According to the Director’s Notes, Marion Bridge is about three East Coast women trying to tell their own story, and to get that story straight. Of course, the difficulty in getting any story straight is the myriad of personal details and emotions we keep locked up inside. The more we lock ourselves up, the easier it is to misunderstand and pass over each other’s perspectives, even if we’ve technically lived the same experiences. Marion Bridge is yet another dark comedy about a highly dysfunctional family. Stories like these are a dime a dozen. However, the heartwarming production of Marion Bridge differentiates itself by truly focusing on the humanity of its subjects – flaws, misunderstandings, and inner worlds. The production is engaging and compelling with the different aspects coming together to form a heart-warming whole.

The three sisters in Marion Bridge are brought together in Cape Breton in order to be with their dying mother. From the moment the play opens, the tension between them is palpable. Each of them, Agnes, Theresa, and Louise, carries her pain in a different way. Agnes (a furiously sarcastic Robin Guy) shields herself in alcohol and irony while struggling to make it as an actress in Toronto. Theresa (a restrained Shawna Pasini) is a nun who lives a cloistered life and blankets herself in responsibility. She is wound up so tightly that one gets the impression that event the slightest relaxation would find her crumbed on the floor. Louise (a wonderfully direct Cindy Beaton), the “strange one” of the family, lives in her own world of daytime television. As the story progresses and the women are faced with more obstacles (dinner with their estranged father, the death of their mother, etc), chinks begin appearing in their armour, bringing them closer together.  …

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Sabrina Fair is a Cinderella story that makes wealth the key to overcoming class differences.

In the 1964 movie adaptation of Samuel A. Taylor’s romantic comedy, which premiered on Broadway in 1953, Audrey Hepburn played Sabrina. As the daughter of the long-time chauffeur of a rich Long Island family returning after five years in Paris, her combination of innocence and sophistication was so memorable that her performance continues to cast a long shadow more than half a century later.

In the Ottawa Little Theatre production, directed by Venetia Lawless, the slim, dark-haired Jane Chambers plays Sabrina somewhat in the style and image of Hepburn. She even sounds a little like the movie star, particularly in the exposition-heavy Act I. Despite her lively characterization, Chambers — and Lawless — might have been wiser to present a slightly different take on Sabrina. (In fact, the playwright’s son, David Taylor, has been quoted as saying “My father said — I think quite rightly —  that to do the exact same movie that had been made in the 1950s was wrong, because the story didn’t make sense any more. [His] recommendation was: ‘At least cast a black actress!’”)

This aside, the OLT production is true to the time period (great costuming from Susan MacKinlay) and cast members have a clear understanding of their roles and social standing. …

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It’a difficult to understand the esteem in which Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge is held in some quarters. Even with as solid a production as the one given it by Ottawa’s new Three Sisters Theatre Company, it remains a cliche-ridden excursion into the dreary world of family angst.

That’s not to say that this world isn’t worth exploring dramatically, The stark insights of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming testify to its continuing validity. But MacIvor’s play has nothing new to say in its portrait pf three sisters in a moment of crisis. And it certainly suffers from overload — as though weighting these siblings down with a catalogue of terrible events in their lives is sufficient to give the whole piece “significance.”

Well, not really. Not when the play’s psychology is pretty shallow, not when the pile-up of revelations starts veering into contrived soap opera. Not with a script afraid to acknowledge that the processes of reconciliation aren’t something that can be neatly brought off in two patently artificial hours of stage time.

…

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Welcome to a very dysfunctional family brought together by imminent death. Three sisters, Agnes, Theresa and Louise, assembled to care for their dying mother, reveal their insecurities, variances in memories of events and, most of all, hostility to each other.

Each of the three is deeply flawed, filled with resentment and hiding from the world in her own way. Agnes had escaped from the Cape Breton home by going west to begin an unsuccessful acting career in Toronto, drinking her way into oblivion — as her mother had done while the girls were growing up. Theresa, the “good” middle sister, is literally cloistered from the world since she became a nun, but is now in the midst of a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, the youngest sibling, Louise — officially regarded as the strange one — stayed at home. Her safety net is daytime television and a love of automobiles.

To add to the strain of the renewed togetherness among the three, their father wants to see them. Divorced from their mother long ago, he is now aphasic and living with a very young partner (and, as the girls find out, another man who is assumed to be her lover). …

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There’s a moment in the National Arts Centre’s worthy production of David Hare’s controversial docudrama, Stuff Happens, when the Bush administration’s determination to launch war against Iraq shows its true, frightening colours.

It comes in a confrontation between U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat whose UN team has found no evidence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction that are purported to threaten world peace.

Blix, in David Warburton’s excellent portrayal, is the courtly Scandinavian, whose own integrity will never provide the Bush regime with the false pretext it needs for going to war. But in Cheney, he’s confronting a smug thug who — in Paul Rainville’s entirely believable characterization — is pursuing his own bully agenda. So we have Cheney, secure in his faith in American exceptionalism, warning Blix that the U.S. will not hesitate to discredit the UN weapons inspectors if they don’t support Washington’s own dubious intelligence regarding weaponry that ultimately proves to be non-existent. …

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Anyone who felt a frisson of dread at President Obama’s request to Congress to authorize military force against ISIS should see this powerful production of British playwright David Hare’s “Stuff Happens.”  Originally produced in London in 2004 and in New York in 2006, Mr. Hare uses a fascinating mix of public record information, documented details and theatrical invention to chronicle the events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Twelve years on it has suddenly become frighteningly relevant.

The ensemble cast is exceptionally strong.  Unfortunately I have neither time nor space to mention them all.  The major players are all there.  George W. Bush is ably played by Stuart Hughes who, although physically different, captures Bush’s cocky belligerence. He’s surrounded by Greg Malone as the diabolical Donald Rumsfeld in an almost over the top performance that somehow works and the excellent Paul Rainville as the volatile Dick Chaney.  My companion commented that in the final scene he perfectly captured Cheney’s gleeful fat-cattishness.  It’s fascinating watching those two, along with Andy Massingham as an appropriately scary Paul Wolfowitz, manipulate Bush onto their chosen path toward invasion. …

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A documentary, enhanced by imagined conversations and dramatic licence, David Hare’s Stuff Happens follows the path that led to the Iraq war in 2003.

The play premiered in 2004, one year after the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. Hare’s analysis focuses on the theory that “Iraq was essentially a war of opportunism.” The official rationale for the attack was that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction (not proven) that posed an immediate threat to the western world. The collateral damage/more likely reason for the attack was to overthrow and execute the dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Stuff Happens presents much of the story of the negotiations and lead-up to the war by quoting President George W. Bush and members of his administration. Hare also includes such imagined, but likely, private conversations between U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and between U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Punctuated with constant reminders that the justification for going to war was flimsy, Stuff Happens is a discomforting — though often amusing — account that aims to put the main players and events in perspective. …

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When words are the primary currency, a play about the protagonist’s loss of words is destined to be a major challenge.

Add to this the continuing parallelism between black holes in the cosmos and the jumble in the brain of an aphasic patient and the problems associated with Susan Yankowitz’s 1991 play Night Sky are multiplied.

She apparently wrote the script as a tribute to her mentor (and the director of the premiere in New York) Joseph Chaikin, who suffered aphasia following a stroke during open-heart surgery. He imposed three conditions on her script: that the heroine should be a woman; the aphasia should be the result of a car accident [big bang?] and that Night Sky should focus on astronomy.

Yankowitz complied and the result is almost a how-to manual for family and friends responding to someone with aphasia. Worthy as this may be, it is somewhat low in entertainment value, even if the brain and the cosmos are the last two remaining mysteries in the universe, as scientist Stephen Hawking claimed.

The Kanata Theatre production, directed by Alain Chamsi, appropriately sets the scene with a series of shots of the night sky. The return to earth is less successful. It begins at the tail end of a lecture by astronomy professor, Anna (Tania Carrière) — standing behind a lectern that looks as though it could stand a coat of paint. …

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I’ve always been a fan of George F. Walker’s plays with their dark humor, unusual characters and plot twists.  Unfortunately I can’t say that about “Moss Park,” his two character 60 minute play currently running at GCTC.  The two characters are pretty much stereotypes and the plot predictable.  The fact that it’s produced by Green Thumb Theatre of Vancouver which produces theatre for young audiences perhaps explains why “Moss Park” feels like a cautionary tale for pre-teens.

The two characters, Bobby (Graeme McComb) and Tina (Emma Slipp), have a baby and no money.  They get together to try to figure out their future.  At least Tina does but Bobby, obviously a few bricks short of a load asks, “The future?  Like tonight?”  Among the possible solutions considered is Bobby becoming a thief.  His explanation of the ethics of stealing is mildly amusing.  Another option is the Army and Bobby has some funny lines, but his total ignorance is just not believable.  Both actors hail from Vancouver and do passable jobs with their predictable characters. …

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When you have landed on the garbage dump of life, the only way to go is up. At least, that is how Tina, a single-mother with a toddler, thinks. Meanwhile, her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Bobby, dreams of better times but is seemingly incapable of dealing with reality or even holding a job for more than a single day.

Playwright George F. Walker introduced Tina and Bobby a decade ago in Tough. Then, she was pregnant and they were trying to deal with their future together or apart. In Moss Park, they are apparently three years older (judging from the age of their daughter) and they are drowning in present disasters.

Tina, her daughter and her mother are being evicted from their apartment because they are five months behind on the rent. She is pregnant again after a brief reunion with Bobby. Meanwhile, he has just been fired again and is considering a life of petty crime or discovering some talent — as a rapper, perhaps. …

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