Posted on Artsfile.ca on November 3

The key to life in the big city? Ignore the big and celebrate the everyday.

It sounds trite, but Ordinary Days – Adam Gwon’s thoughtfully empathetic chamber musical about four young people adrift in New York City – is just the opposite of pedestrian, as the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s winning production of his show proves.

Directed by Eric Coates, the sung-through piece tracks the lives of two women and two men as they grapple with loneliness in the city and struggle for everything from artistic recognition to freedom from a past that warps the present. …

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Some times we think our lives are pretty ordinary. Maybe they are but this insightful play reminds us that is no reason not to celebrate them. Ordinary Days playing at the GCTC focuses on 4 people in New York, but it captures the spirit of everyone that feels alone or trapped while surrounded by people. It is minimalist theatre at its best.  It needs so little to create atmosphere: some stairs to create levels a few  benches, chairs and you have a set. Add some light applied in just the correct way and any landscape you need is created to move a story along. In Ordinary Days at the GCTC, Seth Gerry’s set and lighting design embody this principle of creating simple perfect landscapes out of almost nothing at all. …

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Photo: Andrew Alexander

One thing is certain about Canadian playwright Nicolas Billon. He is the slickest of theatrical tricksters.

Audiences attending his much-heralded new play, Butcher, now at the GCTC, may be assured that they’re in for a shocker of an ending, one that turns pretty much everything they’ve assumed beforehand upside down and inside out.

But can we also be convinced that Butcher is anything more substantial than a cynically crafted thriller that plays manipulative mind-games with the playgoer in the same way that it does with some of its characters? Can we really buy into the pretension that the horrors it depicts are essential to some deeper dramatic purpose that will engage our moral conscience and force us to think more deeply about the world we live in and the terrible things human beings do to each other?

The play seems in conflict with itself. It wants acceptance as a crackingly effective thriller — which, on some levels, it is. But it also wants to be taken seriously as some kind of profound artistic statement.

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