The Hamilton Fringe Theatre Review: Crane Girl + A Question of Character
By Ross
Continuing with my time at the Hamilton Fringe Festival, two plays work their interpersonal magic on me with the way that each is delivered, performed, directed, and written. Finding a sharp focus is what they both did most honorably and succinctly, delivering form and function through art and beauty in a search for meaning and discovery.
Minmar Gaslight Productions‘ A Question of Character, like a good filmmaker would, finds the exact focal range to unpack a complex framing that elicits explosions of light in its artful craftsmanship. It’s a tense two-hander, formulating imagery around complicitness and responsibility with Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous German film director, as its clear focal point. Inside playwright Steven Elliott Jackson’s (The Will of a Woman) strongly formed framing, and projected with a decisive combative air by director/set designer, Alice Fox Lundy (Leroy Street’s The Adding Machine), A Question of Character uses an interview for a film magazine as its check in point, where sincerity or deflection will be served alongside the tea and conversation, and it never lets up, even after the door slams shut.
Standing firmly in her tightly controlled focus, Paula Wing (Thousand Islands Playhouse’s The Canadian) plays the solid Leni Riefenstahl, who expects everything that comes at her in this interview with a film reporter and writer, Paulina Mitchell, played carefully and with passion by Tanisha Taitt (Fine Wine’s Violent Be Violet). The game of 20 questions doesn’t surprise her as the criticism of Riefenstahl has never gone away. She has been called both a monster for her connections and service during the Nazi era, and a creative aesthete and master of filmmaking for the art and beauty she created with celluloid. But it is, as many see it, when she crossed the line and started to make celebrated Nazi propaganda films for Hitler, that she lost her solo title of innovative filmmaker and became aligned with the ultimate fascist and the pain he and his movement caused.
The play presents a sharp and focused delivery, indirectly asking questions about whether we can separate the art from the artist and the content they create, and whether the artist should take responsibility for some of the greatest horrors brought forth by the movement they worked on and created. “When does complicity become a crime? Or willful ignorance?” This is what Taitt’s well-formed Mitchell wants to know. But Wing’s solid Riefenstahl has heard all these pointed remarks and lines of questioning before, and refuses to play. “I think I know where your head is,” she states flatly and coolly, before asking the interviewer to leave, but Mitchell has a few other tricks up her sleeve and another explosive statement to deliver hidden away. Mitchell admires the guts of the female filmmaker, who at the time shifted her creative pathway from dance to film at a time when females were not usually given that kind of access and authority. Still, beyond that, there is much more to Mitchell as well, and her anger and pain are enough to fill the room.
“It’s easy to call people who do terrible things monsters“, writes the director, but the framing of the hypocrisy and criticism makes it all the more complicated, especially when the actors playing these two fierce women serve up the combative conversation, find their tight focus so well, and clear. Weaving around one another in a tense and combustible dance of questions and answers around complicity and responsibility, A Question of Character never gives in to the easy route forward. “I have survived,” the famed film director states, “who are you to judge?” further establishing an ideal that “mice do not survive.” It, along with the whole play, creates a framing of epic and timely proportions, making it impossible not to think of that time in relation to what is happening south of our Canadian border. The words that fly out of their mouths are clear and as purposeful as can be, even in the most subtle angles and images that this cinematic scene creates. It’s epic and intense, right to the very last moment, as the past and all its pain are unpacked before us, and we wonder what is in store for us all. Who is complicit now? And what will become of us all going forward?
Pain from a different arena is played out and examined in one of my favorites from the Hamilton Fringe. Structured like the scaffolding placed in negative space on the Theatre Aquarius secondary stage, Crane Girl, a Falling Iguana Theatre production, is an emotionally raw and remarkable climb that keeps us all hopelessly engaged and emotionally captivated. It zigzags around the void like an expert climber finding her footing on a societal cliff that doesn’t make sense to the observer from far away. From a distance, it looks like “quite a pickle” backlit and dangerous, like a woman just trying to exist in this crazy, messed-up world we all inhabit.
Roped and clipped onto the same towering structure—metaphorically constructed by playwright and director Alexa Higgins (Don’t Look Down’s SIBS)—Jane, played flawlessly by Higgins, navigates the play’s fast-paced, fierce formula, jumping back and forth to unpack her untethered story that doesn’t make sense to those looking up at her. Yet, curled up and climbing like an animal being chased up to the top, Jane seems to know her stance, even as she finds herself stuck in that tight spot high above the crowd. You’re causing “quite the stir,” she is told by the one, also damaged, who is trying to help her, by trying to understand her. She’s caught, in a way, between that symbolic rock and a hard place, but high up in the sky in a metal cage that is giving her a freeing vantage point to survey the horizon.
Inspired by the real 2017 incident in Toronto, when a woman climbed a crane almost 100 metres high, the play is a fast-paced climb, working diligently to try to comprehend her pain through its sharply funny physicality. It’s an intensely personal contemplation of a young woman’s anger and rage against the confines of her own body and her ownership of her reproductive rights as a woman, a friend, a wife, and a possible future mom, all played out high up in the dark clouds. Navigating the metal bars and the patriarchal nightmare of a modern woman’s existence, Crane Girl delivers with the roped-in dynamic assistance from her fellow actors: Ian Ottis Goff (Don’t Look Down’s Skyline) and Katherine Cappellacci (Theatre By Committee’s Wagon Play). The play, and its crew, never lets Jane step down, literally, keeping her character and her battle suspended on that crane for the entirety of the show. The three actors move about the space, navigating most magnificently the metal structure like it’s a fourth character, giving it unpredictable and unprecedented character development in its restructuring, like the wires, pathways, and formulations that exist in our traumatized brain.
“I know you’re pissed“, he says to her, as she dangles dangerously on the edge of an abyss after an argument that ignited the climb. Letting go and wobbling in the wind, the two that hang dangerously in the sky speak to one another in unfinished sentences that tell a story that is both stimulating and upsetting, yet completely relatable and engaging. “No one should talk that much about their own sadness,” but we understand her pain and predicament, and completely comprehend the idea that “this isn’t the end,” but just another step forward, and she looks for a way out, and a way up to the structure she wants. If she can only stay calm. Crane Girl moves us past the No Trespassing and Danger construct, into something both abstract and absolute, without letting go of what connects us to the earth. It still climbs around in my head long after its heady climb upwards.
In the end, both Crane Girl and A Question of Character unpack trauma and pain through the intense power of theatre and its majestic ability to confront difficult truths—whether digging into ideals around responsibility, or scaling extreme heights to address pain through resilience— all via bold, innovative storytelling. These two plays push hard on vulnerable boundaries, challenge perceptions, and deeply engage audiences with their raw emotional layers and striking examinations of truth and clarity. Walking out, I felt a quiet weight—a luminous ache stirred by the raw ideas unveiled on stage. Both Crane Girl and A Question of Character, as presented at the Hamilton Fringe Festival, rope and tie within me twin reflections of resilience and vulnerability, whispering stories of strength, guilt, pain, despair, anger, and hope. Their unflinching honesty serves as a gentle, complex reminder that art and impulse have the power to address our deepest concerns, to stir empathy, and ignite change. Experiencing these two formidable plays in over one weekend was like standing on the edge—terrifying yet radiant—where, in confronting shadows, we discover the luminous, majestic, and complex light that can secure us all.
