One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has become a period piece. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that Dale Wasserman's adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel about life in a state mental institution in the early 1960s has become dated. It still has historic importance in what it has to tell us about U.S. psychiatric care in another era — and let's remember that Kesey's novel, based on the author's own experiences working in a state veterans hospital, was considered in its time to be a blistering indictment of a culture that condoned electroconvulsive therapy and pre-frontal lobotomy as legitimate ways of dealing with mental illness.
The sound booms book-ending Rick Miller’s packed ride from 1945 to 1969 are the world-changing release of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
The baby boomers, born, raised and living through those tumultuous years, are invited to relive their memories through Miller’s lens, a combination of multi-media flashes, impressions (some more successful than others), comic twists and the stories of three people with very different backgrounds: Miller’s mother, Madeline, originally from Coburg, Ontario; Laurence, an African-American draft dodger and jazz pianist; and Rudy, an Austrian who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War to become an advertising executive and illustrator.
As well as the kaleidoscope of political, cultural and social events with which Miller’s Boom bombards us, replays of advertisements of the period — oddly amusing from the perspective of the 21st century — remind us just how much times have changed.
The long awaited Boom directed, written and performed by Rick Miller is both seductive and questionable, especially as it purports to be a cultural history of the Baby Boomer generation that will incite young people to become interested in their own stories as well as world history. It turns out to be an amalgamation of various narrative structures that function in different ways, some are successful and others much less so. Rick the actor begins by introducing us to a film of Maddy his mother, projected against a huge pole of light that stands in the centre of the stage. This is the background against which all the floating images, the films, the lighting effects and the great mass of visual information will unfold during the evening. Structured by chronological time (1945-1969), the stage event becomes, the story of Rick’s own life told through fragments of historical information and personal experiences by multiple voices whose identities are not at all clear and who splinter the whole narrative into so many pieces it is difficult to locate any kind of centre.
The American Repertory Theatre is currently presenting George Orwell’s 1984. Newly adapted by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, the British company is touring the US after a long and successful run in the UK. It has a lot going for it, particularly the reference to the book’s appendix, which does not appear in the original American edition.
Most people who read the book will remember newspeak, the language which was to replace oldspeak (Standard English). Newspeak would destroy the individual’s ability to think conceptually by limiting the number and complexity of words. Early American editions of Orwell’s book left the reader with the impression that the totalitarian government had won. And it seems that even in Great Britain, few people pay attention to the appendix, an explication of newspeak principles, which although it appears to be written long after 1984 is in oldspeak from which one may infer that the regime no longer exists. To dramatize the appendix, there is a short scene out of time with the rest of the play in which unknown characters – linguists, politicians, historians? – discuss its content.
Freakish, Friendless, Pushy Parents! The contestants in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are never asked to spell any of this group of words, but they come to mind as the background of the kids and the adults involved in the cutthroat competition are revealed in passing.
Surprisingly, the 2005 musical, with book by Rachel Sheinkin and music and lyrics by William Finn, won a number of Tony awards when it debuted on Broadway. (It must have been a lean year.) The music is entirely forgettable, although some of the lyrics are effective and the book holds more interest than simply testing spelling ability.
Heavily dependent on the quality of the characterizations by the six finalists and the three officials running the Bee, the inclusion of audience participation (four extra contestants) is more awkward than effective and the general presentation—partly because of the script and partly because of the limited stage space —is somewhat static. However, the members of the cast in the Suzart After Dark production define their characters well and have fun with their roles (despite the occasional stumble over lines).
A woman creeps her way onto the stage, holding a tattered book in her hands. The pages are so well-loved that the book is falling apart. She extends it to her audience and her mouth curves into words that might explain the book. But how can you put into words something as nuanced as our reaction to a piece of great literature?
Particle, co-created by Kristina Watt and Martha Ross, is a rumination on inspiration itself. This year, audiences have a chance to capture the World Premiere of this production at the undercurrents theatre festival.
At the centre of the play is Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, but where you might expect a straight-forward adaptation, 100 Watt Productions sets its sites on the impossibility of wholly capturing the impact of art. Yet, through the lens of this cleverly conceptualized, metatheatrical production, Particle succeeds in inviting the audience to experience a delicate moment of shared understanding.
The stage layout features a prominent projector screen to its right where images of rolling waves are projected—a nod to the book that is at the heart of this production. The play features some basic set pieces, for example, a desk with a small bell and some clutter directly center, or a coat rack that stands at stage left. It’s all intentionally vague; the set is simply a play-ground for the characters. And these characters aren’t what they seem.
Actress Kristina Watt uses costumes (including exaggerated noses, lab coats, glasses and more) to take on various characters, and yet, these characters are heavily symbolic in nature. They are exaggerated and far from realistic—they are characters that Watt wears like a coat as she tries to home-in on the meaning behind Woolf’s enigmatic novel. Underneath the characters is another nameless, tenuous character that is just as present on stage, finding moments of silence to simply stare back at the audience. There’s a complex balance between what’s real and what’s not that Particle manages to capture, a credit to director Martha Ross. …
This tedious solo piece finds writer/performer Sarah Waisvisz on a quest to answer that ancient puzzler, “Who am I?”
In her case, that means a search for her multi-racial roots involving an imaginary journey from St. Martinique to Africa to Europe to Ottawa. It means encountering people who link skin colour to identity. It also means 65 dreary minutes for audiences as Waisvisz drapes her premise – if she’s interested in who she is, then everybody else must be as well – in a blend of song, dance, movement and text that does little to universalize her personal story or effectively link past and present even when she dips into the fraught history of the slave trade. …
It’s a role only its creator, First Nations performing arts legend Margo Kane, has ever played: Agnes, the young aboriginal woman severed from her roots as a child when a government agency snatches her from her family and who then spends years in search of herself and her place in the world.
Now Paula-Jean Prudat is Agnes — sweet, exuberant, with a nervous and expectant laugh — in a new production of Kane’s one-woman show, which premiered in 1990. The revival, part of the undercurrents festival and at the NAC Fourth Stage for Feb. 12 and 13 only, is billed as a workshop, the hope being that the production will be picked up by theatres across the country.
Despite the occasional misstep — a few muffed lines, more conviction in the second than the first part of the show — Prudat gives us a rich, captivating Agnes. Armed with only a suitcase, a drum and serious acting chops (she plays, briefly, multiple characters), Prudat infuses Kane’s mix of storytelling, dance and ritual with her own brand of verve. Funny when lampooning the destructive Hollywood version of First Nations people, touching when displaying Agnes’s hunger for love and acceptance, Prudat, under director Corey Payette, proves a worthy successor to Kane.
Especially powerful is the powwow scene where the teenaged Agnes, having joined the 1960s army of other young people hitchhiking around North America on their own quests, finally gets a glimpse of her heritage as she meets the old men, the young women, the little kids who have come together in celebration just as her family did before she was cut away from home and culture. …
Three strong performances and an attractive set do not make up for a weak play weighed down with exposition.
Leslie Sands’ 1983 “psychological mystery” Cat’s Cradle is slow moving mainly because the lengthy back story is the key to the small amount of action that occurs on stage.
Set in the residents’ lounge of an English country inn, it is the eve of local resident Sarah Fulton’s wedding. A shadow hangs over the happy occasion when Detective Inspector Jack Frost appears, determined to clear up his last unsolved case before he retires: the kidnapping/murder of Sarah’s baby brother 12 years earlier. The second part of the mystery is why the family and friends of the victim are so hostile to Frost and so determined to preserve the secrets behind the crime.
At first, Cat’s Cradle (the title is a reference to a child’s game of creating changing three-dimensional thread patterns) seems carefully constructed to explain each character’s behaviour. But there are some inconsistencies, particularly in the bride’s reactions. It is also hard to accept that almost everyone can be bought off. …
Danai Gurira’s The Convert, now playing at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA, gives the audience a picture of late 19th century Zimbabwe when it was undergoing British colonization. The British usurpation of the country’s natural resources and the displacement of peoples led to civil war between the Shona and the Ndebele. Cultural changes took place, religious conversion not the least of these.
Although there are several plotlines, the most dominant is the story of Jekesai (Adobuere Ebiama), a young Shona woman whose uncle (Paul S. Benford Bruce) wants to marry her off to an elderly man with a great many wives. The bride price is of great concern to the uncle. Misogyny within the native culture is an underlying theme of the play as is classism.
Jekesai runs off, and is rescued by her Aunt Mai Tamba (Liana Asim), the trickster maid of Chilford, a would-be Catholic priest (Maurice Emmanuel Parent). To keep her job Mai Tamba pretends she is a believing Christian while hiding amulets in the house to appease her dead ancestors. Following her aunt’s advice, Jekesai asks Chilford to convert her. Chilford, a lay religious teacher, thrilled to find a willing convert who claims she wants to dedicate her life to Catholicism, takes her in to his home, after changing her name to Ester. He tutors the gifted Ester in English, reading, writing, and religion. Although he too is Shona, he acquired English as a child when he was taught by missionaries. Ester, enamored of her new religion, devotes time to converting other Shona people. Like her aunt, she is also a servant, and addresses the pompous Chilford as Master. She is now modestly attired like an English woman with a long dress and shoes rather than her Shona self where her breasts were almost uncovered and her feet bare. …
