Photo: Andrew Alexander

GCTC is closing out their season with a terrific production of George F. Walker’s new play, “The Burden of Self Awareness.” This is the world premiere of what can be called both dark comedy and social satire. After a near-death experience, Michael decides to give his fortune away to the needy. His wife Judy, firmly ensconced in the 1%, her shrink Stan who’s in the throes of a breakdown, Lianne, a call girl with a history degree and Phil, a private eye/hit man all have different opinions on the matter. The play skewers the differences between the haves and have nots with biting humor.

This is a first-rate cast. Samantha Madely is very good as the lissome well-educated hooker Lianne, who’s looking for a new direction in life. As Phil, a former news anchor turned detective, John Koensgen dithers believably between his Born Again faith and becoming a hit man. As the wound tight as a violin string Judy, Sarah McVie obviously needs, as she insists, “a large buffer” between herself and the have nots. She’s also expert at shimmying out of her underpants without disarranging her dress.

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Johon Koensgen and Eric Coates. Photo Barb Gray

The Burden of Self-Awareness is a dark comedy about a dark time: ours. It questions our needs and wants and contradicts  our moral values.

What we want, what we do and what we need is mainly shaped by a certain society at a certain moment in time. Of course, our nature plays a role as well and somehow, that nature always leans towards money. Whether it is a question of prestige, power or consumerism, everything  starts and finishes at the same point: money.

Michael is a great success: wealthy beyond his dreams, well respected and happily married… Or, is he?

A close encounter with death changes his outlook and makes him re-examine his life and define his  values. What he comes up with as a solution disturbs his wife and  as a result there is mayhem in the household. Michael’s decision to give away all of his wealth leads to a chain of events through which the ugly truth is revealed.

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Ottawa Citizen, June 5, 2014

Eric Coates as Michael (left), Samantha Madely (Lianne) in The Burden of Self Awareness at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. Photo Julie Oliver.

A breathtakingly incompetent psychiatrist lolling about in his underwear, a disrobed hooker, a private detective/hit man draped in a bathrobe: George F. Walker’s latest dark – make that exceedingly dark – comedy gives us a grim – make that exceedingly grim – vision of contemporary life shorn of its trappings.

Making its world premiere in this tight, spirited GCTC production, Walker’s show is rooted in a stripping down when the main character, the questing Michael (Eric Coates, aka artistic director of GCTC), decides to give away most of his fortune. Michael has had a close encounter with death, and in a cliché that’s so true to life that it’s not a cliché, is questioning the meaning of everything. “I don’t know what I believe,” he says at one point, that burden being a universal one in Walker’s disjointed, morally ambiguous world.

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Robert Marinier, David Frisch, Andy Massingham (on the floor)

Photo: Julie LeGal .

Yasmina Reza loves to torment the Parisian bourgeoisie, so well ensconced in its own particular snobbisms, its cultural traditions and prejudices. However, these people are also her theatrical audience so she does not want to insult them. Thus while teasing her (French) spectators, she shows that her special brand of middle class boulevard theatre also confirms the breadth of her audience’s cultural background. – An excellent strategy to keep the audience in a good mood and keep it laughing at itself. The play Art is such a double edged weapon in her theatrical dialectic and since Mme Reza’s plays are so well constructed, and her dialogue is so sparkling, they still make for an amusing evening of theatre.

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Yasmina Reza’s play Art explores the nature of modern art and friendship and exposes the equal strangeness and subjectivity to be found in both. Same Day Theatre’s production of the play, translated by Christopher Hampton, has some great comedic moments, but overall comes off as a bit tedious and pretentious. Although on the shorter side, it dragged on by the end.  …

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Photo: Alan Viau

The joy emanating from the stage is so infectious in the Suzart Productions presentation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that you overlook problem areas.

Never mind that the lighting operator has trouble focusing, periodically leaving Joseph and the Narrator in darkness at the beginning of their numbers. Never mind that several of the performers did not dispense with their spectacles before portraying folks in Ancient Egypt. It is not even a downer that poor enunciation makes some of the lyrics hard to understand or that not all the movement of chorus members is as crisp as it might be.

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Poster from Kanata Theatre.

The central argument of Inherit the Wind should be irrelevant today. Sadly, it is still front and centre.

Last week, a University of Saskatchewan professor was fired following a public disagreement with the university president. That the decision was later reversed after a firestorm of negative reaction does not alter the threat to freedom of speech in academia today.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote Inherit the Wind in 1955, during the McCarthy era and the U.S. witch hunt to root out any vestiges of communism (real or imagined), thereby adding further texture to a drama that puts the right to think on trial.

Add to this that close to 50 per cent of Americans still say Darwin was wrong and Creationists who take the bible literally are right, little appears to have changed in the Bible belt’s view of the world. The Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach that human beings were descended from a lower order of animals, was not repealed in Tennessee until 1967.

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Counterpoint Players’ Corpus launches

a new collaborative theatre series

On May 2^nd, Counterpoint Players launched the innovative new theatre series, TACTICS – Theatre Artists’ Cooperative: the Independent Collective Series. The lineup for the 2014-2015 TACTICS season was announced at the post-show reception on opening night of Darrah Teitel’s award-winning play Corpus. Corpus is the pilot project for the series, which will be in residence at Arts Court Theatre.

TACTICS’ collaborative model of theatre gives local independent artists a chance to showcase their work in an affordable venue, and brings quality stories to the Ottawa stage. TACTICS is a series of independent Ottawa theatre productions that will run from November 2014 to April 2015 at Arts Court Theatre.

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Photo. Maria Vartanova

That’s how Theresa Rebeck once described the things that interest her as a playwright. And she certainly delivers them in spades with her 2007 comedy-thriller, Mauritius, which has romped onto the playbill of the Ottawa Little Theatre in a confident and entertaining production.

The words fly like bullets in Rebeck’s script. And they’re laced with profanity — lots of profanity — which we quickly discover is essential to the rhythms and cadences of the dialogue. One could be churlish and suggest that much of Mauritius sounds like warmed-over Mamet, but that would be unjust, particularly since we’re enjoying the company of its assorted schemers and low-lifers so much. So let’s assume instead that Rebeck — who served an impressive apprenticeship writing television scripts for the likes of N.Y.P.D. Blue — has penned an affectionate homage to David Mamet, with a special nod to his play, American Buffalo

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Photo. Yves Renaud.  Scénographie de Michel Goulet

Albertine, un des personnages mémorables de la grande famille montréalaise créée par Michel Tremblay,  refait surface en 2014, après sa création  en 1982,  mise en scène à l’époque par André Brassard.
La pièce est un dialogue entre deux personnages, Albertine et sa sœur Madeleine,  assumé  par six voix dont chacune s’inscrit dans un espace/temps différent.  Chaque discours produit le fragment du récit  concernant la décennie représentée par la comédienne; cinq voix représentent Albertine à  30 ans, à 40 ans, à 50  ans, à 60 ans et à 70 ans.
La somme de ces fragments résonne comme une partition musicale où la superposition des lignes mélodiques distinctes constitue une construction musicale en contre-point comme dans une fugue de Bach.

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