Photo fro the  Ottawa Citizen: Wayne Cuddington.

Eric Peterson as Percy Schmeiser.

Who would have guessed that a legal battle over genetically modified canola could be scintillating?

Yet that’s precisely what Montreal playwright Annabel Soutar’s docudrama Seeds achieves. Not to mention being a smart and sympathetic study of the complexities of human nature, a challenge to our tendency to operate on presuppositions, and a meditation on the nature of life.

The story seems straightforward. In the late 1990s, Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser (played here flawlessly by Eric Peterson of television’s Corner Gas and Street Legal) was accused of patent infringement by agribusiness titan Monsanto Canada for planting their genetically modified (GM) canola seed without a licence.

Scheismer claimed that the seeds had wound up on his property by accident, and that as a property owner he had the right to do with those seeds as he wished.Monsanto figured he’d buckle under their pressure, but he fought back. The case wove its way to the Supreme Court of Canada where Schmeiser lost in a five to four decision in 2004.(read more)………

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Theatre+Review+Annabel+Soutar+Seeds+brilliant+docudrama/9677244/story.html

Spoofing a genre can be very funny. Much depends on the style of the original and the wit of the humorist.

In Murder in Noirville, playwright Peter Colley, best known for his highly successful whodunit I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, mocks film noir. Does it work? Not entirely. Film noir —a term first used in 1946 — referred to a style of melodramatic, black-and-white movie popular in the 1940s and 1950s that frequently focused on private detectives in seedy offices, often accompanied by a Girl Friday in love with him and a femme fatale competing for her boss’s affections.

Colley throws in a number of the basic ingredients and mixes in too many more to create a stylistic trifle, in both senses (a dessert containing a mixture of assorted ingredients and a work with little depth).

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Photo: Dangerous Minds

If the people at Ottawa’s Third Wall Theatre and 100 Watt Productions are to believed, hit men in the England of the 1950s were not confined to the male gender.

Such seems to be the rationale for the sex change which occurs in the production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which arrived last week at the Avalon Studio on Bank Street.

Instead of Ben and Gus, the two hit men waiting in the cellar of a Birmingham house to carry out a contract killing, we have Benita (Kristina Watt) and Augusta (Mary Ellis). But really, the production’s bold conceit of casting two women ultimately seems rather pointless — apart from giving two accomplished performers the chance to show off their acting chops.

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Photos: Richard Ellis .

NOTE: My original review disappeared on line before I had a chance to save it. This is a reconstruction of the main points which I feel were necessary to publish,

The Avalon Studio acting space worked very well this time as it represented a closed basement area where Gus (Ellis) and Ben (Watt) are waiting for their instructions.The fact that director Todd Duckworth engaged two female actors to play roles usually performed by males is of no consequence at all.

First jarring moment: Gus’ comic dance as she struggles to get her boots on. This could be seen as a Pinter style nod to Estragon in Beckett’s Godot where Estragon carries on for a while trying to remove his shoe (Aide-moi à enlever cette saloperie – Act I ) . However, Godot, as Beckett says, is a clown show whereas  The Dumb Waiter certainly is not.

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Photo: Richard Ellis.  Mary Ellis (Augusta ), Kristina Watt (Benita)

“What’s going on here?” asks Gus at one point in The Dumb Waiter. The question is a waste of breath: Gus and fellow armed thug Ben are in a Harold Pinter play and Pinter’s never big on providing answers regardless of whether questions are about quotidian or existential issues.

Besides, even if there were an answer, would it give Gus and Ben an escape route from the faceless and oppressive power structure that’s steamrolling over them?

Third Wall Theatre’s revival of Pinter’s late 1950s play, directed by Todd Duckworth, is partially successful in dealing with these and other matters.

Mary Ellis plays the chatty, questioning Gus while Kristina Watt is the taciturn and controlling Ben. Usually the roles are filled by men, but changing the characters to women (Augusta and Benita to be formal) works fine: male or female, the two still have to wait in a grungy basement for their assignment from an unseen boss.

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Richard Gélinas and Margo MacDonald. Photo: Pascal Huot 

In spite of the title this has nothing to do with Shakespeare, and a lot to do with the writers’/actors’ sense of adventure: the world of pirates, the world of Improv and the playful discovery of what appears to be the old pirate language that is both savoury and very demanding. Yes indeed, Margo Macdonald and Richard Gélinas improvise in “pirate” for just over 60  minutes and that is a feat of great virtuosity. The two adventurers are lashed to the upper mast inside the crow’s nest of a huge pirate ship because the captain (a sadistic old chap whom we never see because he is below) wants to punish them for fighting.

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Mani Soleymanlou. Photo Hugo-Sébastien Aubert, La Presse

Pour ce monologue autobiographique,  aucun décor sinon  des rangées de chaises vides, alignées sur  la scène. Le comédien, assis tout seul, s’adresse au public et l’invite à rompre un tabou  sacré  de la représentation actuelle: «Gardez votre mobile allumé! Et parlez quand vous voulez. » Dès le départ, il se met en scène dans le rire et un chaos des plus joyeux, et pourtant le contenu du spectacle reste toujours  sérieux, même empreint d’auto-dérision.  l’acteur/auteur/personnage explique qu’il veut nous montrer sa trajectoire de vie depuis son départ de Téhéran en tant qu’enfant.

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La cantatrice chauve  (The Bald Soprano – traduite par Donald M. Allen) d’Ionesco, une production du Théâtre de la Licorne, est  présentée par les  étudiants  du Département d’études théâtrales à l’Université d’Ottawa. Le metteur en scène, Martin Glassford, étudiant en 4e année du programme MFA, a voulu tout faire sauf écouter le texte. Le rythme traine, les comédiens font tout et n’importe quoi, et l’orchestration de la parole qui est au coeur du spectacle est négligée.  Le décor de Marcelo Donato fonctionne comme il faut,  les costumes de Vanessa Imeson tiennent le coup, l’éclairage de M. Coderre-Williams est efficace, mais de  manière générale le tout est un peu pénible.

The Bald Soprano continue jusqu’au 8 mars, à la Salle Académique, 133, rue Séraphin Marion à 20h00.

par Philippe Couture   Voir, 13 février, 2014

Photo : Yan Turcotte

Christian Lapointe dialogue depuis toujours avec la notion de disparition: pas étonnant qu’il ait trouvé dans l’écriture de Marguerite Duras un territoire fertile pour approfondir sa pensée. Sa mise en scène de L’homme atlantique et La maladie de la mort, perchée entre théâtre et cinéma, est un ballet délicat et délicieux entre l’amour et la mort.

Dans son cycle de la disparition (CHS, Anky ou la fuite et Sepsis) ou dans ses mises en scène orientalisantes des textes de William Butler Yeats, Christian Lapointe a inventé des formes radicales pour sonder l’essence de l’âme humaine et son dialogue incessant avec sa propre disparition. La mort rôde toujours dans le théâtre de Lapointe, mais on oublie parfois que l’amour est aussi dans sa ligne de mire et que la recherce d’amour fait partie intrinsèque de sa réflexion sur la disparition (et l’impossibilité d’une réelle existence au monde). En s’appropriant les mots de Duras, qui flirtent toujours avec la notion d’absence mais beaucoup avec l’amour et la quête de l’autre, Lapointe se dévoile dans une émotion nouvelle et son spectacle, bien que très formel et entièrement articulé dans une tension entre le corps et l’écran, est porté par une délicatesse qu’on lui connaissait peu. Du moins, les mots de Duras le poussent à ne pas lutter constamment contre l’affect et l’émotion, sans toutefois s’y perdre. Un bel équilibre.

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Ottawa Citizen February 27, 20140

Jayson McDonald in Underbelly, Photo credit William Beddoe

At one point in underbelly, Jayson McDonald’s hallucinogenic, one-man show inspired by the life and times of mid-20th century American beat writer William S. Burroughs, “Willy” gives us a brief autobiography. He then mimes the famous Burroughs writing technique of cutting up and repositioning phrases, so the original recounting of how he lost his virginity to a prostitute is transformed into “I lost my virginity to mankind.”

It’s a sardonic reflection on his own and all of life — much as the entire show is — and a reminder of how Burroughs’ relationship with normal reality was a loose one. That relationship seems, on the basis of McDonald’s show, to have bothered Burroughs not in the least.

Burroughs was, of course, a junkie and a writer so a readiness to reconstruct reality according to his own parameters isn’t surprising. And because he was also a gifted writer, when Willy starts talking about giant bugs and assorted other creatures that could have slithered straight out of John Carpenter’s horror film The Thing, a dark, even hypnotic lyricism sometimes emerges.

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