goestoshow

Chaotica presents the author’s (and solo actress’) life over the last year as if she were playing a giant life-sized Game of Life. Events in the game include things like “party” (which comes with a giant colourful bottle of booze), “have a baby” (with accompanying sound effects), “get a career” (complete with rap about having to succeed), and “become a star” (where she sings a song about self-mutilation).

The real fun of this show, though, is in the clever ways she brings the audience into it. Though she asks people to come up on the stage, she gives them opportunities to escape being the center of attention. But if you’re a very tall, well traveled, and employed man who’s compulsively honest odds are good you’ll be on stage. Take from that what you will.

The play appears to be a kind of catharsis. The author puts the random happenstance of a negative period in her life into the context of a game where an all-knowing narrator deals her life in chance cards. It’s a powerful metaphor humorously delivered (even the worst card somehow manages to be funny).

Though not my favorite so far, it was definitely a solid show.

I went into this play knowing nothing about it other than the title, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I enjoyed it, though I think the running time of 1:20 was a bit long and it could have done without a couple of the digressions (but I have a general bias towards hour long plays). There’s a lot to this play including lots of use of multimedia, lots of little skits to punch up the somewhat dreary main storyline, a fun premise, and great stage design.

Which I feel leaves the story feeling a bit scattered and unfocused. It got where it was going, and had plenty of laughs and intense moments on the way there, but I just felt it meandered a bit too much in getting there. The acting was all well done, the subject was a great dichotomy between funny premise/sad execution, but something I can’t put my finger on keeps me from recommending this play too strongly.

Possibly a part of it is that while there are three actors in it, most scenes are done as if it were a one man play, with the other actors either off-stage, frozen on-stage, or doing something quietly around the stage while someone monologues. I suspect the play is designed to scale down to fewer actors. I have to admit I’m not very fond of one-man plays in general (I like the dynamics of 2+ people on stage better), so maybe that’s part of it.

Despite covering what seems like fairly cliched material, namely the idea of the soul mate and the chase across lifetimes for that one perfect life that’ll make all the rest worthwhile (see for example the film The Fountain with Hugh Jackman), this play manages to be touching and bittersweet in its attempt.

I can pin this play’s escape from cliche on one really important twist. In this play, the soul mate is not always the opposite gender, nor always in a sexual or even romantic relationship with you. While the Aloysius (Lou in one life, Aloys in another) is always a man, his soul mate Valentine switches between being a man and a woman (played by two different actors). In one life, Valentine is even a budding female-to-male transsexual unsuccessfully seeking her father Aloysius’ approval.

Seeing the frustrations of their love across their lives as they are guided to a conclusion they don’t understand by a nearly-all-knowing mischief god in a field of blocks that represent their other lives distorted by other-worldly perspective manages to create a tragic atmosphere that culminates in what I felt to be a very powerful climax. The climax is also helped by some of the most effective use of well known music in a fringe play I’ve seen in a while (simple formula, touching well known song + touching scene).

I feel the only downside to this play for me was a digression into a kind of myth-building that I don’t think can really be pulled off on the small stage. It makes an admirable effort, but I would have been ok without the flashback to the Fox’ origin story. I have to say, though, that it would have made an excellent graphic novel.

So, normally the first thing I want to do when I get out of a fringe play is sit down somewhere (beer tent, one of the outdoor stages, etc) and write about it. It’s how I think about and remember what I saw, and how I manage to get anything out of seeing as many as 20 plays over a week. When I was still trying to figure out where I was going to write my reviews during the first couple of days of the Fringe this year, it was actually fairly difficult to not write them.

With Rabbit Rabbit, though, I couldn’t do that. This play forced me to think about it as I walked home. I largely chose it because it was the most provocative and demented play description I’ve ever read in a Fringe guide. I’ll quote the description verbatim here:

“Larry, a paedophilic birthday clown, is on a “date” with Britney, a sixteen year old prostitute. If Britney gets another shitty score from a client, her pimp will throw her out. Larry wants his usual girl, twelve-year-old Sabrina, but she’s busy. It is D-Day in this motel room.”
- Fringe Guide

I was expecting this to turn out to be some kind of turn of phrase somehow, as provocative descriptions in the guide often are. But no, this is a completely accurate and correct description of what this play is about.

A play that wants to talk about pedophilia in an even remotely serious way (and this play is mostly serious, with jokes and funny awkward moments thrown in very appropriately to break the tension) it has to walk a really fine line. It has to make you sympathize with the main character just enough to be able to follow him through his story, but not so much that you feel the need to cleanse your brain with bleach for sympathizing with a dirty pedophile.

This play does a really good job of walking that line, though. It avoids committing you to watching anyone actually *enjoy* anything they’re going through that people would find morally objectionable (and never goes through with any of those acts), and I think that helps a lot. The two characters are so plainly in pain at their predicaments that you can sympathize with their plights without condoning their actions.

But this play asks a lot of really tough questions. Questions that probably don’t have any real answers. So if you can handle the subject matter, it will make you think. And for that, I think it’s worth seeing, even if it is a hard one to swallow.

Disclaimer: I saw this play on a comped ticket. There will also be offensive words in this review, as those offensive words are what the play is about. Namely, the N word and the three letter F word. If these words in an academic context offend you, you may want to stop reading here.

I went into this play concerned that what I was about to see might be some kind of slam poetry activist in your face kind of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t that at all.

This is an autobiographical one man play about its actor, Berend McKenzie. It’s about growing up and living as a gay black man, a combination that he demonstrates gives the mean people we all experience in our lives double the ammunition to use on him. In a series of deeply personal and intimate skits we see him as a child, discovering that pink skipping ropes cause him to get called a fag, not to mention that they make good whips for kids who gain the wrong kind of inspiration from Roots; as a teenager, discovering that while mohawks and camo pants make you look punk rock, eyeliner just makes you look gay; and as an adult actor, discovering that while he fits into two shoeboxes (gay and black) the combination of them prevents him from getting work.

It is in this last scenario that my favorite line of the play lies: “I don’t look like a black man, more like a member of the gay mexican drug cartel!”

I have previously reviewed plays by both Guys Un-Disguised and Berend McKenzie in previous years by the way. Berend McKenzie’s Get Off The Cross, Mary! was really funny as well, and if you saw and liked it, you’ll probably like this as well.

This play manages to do something I’d kind of assumed was impossible: Make a sexy fringe play. There’ve been a lot of Fringe plays *about* sex. But just being a Fringe play about sex doesn’t mean it’s sexy. This play was done (in part, at least) by the same person as did a play I saw at the 2006 Fringe called Girls Guide that was about sex, but was more funny than sexy.

This play pulls it off, though. Not through nudity (though there is some, it’s more raw than sexy in that regard), but through direct exploration of people’s fantasies. The fantasies range from the mundane (having sex with the husband) to the bizarre (plant planet penetration) to the hilarious (can’t tell you the funniest one, because it’d ruin the punchline. But it’s funny). In exploring every nook and cranny of sexuality, it manages to find all the hot parts and bring them to light by actors completely unembarrassed by the subject matter.

This is easily one of the top plays I’ve seen this year so far, and I really think people should see it. Apparently if Calgary is anything to go by, it’ll be selling out by the end of its run, so get in there and see it.

Think of Mork and Mindy. But instead of Mindy, there’s a male scientist named George Jenkins with an unhappy home life. And instead of Mork, there’s a female lesbian alien named Myrna. Throw in a bit of 50s sit-com (Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver) and old-school Words From Our Sponsor segments and you’ve got this play in a nutshell.

All roles are well played and the comedic timing is so excellent the audience is made to actually sound like a “Live Studio Audience” laugh track. This creates a believable atmosphere of actually being in the audience of a sitcom taping, and I find that impressive.

Oh, and throw a little Ed Wood in as well. It’s that hokey.

Very enjoyable.

I feel like this play was exploring really interesting things, going interesting places, but I really didn’t feel like I got what I was supposed to out of it. The discussion of how we portray and deal with violence when communicating it to children is fascinating, and the character seems perfectly suited to do it, but half the time I’m not sure what’s going on.

Monsieur Lazhar has been hired as a substitute for a teacher who committed suicide in her classroom while the class was out for recess. Understandably, the class is having trouble dealing with it, and Lazhar’s own past makes it difficult for him to confront it as well, but also probably makes him the perfect person to help the students do so.

Unfortunately, he’s lying about some very important things. And this is the problem with this play. It’s actually really hard to tell what he’s lying about and what exactly drives the events of the climax. They come upon the viewer suddenly and with insufficient exposition.

I feel like this play could have benefited from being edited down to an hour from an hour and a half. For example, a good 5 minutes or so right at the beginning is spent with the eponymous main character ranting about the fact he is Monsieur Lazhar who is substituting for Madame LaChance. He says this over and over again, at one point falling on the floor and doing a Homer Simpson style floorspin. The play is full of these zany little performance pieces that just don’t work for me at all.

I see a lot of potential in this play, but can’t quite figure out how to make it work out in my mind.

This one has a little of something for everyone. As far as I understand it, this play was written based on the title. I’ve seen several plays I think were written that way in past years and it always seems to work out well.

Obviously, though, these ones are never all wins. I was least impressed by the fairly slow and kind of depressing story about a man whose wife had left him. Its low energy compared to the other plays left me unclearon what had happened at any given point, as most of the action was off stage (and even the KILL part of the story was left kind of ambiguous).

But my favorite was possibly the best most concentrated awesome I’ve seen at the Fringe yet this year: A neighborhood of people who get together for a sexy games night where they play Russian Roulette in their underwear. The characters hate each other in a super hilarious way that really fits in with the game they’re playing. At the end we get to see a Quantum Immortality vision of all the end results of the game in which you discover that while the players may lose, the viewer wins in all scenarios.

The only problem I had was that they started late and ended even later. It was the first showing and they have some complicated stage tech (a rotating wall/door/window that they redress behind the action for every skit), so it’s likely this’ll tighten up, but I had to run out on the well-deserved standing O to get to the next play I was going to see. You might not want to leave 20 minutes between this play and the next.

This play features the Zombie Apocalypse, an imitation of the noises Beaker (from the Muppets) would make while having sex, and a full on living room brawl between four characters who don’t seem to like each other very much.

I don’t know how to express its awesome side better than just listing those things. At many points, this play is just purely fun.

It has a dark side, though. You have to wonder at points why these characters even know each other, let alone why they would invite each other over to watch Labyrinth (or why any of them would be the type to want to watch Labyrinth in the first place). You get the impression it’s supposed to say something about the main two characters and the repressed homoerotic bond they seem to share, but it never really gets fleshed out.

Mostly, though, this play is a fun romp. It starts really slow, but picks up well enough after a few minutes. It’ll make you laugh.