When the Intermission editorial team sits down to curate which shows to review, many factors come into play. What cities are the productions in? How long do they run? In what size venues are they playing? And how many can we afford to cover?
Inevitably, shows get left behind — often those in intimate spaces, with short runs.
As an editor, I understand that such choices are a necessary part of covering theatre, particularly at a national scale. But I’m also a critic who loves a show in a basement, and therefore find it a shame that so much small-scale work goes unreviewed — not just by Intermission, but by other publications that pay (and edit) writers.
In response to this gap, I’ve recently started writing brief reviews of Toronto productions the magazine isn’t otherwise covering, and stowing them away until I collect enough to publish in a batch. And here I am, with seven, presented in reverse-chronological order.
The asterisk is that all but one of the discussed shows has closed. To those who read reviews through a consumer lens, it may now seem a little strange to publish these. But because Toronto’s indie theatre community is so fragmented — a constellation of companies doing their own thing, in venues spread across the city — I see value in painting its portrait by stitching together impressions of unrelated productions.
When thinking about capturing an arts scene’s pulse, I’m inspired by the work of former Village Voice staff writer Cynthia Carr, who in the 1980s and ’90s documented New York’s underground performance art culture by reporting mainly on one-night-only events. As Carr explains in the foreword to the revised edition of On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, an essential collection of her writings, this approach runs counter to standard newspaper logic, which prioritizes covering events readers can attend. Yet in part because it flouted common practice, her work helped draw attention to a fecund, initially under-discussed performance scene; today, it doubles as a vitalizing time capsule.
Partially as a result of this documentarian impulse, description plays a prominent role in the below reviews. This is especially true regarding work-in-progress shows; when writing about such projects, I don’t feel it’s appropriate to jab my thumb up or down — instead, I aim to contribute to the artists’ understanding of audience reaction by clearly expressing my perception of the piece’s content and goals. (For more on description’s central role in criticism, check out this reflection from Commonweal books columnist Anthony Domestico.)
Anyway, here’s what caught my interest over the last two months.
Literal Trash: A Comedy Experience (The Tranzac Club, third Tuesday of every month until November)
When I first saw a bulletin-board flyer for this pay-what-you-can show about a talking trash bag, I imagined the result would be loud, abrasive, perhaps obnoxious. But this is the precise expectation performer-creator Adam Mohammed hopes to subvert.
Mohammed waddles into a dimly lit corner of the Tranzac Main Hall, crouched inside an upside-down garbage bag, black-and-white sneakers poking through. This character, Trash, has no eyes, so to get to the centre of the floor, he enlists help from the seven-person crowd. For the next little while, we shout directions and try to stop him from bumping into tables.
Movement is necessarily slow for Trash, leading to several lengthy stretches where he disappears backstage in order to travel between different areas of the space. (Even when he’s not visible, his amplified voice stays with us, narrating his journey.)
It soon becomes clear that Trash is a rather melancholic fellow. He laments that no garbage truck has ever moved him from the street to a landfill, where he might make a friend. A morose piano melody plays, prompting him to wonder aloud if he “listens to sad music enough.” His tone is shy, soft, and downtrodden. Existential silences abound. All the while, he repeatedly insists: “I don’t want this show to be too sad.”
There’s something compelling about this pouty trash bag, though Mohammed is still working out exactly what — which is precisely the reason for this work-in-progress residency at the Tranzac. It’s a minor paradox: To figure out how to best embody loneliness, Mohammed requires the company of an audience.
Sometimes It Snows in April (Tottering Biped Theatre, June 5 to 8)
Mounted at at The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre, this wordless, hour-long meditation on grief opens with a brief projected poem: “A stag hunter and his prey / A young man and his lover / An old man and his dog / A woman / A lamppost / A park bench / And an Umbrella.”
The two sidewalk fixtures listed toward the end of that verse are the sole set pieces in this workshop production directed by co-creator Ric Knowles. For me, lampposts inevitably evoke Gene Kelly’s iconic dance through the rain, and what follows is a pas de deux of sorts, with co-creators Bó Bárdos and Trevor Copp roving around the stage and audience, at first essentially independent of each other.
The Hungary-born Bárdos tramples through the space with the absentminded air of someone searching for an unimportant object in a dark, cluttered closet; she concurrently sings in a carefree but sometimes anguished mezzo-soprano. Copp, a mime/dancer and Tottering Biped’s artistic director, moves with more directness, but also often seems to be dowsing for something lost. The sound of keys jangles frequently from the back of the audience.
After a while, Bárdos sits on the bench, munches on a couple pastries, and speaks an unidentifiable language to herself, as if she’s reliving a past conversation or imagining a rhetorical future one. Copp lies in front of the lamppost, softly crying as he mime-cuddles a child — or perhaps that dog from the poem.
The moment where the performers’ worlds overlap is wonderfully unexpected. Bárdos disappears into an upstage wing, hidden by an umbrella lying on the ground; Copp soon pops up behind the object, raising his arms like the horns of a stag — a gesture he’d performed throughout the performance. From then on, the two are far more entwined, like they’ve finally crossed into the same plane of existence. The final image is aching, and almost entirely reframes everything that came before.
This is what I remember of Sometimes It Snows in April. But it’s such an enigmatic work that I found myself doubting my perceptions even in the moment. To really start decoding the many intentional layers of ambiguity at play, you’d need to go more than once — which is a wonderful, all-too-rare thing.
Genrefuck. (Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, May 21 to 31)
As artistic director ted witzel’s first programmed Buddies season comes to a close, I want to pour one out for the company’s tech team. From dazzling sunrises to shocking set reveals and adorable sloth puppets, they’ve helped facilitate many recent design feats in Buddies’ malleable Chamber space. And this sharp double-bill of movement-driven solo plays includes one more: During the hour-long intermission between the two pieces, Augusto Bitter’s Reina and Julie Phan’s Never Walk Alone, the space transforms completely.
In Pencil Kit Productions’ Reina, directed by Bitter and Claren Grosz, a lighthearted invitation for the audience to shape arepas out of real dough transforms into a fantastical riff about the anonymous woman that appears on bags of Harina P.A.N. corn flour. Performer Jaime Lujan spins fantastical tales of the figure’s many lives, which span multiple centuries; he occasionally pauses to dance jagged, vigorous choreography or reflect on femininity’s various forms.
Items related to housework create an oval around the alley playing space (Bitter and Grosz are credited as co-scenic designers). And from a table on one side of the stage, a rectangle of light (designed by Nathan Bruce) sometimes traces the way to a banana hanging on the other. At 35 minutes, the imaginative piece seems still to be in development, but its motivating ideas are bountiful, strong, and ready for further expansion.
For fu-GEN Theatre and PNSNV’s Never Walk Alone, the space is set up in a proscenium configuration — and a sprawling strip club occupies the stage (set design by Jawon Kang, with technical direction by Anthony Allan). There are two dance poles, a dressing room, a bar embroidered with drawn silhouettes of women, and a room for private lap dances.
As Honey, a stripper, tells us about working here on Christmas Eve, she uses the whole of the space, virtuosically dancing up and down the poles and moving from room to room, sometimes pausing her monologue for a while as she ties up her black knee-high boots. Other times, she keeps speaking as she dresses, which is emblematic of the fact that the audience’s role in Never Walk Alone is a bit hazy: Why, exactly, is she sharing all this?
Once, hungry for a pair of hot dogs, Honey even ventures into the Montreal snow (thanks to precise direction by Tawiah M’Carthy, plus thoughtful projection design by VideoCompany). While multiple men have emotional breakdowns in front of Honey, Phan’s deadpan delivery emphasizes that this is just another day at the office. In a confident rebuke to the countless films and plays that sensationalize sex work, Never Walk Alone frames it as strikingly mundane.
The Cunning Linguist (TCL Collective and Aluna Theatre, April 26 to May 11)
Having front-rowed countless fringe shows, I now generally find myself unfazed by audience participation. But I’ll admit that I blushed when the star of this 70-minute autobiographical solo show instructed a pair of crew members to hand out origami vulvas.
Written and performed by Mónica Garrido Huerta in the Factory Theatre Studio, The Cunning Linguist goes as far as is necessary to make its jokes work. So, yes, to trace her own queer awakening after moving to Toronto from her native Mexico, Huerta leads a lighthearted seminar on lesbian sex. Elsewhere, projections translate occasional snippets of Spanish and juice up the punchlines (Zoe Marin is credited as captions coordinator): a video of Ricky Martin punctuates a memory from her youth, and a few key lines appear on-screen in blocky, all-caps text.
One of those phrases, “GOD MADE ME A LESBIAN,” initially lands as a joke, but it turns out the show really is committed to unpacking that idea — in monologues to the audience (and, sometimes, God herself), Huerta considers what it means to realize you’re queer after growing up in a Christian household. Director Beatriz Pizano complements these meaty explorations with bursts of existential darkness, conjured through stark visual shifts from set and lighting designer Trevor Schwellnus (a frequent collaborator of Pizano’s), as well as unsettling, gradually crescendoing hums from sound designer Camilo Diaz-Varela.
The Cunning Linguist is a delightful, mature entry into the autobiographical solo show genre. If you missed it, see if you can at least find a copy of the program; there are origami instructions inside.
A Girl in School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar) [A Front Company and Pickles Theatre Co., April 28 to May 1]
In the early morning of April 28, a massive blackout hit the Iberian Peninsula, leaving several million people without power for 10-plus hours. The same night, in the basement of a well-loved College Street bar called Green Room, A Front Company and Pickles Theatre Co. opened this grungy 80-minute two-hander, set in a dystopian near-future where power outages are an everyday occurrence.
In British playwright Lulu Raczka’s 2017 drama, determined schoolgirl Steph (Andrea Perez) barges into the barely-in-business workplace of brusque bartender Bell (Saskia Muller) with a picture of her friend Charlotte, who recently went missing — a common fate for women living in the play’s unnamed metropolis. Bell claims she knows nothing but flinches in recognition, which is enough to encourage the otherwise hopeless Steph to return again and again, clawing for any crumb of information. The play was advertised as a noir, which comes to bear toward its climax, when the evidence begins to pile up and facts become indistinguishable from fiction.
While A Girl in School Uniform leans into its site-specific bar setting, director Robert Morrison makes some deft interventions on the level of tech, with lighting designer Christopher-Elizabeth installing smart light bulbs into what seem to be the basement’s existing fixtures. Light becomes central to the show: much of the last half unfolds during a blackout. Perez and Muller’s venom-laced back-and-forth keeps its urgency even when it’s only aural, but the production’s most memorable images involve brief spurts of light from flashlights (and, occasionally, a blacklight). They illuminate Steph again and again, whether she’s cowering in fear, wringing a washcloth like a human heart, or pretending to be in a play.
The King of All Birds (Bealtaine Theatre Festival, April 25 to 27)
This sly solo show from Dublin took place in a marble-columned meeting space at the Ontario Heritage Centre. While it’s a majestic room, it made for a somewhat makeshift performance venue — a mix of grandness and modesty that ended up synchronizing nicely with playwright-performer Martha Knight’s music-infused one-act, which pairs a vast narrative scope with a playfully sheepish tone.
Perched on a chair, in an eerie mask with a black veil, Knight mysteriously reveals that she’s here to crown a new king of all birds. To explain what that phrase means, she speaks excerpts from a musty tome containing the history of this royal lineage over thousands of years; it seems that during any given period, the king of all birds is whoever wields the most power over the sky, be that a wren or an accomplished airline pilot.
Between accounts of these different reigns and usurpations, Knight takes cheekily long pauses and plays the Irish folk song “Wild Mountain Thyme” on a variety of instruments, including a guitar, a flute, and a harmonizer (into which she also sometimes speaks parts of the story). Above her, in a static projection, hangs a framed aerial photo of a rural Irish home.
It’s all very meandering and offbeat, but Joy Nesbitt’s unassuming direction and Knight’s elegant performance hold it together, with the final couple of minutes justifying the whole affair by achieving that chimerical perfect balance between unexpectedness and inevitably.
The Masque of the Red Death (Assembly Theatre, April 8 to 12)
Vaudeville at the end of the world — an evocative notion this Edgar Allen Poe adaptation moulds into passionate, unvarnished shape. Directed and written by Stella Kulagowski, the 90-minute play tracks a motley band of cabaret artists enlisted to perform for the entertainment of a hot-headed billionaire sheltering from climate apocalypse in a private bunker. This shaky narrative frame proves secondary to the variety-show-style performances themselves, which grow in intensity as the passing of weeks leaves the fictional performers feeling increasingly trapped. (The show is unrelated to Punchdrunk’s immersive 2007 adaptation of the same story.)
At one point, Rosalind Saunder tap dances to a piano rendition of the jazz standard “All of Me,” accompanying herself on ukulele, then trombone, then xylophone, then wooden spoons; she ends the tune kneeling in a wooden trunk under red light, crying out: “Is this enough?!”
In other numbers, Bryna Bella serenades us while executing a twirl-heavy movement piece, Nailah Renuka contorts herself atop the trunk, Joy Thompson belts a shimmering rendition of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Kulagowski careens through a climate-change-themed burlesque routine, and Eli Holliday croons A Great Big World’s “Say Something” in drag. But the most pointed performance comes from Rennaldo Quinicot, who performs a hip-hop dance solo to Kendrick Lamar before busting up a bank-safe-shaped pinata filled with fake 100 dollar bills.
The show doesn’t do much to implicate the audience in its societal critique, instead remaining firmly in eat-the-rich mode. (I’m all for venting, but billionaires are fairly easy targets — of course they suck.) Still, the slightly awkward private preview performance I attended was filled almost entirely with theatre critics, which left me wondering about our own decision to spend so much time watching plays as forests flame. Are we also in a bunker of sorts?
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. His writing has appeared in publications like Maisonneuve, This, and NEXT. He loves the original Super Mario game very much.
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