So who did kill Spalding Gray, the American monologist who died in 2004? Considering that he committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in New York, you’d think the question unnecessary.

Turns out the question is very much necessary according to Daniel MacIvor’s disarmingly idiosyncratic solo show about himself, Gray, a guy called Howard, and some pretty big issues including death, self-forgiveness and truth.

Principal among those issues is truth. The question of who killed Gray is, after all, a question about the truth, metaphoric or otherwise, of what happened, and as MacIvor makes clear, certainty about any situation or person is a moving target. While that’s hardly a stop-the-presses insight, the ways in which the playwright frames that target make for a fine 85 minutes.

The show, directed by Daniel Brooks, is a skein of stories and enacted pieces that link MacIvor, Gray and Howard in progressively inextricable fashion.

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Photo, courtesy of the Edmonton Journal.

About one hour and twenty minutes elapse, just enough time to give the public a chance to see that Daniel MacIvor is a masterful story teller who holds the audience’s undivided attention, to the point where you can hear a pin drop. And it almost doesn’t even matter what MacIvor is saying because his natural demeanor and relaxed manner are so disarming, we fall quickly under his spell. This is verbatim theatre, but then it’s also MacIvor being MacIvor, using all his tried and true stage strategies such as his reading, to the audience, a negative review by Robert Cushman that hurt, or doing one of his unexpected interviews with the audience. In fact he invites a young man at the front to come on stage and answer a few questions. This is not a plant! It’s authentic. The young man happened to work in the ticket office and the actor asked him questions that in fact, gave us a resumé of the play. That prologue was clever and when the audience was ready, away went the actor with his own narrative.

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Soprano Neema Bickersteth. Photo John Lauener

Cette production multidisciplinaire, une création mondiale, a marqué l’ouverture du festival culturel annuel promu par le Centre national des Arts à Ottawa. Cette année, « la scène d’Ontario » est à l’honneur. Parmi les 90 événements prévus, dont la danse de toutes les origines, les « arts médiatiques » ainsi qu’une grande variété de musiques classiques, populaires et traditionnelles, il y aura des rencontres littéraires (anglophones et francophones) et une quinzaine de spectacles de théâtre.

Le chant du siècle nous ramène aux expériences scéniques et musicales de John Cage sauf que ce contenu est autre. L’unique artiste en scène, la soprano Neema Bickersteth, une figure sobre, jeune et filiforme, dont la belle voix d’opéra, puissante et dramatique est le socle dramatico-musical de la soirée. Sans paroles, le spectacle nous raconte par des images, l’histoire de la femme noire au Canada. Appuyée par des paysages filmés, des intérieurs qui se transforment à vue d’œil, tous les effets visuels indiquent la remontée dans le temps à travers les proscéniums qui encadrent l’espace de jeu. Dans ce contexte, la soprano adopte une gestualité inspirée de la danse moderne afin d’indiquer l’évolution des rapports entre cette femme et son milieu socio-culturel. Grâce à un sens de théâtre hérité des spectacles de John Cage, du jeu transgressif de Mauricio Kagel qui subvertit tous les instruments qui lui tombent sous la main, et un texte d’Alice Walker (À la recherche des jardins de nos mères), l’équipe du Volcano Theatre a réussi un événement d’une excellente qualité visuelle et musicale.

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National Theatre Live….with Ralph Fiennes

If you saw the 1987 movie, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, then you know exactly how Dirty Dancing will play out on stage.

In many respects, the aim of the touring production currently at the National Arts Centre’s Southam Hall, seems to be to reproduce the movie — hence the many scene changes and the use of video effects to deliver fields of waving grass, watery playgrounds and, of course, projections of dancers.

Despite the note in the program that the stage show contains a number of songs that were not included in the movie version, the film trumps the stage show, primarily because on stage the flimsy nature of the dated book is more evident.

But, as long as you understand that a show whose most famous line is “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” is unlikely to have a complex and meaningful script or message and that there will be only passing references to major events of historical importance, you can just sit back and enjoy a blast of high energy, some good dancing and a couple of fine singers. Soloists Doug Carpenter and Jennlee Shallow do a particularly fine job.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova. David Whitely and Chandel Gambles.

There are those who will no doubt be attracted to a new Ottawa production of Venus In Fur by some of the hype surrounding it — the promise of titillating sexual mind games and the opportunity to ogle one of the characters in various stages of undress.

There will also be some who will insist on applauding David Ives’s Tony-Award-winning Broadway hit as no more than an entertaining sex comedy cheeky enough to probe some of the darker recesses of sado-masochistic culture. Indeed, it’s scarcely surprising that Venus In Fur is being produced all over the place these days — not always for reasons necessarily artistic. Sex sells — especially the naughtier brand that on the surface drives this play. So the guffaws and giggles that Plosive Productions is generating from the show now on view at the Gladstone are perhaps inevitable. But let it be noted that the laughter begins diminishing as the play reaches its creepy, identity-bending conclusion — and this reflects the virtues of Catriona Ledger’s production and the often brave performances of David Whiteley and Chandel Gambles.

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Photo: Mark S. Howard.

City of Angels, currently playing at Boston’s Lyric Stage explores the limits of meta-. This musical is meta-theatrical, meta-cinematic, and meta-literary. Its intricate tale takes place in two worlds, the real and the “reel” or movieland during the 1940s. There are plots and subplots galore which, along with flashbacks, can confuse. The tone is intended to be parodic.

Stine (Phil Tayler), a detective story writer, is in the throes of adapting one of his novels as a film noir to be directed and produced by the egocentric, implacable, and manipulative Buddy Fidler (J. T. Turner). Stine struggles with the script, which is enacted before the audience as he writes. When he makes a change, the film’s actors, all of whom are dressed in black and white, begin the scene again. Stine’s constant rewrites are the result of his inability to please Fidler. Stine wants to express his social conscience; Fidler demands a hit.

Stone (Ed Hoopman) is the tough private eye of Stine’s opus and his alter ego. While Tayler plays Stine as something of a nerd, Hoopman is attractive and vibrant. All the other actors perform two characters. Although one is “realistic” and the other filmic, both of the characters share similarities. As for example: Leigh Barrett plays Stone’s hard-bitten secretary as if she had wandered out of The Maltese Falcoln and, as Buddy Fidler’s ironic girl Friday falls in love with Stine. Samantha Richert, Fidler’s sexy wife is also Alaura Kingsley, the “femme fatale” of the film noir.

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Photo: Barb Gray

Dean Gilmour as Anse, the patriarch of the family

The youth is engaged in a battle of wills with the unruly horse that he loves. And he seems to be straining every muscle as he’s thrown about the stage and into the air by the whiplash resistance of his steed. But, of course, there’s no animal on the stage of the NAC Theatre — except in our imagination.

However, we do have a determined young actor named Ben Muir in the role of Jewel, the fierce and haunted bastard son who is perhaps the most compelling character in Take Me Back To Jefferson — the title lately bestowed by Theatre Smith-Gilmour on its 2013 adaptation of William Faulkner’s great novel, As I Lay Dying.

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Hillbillies and commedia d’ell arte are an unlikely combination, but this is the style delivered in Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s Take Me Back to Jefferson.

In adapting William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour rely primarily on physical theatre and the imagination of their audiences rather than on elaborate sets or lengthy speeches.

The dying matriarch of the family wants to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson. Therefore, her poverty-stricken family attempts to comply, meeting the extreme challenges of flood, fire and impassable roads along the way — not to mention one of their number losing his mind, a second breaking his leg (stupidly cast in concrete) — while their selfish patriarch bullies them all, the pregnant, teenage daughter of the house tries to arrange for an abortion and a little cruelty to animals is thrown in for good measure. …

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Photo: Wendy Wagner

The Lion in Winter began with a whimper rather than a bang, lasting for fewer than 100 performances on Broadway. Its future looked up when it headed for the silver screen with Katherine Hepburn in the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

But a recent West End revival was described as “Broadway hokum” by Michael Billington of The Guardian. Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph was a little more positive in talking of it as “historical hokum but high class hokum much funnier on stage than in the overblown film.”

Set up to portray the ultimate dysfunctional family, James Goldman’s script throws in the odd tender moment in his portrayal of the love/hate relationships between King Henry II, his wife, Eleanor, their three sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John and Alais, the sister of Philip, King of France. She was betrothed to Richard as a child, raised by Eleanor and is now Henry’s mistress.

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