Meegan Sweet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
•The star of The Shiniest Piece Of Trailer Trash, the solo show launching the Fringe Theatre season tonight, is a dreamer. The aspirational raccoon from the crummy trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks wants to be human, a real live ‘yuman bean’. The solo show, by and starring the multi-faceted Meegan Sweet (who’s is also the costume, set and sound designer) was the ‘staff pick’ of the 2024 Fringe. And, as I know, it was impossible to get a ticket, for love or snacks.
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It runs through Saturday in the Studio Theatre at the Fringe Arts Barns, before de-camping to Toronto’s What The Festival later this month. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.
•It’s been 85 years since the Battle of Britain, as British prime minister Winston Churchill coined it. And in a genuine l940s hangar at the Alberta Aviation Museum Saturday evening that seminal event, and Canada’s role in it, are celebrated in an original site-immersive play by Kenneth Brown, specially written for the occasion.
The evening, which includes dinner, is the inspiration of the 700 (City of Edmonton) Wing of the Royal Canadian Air Force Association. And all proceeds benefit the veterans at the Capital Care Kipnes Centre.
The playwright is an expert in bringing Canadian wartime history to life in the theatre, as Edmonton audiences know from such Brown plays as Letters in Wartime, Roy versus The Red Baron, and his epic Spiral Dive Trilogy, with its Canadian fighter pilot hero. As Brown explains, at the centre of Battle of Britain, which unfolds in four parts (and three intermissions for dinner), we meet Kent, a Canadian test pilot enlisted to lead the RAF’s 303 Polish Squadron. Based on a real Canadian aviation story, “one of the great ones,” his crazily dangerous job is “to test huge helium-filled balloons suspended on cables at 10,000 feet,” by ramming them — designed to repel the Luftwaffe air onslaught. “Kent leads us into the story,” says Brown. “And he’s an extraordinary character, in a way blandly ‘Canadian’, but managed to corral these Polish ex-pats; he didn’t even speak Polish.”
Brown has borrowed liberally from his Spiral Dive plays for Battle of Britain. And, he says, he “welcomed the opportunity to go back to a historically important period … a battle that changed the course of world history.” And not least, because it counts as “a glorious defensive war, nothing morally ambiguous about it.”
Brown’s cast includes a top-flight trio of Edmonton actors: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Graham Mothersill, and Brennan Campbell. Tickets: 700wing.com.
•Starting previews Saturday (and opening next week) is Life of Pi, a stage adaptation of the Yann Martel best-seller about a shipwrecked Indian teenager on an impossible journey — afloat for hundreds of days on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a menagerie of zoo animals de-populated (by ways you can imagine) down to a Bengal tiger. The Citadel-Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Haysam Kadri features puppets by Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada (you can read about how they came to life in this preview here). Life of Pi runs through Oct. 5. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.
•Continuing at the Mayfield is their season-opening production of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, in which an expert cast and band conjure those indelible songs and that signature sound. It runs through Nov. 2, and the review is here.
