Category: Theatre in Ottawa and the region

Mauritius : A musical chairs of con artists is fast moving and absorbing.

Mauritius : A musical chairs of con artists is fast moving and absorbing.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

You don’t have to be an avid philatelist to be entertained by this drama about stamp collecting.

Essentially, Mauritius is a caper story with two legendary error-laden stamps as the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Conceived as musical chairs of con artists and propelled by the greed of all the participants, Mauritius is fast moving and absorbing. However, in focusing on the well-researched, main theme of a grab for rare stamps, playwright Theresa Rebeck chooses to allude to dark secrets and previous conflicts among the characters, without giving more than a hint of the back stories, a ploy that works only some of the time. Why, for instance, are the half-sisters who claim ownership of the family’s stamp collection so hostile to each other? What happened eight years earlier between the knowledgeable owner of the store and the psychopathic philatelist who craves the stamps? And did the third crooked philatelist have a connection with the younger sister before the con game began or did they simply come together because of the similarity of their goal?

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MY Brilliant Divorce: This infectiously lovable divorcee navigates an unforseen complication in her life with apparent ease.

MY Brilliant Divorce: This infectiously lovable divorcee navigates an unforseen complication in her life with apparent ease.

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Reviewed by Kat  Fournier.

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Photo: Lois Seigel

Kate Hurman is brilliant in My Brilliant Divorce, a monologue by Irish writer Geraldine Aron which is now playing at the Gladstone Theatre. The lone character is Angela, an irreverent middle-aged woman suddenly contending with divorce. Playwright Aron’s award winning script was originally performed across Ireland in a successful run which garnered a nomination for an Olivier Award and has subsequently been performed worldwide. Angela, the infectiously lovable divorcee, has appeared on stages from Nairobi to Prague and beyond.

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My Brilliant Divorce: A Shining Achievement

My Brilliant Divorce: A Shining Achievement

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One-person shows are drearily frequent on the theatrical scene — and often they smack more of budget-controlling measures than anything else. But Geraldine Aron’s My Brilliant Divorce, now at the Gladstone, is an exception. That’s due, not only to the quality of the text but to Kate Hurman’s terrific performance as a woman picking up the pieces of her shattered life after the breakdown of her marriage.

Hurman makes the character of Angela our irresistible confidant in this play, inviting us to share moments of rage, resentment, sorrow, despair and humiliation, but also ensuring that we also experience the release of laughter when her naturally buoyant sense of humour reasserts itself.

To a point, our response to Angela’s unreeling of her miseries may seem suspect. Should we really be enjoying Hurman this much as she rants about her estranged spouse’s new girlfriend, a sexpot with the voluptuous lips of Angelina Jolie? Or, as she caustically recalls her encounters with a chauvinistic divorce attorney, or as she makes a disastrous middle-aged attempt to re-enter the dating circuit?

There’s a certain element of the spectator sport in our natures when it comes to gluing ourselves to the spectacle of a human train wreck — witness the addiction many of us have to the ongoing Rob Ford saga — and we can be cocooned against its full implications by knowing that it’s not happening to us.

But Geraldine Aron’s textured and affectionate script offers a bouquet of opportunities to an attentive actress. The play, discreetly directed by the reliable John P. Kelly, has a natural flow at the Gladstone. And, thanks to Hurman, who also takes on a variety of other roles, we’ll never make the error of regarding My Brilliant Divorce as no more than an extended stand-up routine.

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My Brilliant Divorce. A one-hander that works brilliantly

My Brilliant Divorce. A one-hander that works brilliantly

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A one-person show works only if it is rich in content, has a fine dramatic arc, quality production values and, most of all, a first-class performer.

The SevenThirty/Pat Moylan production of My Brilliant Divorce by Geraldine Aron has all of the above.

Early on, it seems that it might be a lightweight comedy shrugging off the sadness of marital failure. But, Aron’s script moves on from the initial dismissal of the errant husband, through the gamut of emotions — anger, depression, loneliness, desperation — and actions ranging from the contemplation of suicide to the emotional suicide of trying to revive the dead marriage. Eventually, acceptance is followed by a new and healthier life after divorce.

Kate Hurman delivers a powerful and beautifully sustained characterization of Angela, the discarded wife who was once half of the world’s happiest couple, as well as throwing in cameos of a number of the people she meets on her journey towards survival with only her dog, Dexter, by her side and voices at the other end of the telephone to break the monotony of her life.

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My Brilliant Divorce : Kate Hurman upstages Geraldine Aron’s Text

My Brilliant Divorce : Kate Hurman upstages Geraldine Aron’s Text

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Photo. Veooz.com

Kate Hurman is one of Ottawa’s theatre treasures who is not on stage as much as she should be. Here, Director John P. Kelly has given her Geraldine Aron’s juicy monologue where she can show us the great variety of her talents. The play is written in the form of a diary,  where a certain Angela Kennedy Lipsky, an Amercian living in the UK,  tells us the whole trajectory of her post-marriage life. It begins at the beginning, with the sudden announcement by her ex-husband that he wants to leave. “Round Head” as she so affectionately calls him, quickly packs his bag and clumps down the stairs of their London flat, making a quick getaway to join his “Rosy” from Argentina, leaving Angela more than stunned. 

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My Brilliant Divorce: Kate Hurman walks the balance between humour and poignancy

My Brilliant Divorce: Kate Hurman walks the balance between humour and poignancy

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Photo: Lois Seigel

Angela Kennedy-Lipsky can crank out shrewd and funny lines: “Smugly round,” she says of her ex-husband’s head. At the same time, she’s so lonely that she sends a postcard to herself from a disastrous resort holiday.

And that’s the real trick to Geraldine Aron’s comedy My Brilliant Divorce, a one-woman show here starring Kate Hurman: to walk the balance beam between humour and poignancy that makes Angela a full human to whom we can relate.

Directed by John P. Kelly, this production slips more than once in the first act, only to stride beautifully through the second.

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Oil and Water: Notes after seeing the production at the NAC.

Oil and Water: Notes after seeing the production at the NAC.

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This is not a finished review because I was off to a  theatre conference in Trois Rivières but this is a play that deserves a comment. Oil and Water is an important narrative that brings much to Canadian contemporary history but the play and especially the staging of the performance are terrible disappointments. How can one find a parallel between  the oppression of miners in Newfoundland the poverty created by the end of the fishing industry, with racism in the United States?. …

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Dancing with rage: Chutzpah mingles with rage as Mary Walsh bares her soul on the stage.

Dancing with rage: Chutzpah mingles with rage as Mary Walsh bares her soul on the stage.

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Photos Barb Gray.

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah to ambush political figures and conduct mock interviews. It takes nerve for a woman of a certain age (actually 61) to sport a ridiculous warrior princess outfit, complete with plastic sword. But both are as nothing compared to stripping down to unflattering, expansive and expanded spandex, black underwear and making fun of the aging body squeezed in and flowing out.

As Newfoundland comedienne Mary Walsh a.k.a. Marg Delahunty says, even the nuns who despaired of her through her schooldays never thought she would sink this low. But that is part of her charm for audiences. Her self-deprecating humour in general and this moment in particular (further enhanced by attacking the flesh flow with electrician’s tape) is one of the funniest and most endearing aspects of her one-woman show, Dancing with Rage.

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Drama at Inish: Good Performances Rescue this Drama at the OLT.

Drama at Inish: Good Performances Rescue this Drama at the OLT.

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Drama At Inish is a trifle of a play which seeks to wrest a full evening’s entertainment out of a trifle of a situation. As such, it poses a challenge to anyone attempting it.

Lennox Robinson’s 81-year-old comedy has to do with an Irish seaside town and the impact on it of a travelling theatre troupe which has no intention of providing the kind of light summer entertainment to which it has become accustomed. Instead the townsfolk get a diet of gloom and doom — Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg — and their reaction to what they see on stage casts a pall over the community even as people continue flocking to the performances.

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Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece

Death of a Salesman: A resonant tribute to Miller’s masterpiece

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Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – about the delusional, beaten-down anti-hero Willy Loman, a travelling salesman you’d not look twice at were you to pass him on the street – is a play at once timeless and specific, a story one instinctively relates to at the same time it’s a snapshot of the American dream embodied in one man and his family circa the mid-20th century.

So Chamber Theatre Hintonburg’s decision to enact the play on a tiny stage at the Carleton Tavern, while creating staging problems, seems appropriate: a story writ large and small at the same time.

The centre of that story is Willy, and Donnie Laflamme gives us a richly realized characterization of this man whose disintegration you watch with the same slightly voyeuristic guilt you’d bring to watching a train wreck. Hope, anger, love, confusion: Willy’s mind is a tornado of emotion, and Laflamme captures it all in the passionate, loose-cannon style that is his acting trademark.

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