When Harry Met Harry has all the qualities of a perfect Fringe piece. With his long lanky legs, expressive arms and fingers no less,  Allan Girod and his style of physical performance  reminded me of the  famous Monty Python character created by John Cleeves  who used to do all kinds of funny things with his extremities…so does Girod. But that’s where the resemblance stops. His material is not as quirky or dislocated  as Monty Python’s. It is much more  psychologically oriented.

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Yes, there was his drug use, restlessness and eventual murder. But the late Canadian guitar legend Lenny Breau was, above all else, a musician, and that’s the focus of this fine show by Vancouver’s Colin Godbout. A masterful guitarist himself, when Godbout finger picks tunes from Breau’s catalogue you’d swear they’re both in the room playing at once. Breau, found dead in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, mixed jazz, country, flamenco and more; Godbout does the same in depicting Breau at his last gig, slipping tunes by Merle Travis, John Coltrane and Breau himself into the blend. Godbout also explores the idea that Nashville guitar great Chet Atkins, Breau’s mentor, put far too much pressure on his younger colleague by insisting he was the “great white hope of the guitar,” pressure that contributed to Breau’s retreat into personal mayhem. Breau’s biography needs more fleshing out, and Godbout is more musician than actor, but for now the guitar tells us most of what we need to know.

The Last Gig of Lenny Breau

By and with Colin Godbout

At Royal Oak Laurier, Saturday, June 18

For the Ottawa Citizen, Saturday, June 18, 2011

Gather five psychiatric patients for their weekly group therapy session, have their shrink mysteriously murdered, and then add a couple of cops to investigate the crime. Result: a play that pretty much flatlines from the get-go. Alana Kainz’s script, potentially interesting and intended to be darkly comic, trips itself up by using stereotypical characters (Susan, a girl who can’t say no to men; Jack, a phobic nerd), bad jokes (“She has more troubles than Donald Trump on a windy day”) and a predictable plotline (did one of these neurotic patients do the doc in?). Kainz knows the horrors that unchecked mental illness can produce: her first husband, CJOH-TV newscaster Brian Smith, was gunned down by a paranoid schizophrenic man in 1995. But she doesn’t incorporate nearly enough reality into her script to make it engaging. Paul Dervis directs the show which features, among others, an overacting Jerome Bourgault as the damaged Len and a funny Charlie Ebbs as the narcissistic Antoine.

Home/Accueil

Padre X

Looking Glass Productions

For the Ottawa Citizen, June 18, 2011

War, Padre X tells us, is “the closest thing to hell a human being can experience on this earth.” Actor and writer Marc Moir stares into that hell, and we along with him, in his true story of a Second World War chaplain whose two greatest obligations were to God and his fellow soldiers. At the centre of this compelling show is the catastrophic Allied invasion of Dieppe, where countless men lost their lives and Padre X discovered the meaning of his. Moir’s depiction of the chaplain from small-town Ontario is nuanced and satisfying, a mix of the decent men once portrayed by film actor Jimmy Stewart and the memorable cadences of CBC Radio storyteller Stuart McLean. The show is too long, and the short intermission — feeling so out of place in a fringe performance — breaks the momentum, but Padre X’s story, like the legacy of the war, resonates deeply.

 

A subject matter that has attracted social workers and social scientists of all disciplines from around the world:  research into the world of the sex trade, the sexual slavery of women and the trafficking of women. The subject matter, which is not new, has been the object of plays, films and many studies. Yet, in spite of all the interest and the outrage, the practice continues.

Since that is the case, what is the aim of another play about the same subject? What does this team want to capture. What do they want us to feel or see or understand?  That is the real question here. Why this play?

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We all whine about how demanding our jobs are, what tyrants we have for bosses. Dying Hard could cure us of that forever. Mikaela Dyke, a riveting actor, has adapted for the stage six of Elliott Leyton’s first-hand accounts of miners and their families in 1975, whose lives were both supported and destroyed by Newfoundland’s fluorspar mines. Men went underground to earn a living only to wind up with silicosis or cancer or bodies crippled from accidents. Their wives, already caring for children, ended up looking after their husbands as well and stretching inadequate compensation cheques beyond the breaking point. Some of these people stayed positive, others turned bitter. None escaped the legacy of mining. Dyke’s characterizations are vivid and telling, and her use of verbatim theatre technique, in which interviewees’ exact words are used for the script, is thrilling. Only one — old Pat Sullivan — needs work: his accent is so thick that much of what he says is incomprehensible. While the show has some humour, and the fortitude of these people is inspiring, Rebecca Flynn has the final word: “We have a thick graveyard, a fat graveyard.”

Fringe festival tickets and information: 613-232-6162, ottawafringe.com.

Dying Hard

Compiled by Elliot Leyton

Adapted for the stage by Mikaela Dyke

Directed by Dahlia Katz

Featuring Mikaela Dyke

A Vagrant Theatre production

Verbatim theatre  is something akin to a current of  Theatre of testimony that has developed in Latin America  when victims of torture describe their experiences, first hand. These forms of "theatre" are actually historical documents of a very precious sort.   One hears about Verbatim theatre  in other countries where it can  often be related to the Shoah or to the  Truth and Reconciliation process of recounting real and traumatic events  that affected  an individual or a whole society.

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