such as We
Created by Meagan McDonald & Vishesh Abeyratne
Produced by Angel in the Rafters Theatre

Joanna and Kit meet in their teens. He is a tough boy and she is a modest, religious girl. As opposites attract, Joanna and Kit fall in love.  It is an unsteady, adolescent relationship, but it is exciting and pure. The Romance finishes with an unexpected pregnancy and stillborn child. They part, each going a different direction. Still, they often think of each other, and finally meet again after 10 years. Now as adults, they talk about how their lives have been changed as a result of their past. By revealing sequences of their youth, they face their inner demons and expose their tortured minds.

Small Creatures Such as We is a well-written story in which Meagan McDonald and Vishesh Abeyratne explore the dark side of growing up. They probe such issues as violence among teenagers, fear of and confusion with circumstances they find themselves in, as well as unprotected sexual relationships and its consequences. Although the general tone of the play is tragic, the creators leave hope for the future. Does love conquer it all? The end seems to be rushed, and therefore lacks the conviction of the rest of the narrative. …

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Miss Bruce’s War
Created by Jean Duce Palmer
Produced by Elmwood School_Elmwood Theatre

Playwright Jean Duce Palmer wrote Miss Bruce’s War based on her own experience as a young schoolteacher in ruralAlberta during World War II. This semi-biographical work brings back a different era – a time where people sang patriotic song and helped the war effort any way they could.

Miss Bruce gets a three month job teaching a small group of children who happen to be of a German origin. Her assignment starts in January – the worst and the coldest part of year. The journey is long and tiring, she is cold and hungry, and her only wish is to reach her destination as soon as possible and get a chance to rest. As the story unfolds, Miss Bruce undergoes changes. She matures a little after every single event during her short stay in the area. Prejudice and insensitivity towards her neighbours disappear and she learns a lot about love and friendship. …

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Fugee
Production: Third Wall Academy
Created by Abi Morgan
Directed by James Richardson

Kojo is a refugee fron Ivory Cost. He is only 14, but has already lived a very adult life. When he was only 11, soldiers kidnapped him, took to a training camp and made a solder out of him. He watched soldiers kill his parents and younger brother, suffered unkindness of all kinds and was made to kill. Finely, he escaped, and with a fake visa, came to England, where he was put in a safe place for unaccompanied minors. There he lives with other children, none of whom speaks English. The only thing common to all is the horror they once lived through and managed to escape.

Kojo’s styory is not told  in chronological order. On the contrary, Fugee starts with the last scene of the story – the moment when Kojo kills a young man on the street. From that first scene untill the last one, the play is constructed through a numbe of snapshots: children bonding, falling in love, telling their war experience, Kojo remembering his parents, and finally, the moment when, due to miscommunication, the system in England accuses him of a false identity and kicks him out of the safe place. Scene by scene, Kojo’s story unfolds, and by the end, all snapshots fall in place and make a perfect unity. …

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Black Sheep Theatre (Ottawa), The Courtroom
It sounds like an idyllic spot, but Magic Unicorn Island is in fact a refuge about to confront its nemesis: The United Empire. How did the island, a Pacific Ocean home to one million children, get into this position? To answer that, writer/performer Jayson McDonald starts at the beginning — literally. His exceedingly dark-humoured solo show opens with a dude-like God fashioning the galaxy, cycles through millennia of human conflict, and winds up in some distant and ravaged future where the children of the world, led by a precocious and earnest 14-year-old named Shane, establish their own colony on a previously undiscovered island. McDonald’s cautionary tale includes a bunch of other characters including the Empire’s conniving leader, a front-porch philosopher, and a father who spews hatred toward every human including himself. Furious, entertaining and imaginative in accepted McDonald fashion, Magic Unicorn Island is named for a mythic creature, but its lesson is disquietingly realistic. …

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(Ottawa), Arts Court Theatre
War turns the world upside down, causing language to lose its meaning, relationships to be fraught, the grotesque to become the normal. Simon L. Lalande and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer, this cabaret-style show’s writers and principal performers, explore such outcomes of armed conflict in a production that’s long on concept but short on clarity, tension and other elements essential to maintaining our interest. LeSaux-Farmer plays a war correspondent whose encounter with destruction drives her into her own head where memories of remembered happier times play in near-constant performance. Lalande is an angel from Hell (whatever that is), a cabaret performer and other characters. There’s lots of physicality, two on-stage musical accompanists, and frequently baffling leaps in time, place and rationale as the playwrights pile one thing on top of another. That the show lacks structure was cringingly apparent when it concluded in such uncertain fashion that Lalande felt compelled to say to the audience: “The end.” It was indeed. …

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Aplombusrhombus (Ottawa), Academic Hall
An early contender for one of the best shows at this year’s Fringe, Cardinal is a powerfully affecting, clown-based journey into Alzheimer’s disease. Mitchel Rose and Madeleine Hall, dressed in red and white respectively, use just six chairs, a couple of flats and their own bodies to depict an intimate battle between memory and disease. Alzheimer’s being a vicious disrupter of communication, the two speak not a word as they track the confusion, fear and sometimes brief, liberating joy that mark memory’s confrontation with a sly, self-satisfied disease that cunningly builds a kind of symbiosis with its victim. At one point, the two opponents use the chairs as pieces in a game of checkers. You keep hoping that memory will win even though you know how this one is going to go. The show is compassionate, insightful and sometimes very funny as it tries to laugh valiantly at the disease. Most importantly, it’s true.

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