How could a theatre community respond to a serious dearth of local theatre criticism?
It’s a question organizers Maria Colonescu and Ciarán Myers grappled with throughout the development of Kitchener’s inaugural Treading Theatre Festival, but one which also goes deeper than the event’s five-day run. “When you watch your peers in other cities it does not feel like there’s a mobility to a career in this environment,” Myers shared in an interview. “Having criticism here is a really important piece of the puzzle.”
The festival is intended to support the health of both Kitchener’s theatre scene and the work it produces. Its stated mandate is to “provide an accessible platform for contemporary performance-based artists to push creative boundaries and develop interdisciplinary skills toward a maturing, innovative, and diverse practice.” In programming the festival, Colonescu and Myers reviewed and responded to over 30 applications, eventually landing on the five productions featured in the festival.
In planning the event, Myers and Colonescu also agreed that criticism had an important role to play. “Criticism is a good, healthy thing,” Colonescu explained. “If you normalize getting criticism, you get better at taking it in a healthy, constructive way.”
In discussing how best to bring criticism to the festival, the team landed on a somewhat unconventional solution: offering payment to critics (a deviation from the norm which sees critics paid by the publication rather than the theatre company, if they’re paid at all). While Colonescu noted that this decision stemmed in part from needing a way to draw out-of-town critics to a new and unknown event, it also connects more deeply to the ethos of the festival. “Critics are theatre practitioners,” Myers explained, “and we’re intentional about paying our artists more than the local norm for a festival, so we wanted to raise that bar in terms of supporting artists.”
In exchange for reviews of each of the festival’s five productions, the festival offered both an honorarium and complimentary accommodations. After an initial invitation was extended to senior editor Liam Donovan, Intermission came on board with the agreement, and I took on the assignment. Over further discussions of what coverage of the festival would look like, Colonescu and Myers made it clear that this payment was compensation for my time, work, and travel, and not tied to any expectation of positive reviews. “It’s the same kind of contract we would have with an artist — we’re paying them to do a good job,” Myers said. “I think it’s as simple as that.”
The festival runs from May 28 to June 1 at the Schneider Haus National Historic Site, a 19th-century farmstead-turned-museum in what is now downtown Kitchener. While Colonescu and Myers were originally attracted to the space’s outdoor amphitheatre, a warm reception from the museum has led to the festival making use of areas around the house and its grounds. The result is a series of five site-responsive productions in intimate and unconventional performance spaces.
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Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit is a one-person play that revolves around improvisation and the unexpected, making it somewhat fitting that its opening night performance at the festival was forced to pivot just before it started. Rained out of its original outdoor playing space, the production was moved indoors, into a brightly lit and vibrantly coloured classroom which made for an incongruous yet surprisingly apt setting for the play’s absurdist commentary on power and control.
The conceit of Soleimanpour’s play is such that at each performance a new actor — who knows nothing about the play — removes the script from an envelope and delivers it cold. There are minimal props, no predetermined direction, and (in the case of this hastily relocated performance) no set. On opening night, the actor was Ben Gorodetsky, who, despite their lack of familiarity with the script, moved fluidly and with care between the text’s humorous moments (his ostrich impression is excellent) and more serious beats, while also adeptly directing scenes of audience participation. Their occasional improvised interjections into Soleimanpour’s widely performed text — including their tactful critiques of both a scripted instance of body shaming meant to be directed at an audience member, and the play’s handling of gender — felt pertinent and respectful.
With a different actor leading each of the five performances (and a different audience with a different willingness to participate each time), this is a piece which is likely to change substantially across the festival. On opening night, an enthusiastic audience and Gorodetsky’s generous leadership made for a strong start.
(While White Rabbit Red Rabbit works best when seen without much prior knowledge, it is worth noting that it features a blunt and lengthy discussion of suicide. It would be helpful, here, for the festival to offer a clearer content warning to potential audience members.)
Nathaniel Voll’s Trading Post is similarly improvisatory, but much lighter in tone. A new take on a project initially conceived for Kitchener’s 2017 Night/Shift Festival, this version features text by Myers as well as Voll, and direction by Matt White. Set in the Schneider Haus’ kitchen, where tables and shelves have been covered in a seemingly random assortment of objects (stage management by Bea Littleton), the piece is an immersive and heartfelt commentary on the power and significance of seemingly arbitrary things.
Littleton welcomes the audience into the space, where chairs and benches line the wall not covered in items, and invites us to explore the objects on offer. We also meet amiable Walmart-greeter-by-day and trading-post-owner-by-night Guy S., performed charmingly by Voll, who invites the audience to trade secrets, stories, or small items in exchange for the trading post’s wares.
Audience members are welcome to bring their own items to trade (there’s a brief note on the production’s website encouraging folks to bring in a trinket, although this could perhaps have been made clearer), but this isn’t necessary — each attendee is also given an object to trade with when entering the space.
As the audience makes trades and shares stories, we learn more about Guy, the items, and each other. Guided by the mantra that there’s no such thing as garbage (which feels sincere, if a little saccharine), the piece asks its audience to reconsider the ways in which the objects and stories we all share connect us.
This is another piece that may shift substantially from night to night, based on the objects and stories the audience brings with them, and those they’d like to take away. It’s a fun concept, and I can’t help but wish it had a longer runtime than 45 minutes — I would have loved to have heard more stories.
Night Just Beyond the Forest, Timothy Johns’ English-language translation of Bernard-Marie Koltès La Nuit juste avant les forêts, marks another distinct tone amongst the festival’s productions. Performed by Lazaros Theodorakopoulos, the play is a frenetic, stream-of-consciousness monologue centring a man who is both literally and metaphorically attempting to find his way — and a room for the night — in an unnamed city implied to be Paris.
The content of Koltès’ text may be challenging for audiences — the provided warnings for racism and racial slurs, sexism, and homophobia are well-warranted here — and renders the unnamed speaker somewhat unlikeable and hard to root for. In performance, Theodorakopoulos doesn’t shy away from these harsher aspects of the character, instead embracing them in a way that feels believable, if off-putting. While much of the production, directed by Bill Bower, takes a frantic pace, the rare moments where Theodorakopoulos slows down help to more clearly communicate the plot and the character’s plight, providing the audience with opportunities for a more nuanced emotional engagement.
The production’s use of props is especially inventive; the images it creates are striking. Water sprayed into a flashlight beam becomes rain, and black shirts on clothes hangers represent the other individuals in the man’s orbit. The choice to stage the production in the Schneider Haus’ attic is also a strong one — dimly lit and a little chilly, with the faint sound of cars passing by on the wet streets outside, it’s a near-perfect atmospheric match to the world of the play itself.
Ultimately, the piece is immersive and evocative, if a bit alienating in its content.
Part ritual, part concert, part manifesto for hope and belief, Braeden Etienne’s Believe In It Alive challenges nihilism and cynicism, making for an effective counterpoint to the festival’s heavier fare.
The autobiographical piece is premised on a strange encounter with a metal hook which Etienne found hanging off a tree in their backyard. In performance, that hook is made tangible through small tinfoil recreations which Etienne distributes throughout the audience. Unsure of the hook’s origins, Etienne takes it as a sign from the Celtic deity Cernunnos, who he begins to write poetry to and about. Over the course of an hour, Etienne shares this poetry, performing (with direction by Bex Zehr) from behind a lace-draped table covered with synths, mics, a looping machine, and bright flashing lights, tucked into the corner of the Schneider Haus’ backyard. There’s a nice overlap of form and content here, which was made especially compelling by the piece’s sunset time slot on its opening night.
Etienne spins audio loops of singing, spoken word, guitar riffs (performed live by DAPH), and various beats into a critique of the metaphorical mental loops we play for ourselves, be they oppressively fearful or full of world-shaping belief. The piece’s writing is earnest and honest (although hard to hear over the instruments in a couple of moments), and Etienne performs with conviction, touching thematically on everything from religion and queerness to the abundance of mosquitoes in the Schneider Haus’ yard.
As Etienne proclaims in the piece’s frequently-repeated refrain, “if you believe in it, you can make it work,” and it’s their belief in the piece which sells it as a standout of the festival.
Krapp’s Last Tape sees a return to the attic, this time transformed into the isolated den where Samuel Beckett’s famous one-act play is set.
The audience enters the space to find the titular Krapp (a cantankerous Gary Kirkham) already seated at a desk, surrounded by books, a filing cabinet, boxes of tapes, and a tape machine. Guided to sit in a semicircle of chairs placed just outside the pool of light illuminating the playing space, the audience is positioned as witnesses on the periphery of Krapp’s life. As Krapp listens back to his younger self’s tape-recorded memoirs and reflects on the realities and disappointments of his 69 years, the title’s implicit reminder that the man is nearing the end of his life looms large.
Performed without dialogue for its first several minutes, the production instead relies on Kirkham’s physicality, mannerisms, and movement throughout the space to offer insight into Krapp’s character (the excellent direction is by Colonescu). We learn that he’s nearsighted and world-weary, and, through some effective physical comedy, that he likes bananas. And when he does eventually speak, Kirkham’s delivery is wry and sympathetic.
The use of the attic is also strong, with boxes of tape recordings tucked up under the eaves, and Krapp’s trips up and down the stairs to get a drink fully leveraging the affordances of staging the play inside a house.
Kirkham and Colonescu’s work here is understated — possibly the most subtle of the festival’s offerings, and certainly one of its most effective.
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To return to the question of what theatre communities do when faced with a lack of criticism, in this context and from my own perspective, the solution Colonescu and Myers tested out by inviting Intermission feels reasonable. I felt no pressure to review in a certain way, due in large part to Colonescu and Myers’ emphatic requests for honest and constructive critique, as well as their assertions of the benefits that such critique would have for Kitchener’s theatre community. The provided accommodations took away any worries of making it to a bus or train after a late-night performance, and saved me multiple hours of back-and-forth commuting over the two days I attended — a substantial perk which made working to a tight deadline much easier.
While this may not be a one-size-fits-all solution (not all companies can afford to pay critics, and certainly my lack of a more comprehensive knowledge of Kitchener’s theatre scene is a limitation), I think it does have potential as a way forward for communities struggling with a lack of local arts coverage.
Treading Theatre Festival runs until June 1 in Kitchener. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Charlotte Lilley
Charlotte Lilley (she/her) is a writer currently living in Hamilton, ON. She holds a BA from Western University, a Master of Applied Literary Arts from the Memorial University of Newfoundland (Grenfell), and currently studies at McMaster University. Her writing has appeared in Horseshoe Literary Magazine, Prelude (Calgary Phil), the Stratford Beacon Herald, and elsewhere. Charlotte’s writing and academic work explores speculative fiction, sustainability, and hope. www.charlottemlilley.com
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