2014 Year in Review — The Plays I Saw
Here it is, the first entry in my 2014 Year in Review. Over the next week or so, I will be compiling and analyzing my stats in a number of different categories: Plays I Saw, Books I Read, Concerts I Heard, Movies I Watched, Jobs I Worked, Food I Ate, and People I Spent Time With. If you’d like to see last year’s Year in Review, it’s over on my tumblr blog: www.mackgordon.tumblr.com. I’ll link to each of last year’s posts individually in the footnotes. If you’d like to see what I’m up to in the future you can check out my personal website: www.mackgordontheatre.com. As always, these lists are focused on my favourites instead of objectivity. This year I tried to take notes as I went along so I wouldn’t have to do so much remembering. As a result, I sometimes stayed true to my reactions in the moment rather than recrafting a ‘review’ of the consumables concerned. I hope you like it!
THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY — Shows I wish I’d seen:
Ourtown, How to Disappear Completely, Small Parts, Venus in Fur, Iceland, This is War, Late Company, Equivocation, Cymbeline and probably more.
THE PLAYS I SAW
I haven’t included any of the shows that I worked on over the course of the year. If I had, I might’ve put The Tempest at the number one spot.
At the bottom are my top 25 favourite plays of the year. But first, in no particular order, the rest of the plays I saw with a few stray thoughts on some:
Porno Death Cult — Kind of like a personal collection of images, ideas, and impressions that choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg had during her pilgrimage on the Camino. I hope I never have to see another satirical yoga teacher again. Friedenberg herself is an incredible performer.
Ladystache Sketch Show — Buttons (the ending lines) are one the hardest things to write in comedy and Ladystache suffered in that department. The girls themselves were hilarious.
Sun Dogs
The Chariot Cities — This musical was written by one of my favourite hockey writers, Harrison Mooney.
Urinetown — Metafiction often gets a bad rap. Sometimes I’m a fan and sometimes I’m not. I don’t like metafiction that relies on characters commenting on the play for the sake of cleverness. Urinetown had some terrific performances, particularly from Meghan Gardiner and Anton Lipovetsky, send-ups work best when you truly care about what you’re sending up.
Godhead
Between the Sheets — a very cool concept — a play inside an elementary school class — with good performances, but, for me, the script didn’t deliver. The first third is great — it rips along at a good tempo. Then the show extends into some falseness to keep that tempo going. In it, a teacher is sleeping with the father of one of her students and, on parent teacher interview day, the mother shows up to confront her. As they move towards being friends and the mother starts to feel sympathy for the teacher and the inevitability of her losing her job, I start to get the ‘no’ feeling. The teacher shouts, “This is my job! This is how I make money!” And the mother feels bad for her. I wished with every cell of my being that the mother would say, “fuck you. You slept with my husband. Get another job. Leave my kid alone,” instead of finding some false recognition or human connection with the teacher.
Electric Company Obstructions: There is No Way to Fix What is Going Wrong — The company was given the task of creating a piece of theatre that followed three specific rules (or rather avoided three specific methods or modes that the company is known for). It was funny and occasionally surprising but ultimately fell flat because its content was so closely tied with its obstructions. To me, the point of an obstruction is to tell a story without utilizing techniques that are barred from you. Your story could be anything. As soon as you define your story by the things you cannot do, it becomes more of an experiment than a play. And as interesting as Electric Company’s experiment might have been, it lacked narrative hook for the audience to grab hold to. I think it’d be interesting to see the companies that partook in the Obstructions series do a simple remount of a show they’ve already produced, originally heavy on the three obstructions, without some of their trademark themes and techniques. Imagine a remount of the Electric Company’s Tear the Curtain, without electricity, performed by less than four actors, and without any direct-address to the audience. Now that would be interesting.
The Unfortunate Ruth
The Grid — This was a Satco (Student Alternative Theatre Company) at Uvic! Pretty solid work from the actors, a well-told story with the right amounts of information and intrigue.
Helen Lawrence — It was sort of the opposite of the film Dogville. Where Dogville is a movie that is really a play, Helen Lawrence is a play that’s really a movie. The concept is cool and fairly effective. Actors work behind a scrim with three cameras live-tracing their moves. They are on a completely blue background (including sets and props). Projected onto the scrim are interesting angles and perspectives of their performances but also, a completely rendered background world (including props and set). From an architectural standpoint, the show is a masterpiece. But the concept only awes for about a third of the show. The rest of the time, it spins its wheels. Chris Haddock wrote the piece, he is also the creator of the TV series ‘Da Vinci’s Inquest.’ He admirably uses the city of Vancouver as the setting in most of his work. I believe that the first step for a city to become internationally integral is to embrace setting our stories there. In Helen Lawrence, Haddock uses Vancouver as Vancouver. And that’s great. It’s amazing to hear characters talk about taking a right on Union. It’s affirming to see an establishing shot that features a bird’s eye view of our city’s map. What’s not great is that almost none of the actors are from Vancouver. It’s irritating to sit in a Vancouver theatre, watching a show based on Vancouver, hearing a character talk about living in the city but knowing that the actor has been imported from Toronto. There are hardly any jobs left in the city and when companies look outside to cast, they devastate our already injured cultural economy. A cool concept that doesn’t last the production’s lack of content.
Herm and Gertie
Lowest Common Denominator — The acting by Sean Macdonald and Deb Williams is exceptional. The dialogue between the three characters achieves dramatic tension while remaining true and believable. The well-executed transitions between scenes tie the story together. The action falls like dominoes until the end, in a slightly unexpected and satisfying conclusion. It’s funny. It’s well-written, well-acted, and well-told. But it’s almost a little too clean. Lowest Common Denominator did for me what very few shows do, it suspended my disbelief. For a little while, I forgot I was in the theatre, I forgot about my own life, and I just watched the story.
Listen to Me — Resounding Scream’s take on speed dating, our ability to talk to each other, and contemporary storytelling on the topic of people’s personal experiences (mostly with sexuality). This was a dress rehearsal so I’m sure some of the performers were only just beginning to experiment with how much affect the audience would have on their stories and how much of each ‘speed date’ would be ‘scripted’ and how much would be ‘improvised.’ I could’ve used a little more control in the experience but I’m sure most people wouldn’t feel that way. Either way, it was a cool experiment in active listening and connecting with a total stranger.
The Masks of Oscar Wilde
Trainspotting — Great production design and admirable performances from all the actors. Scottish accents, in my opinion, are some of the hardest to do, and while they weren’t uniform, I found them quite transforming. I knew the actors but I very easily saw them as their characters instead of as my friends. The script itself was a little problematic. I loved Act I but Act II didn’t add much. A dark impression of the lives of addicts.
The Glass Menagerie — An honest production of Tennesee Williams classic, Marilyn Norry and Graeme McComb were exceptional.
Floyd Collins
Broken Sex-Doll — This one has garnered some interesting controversy during it’s time in Vancouver but it’s really pretty innocuous. The show is neither satirical nor misogynistic, it’s simply a story that deals with a subject that no one will allow to be unpolitical. And rightfully so. The show is polished, the music is great, and Ben Elliott is amazing in the lead role.
Nothing But Sky — This show was at its best when it was most fun. There were a lot of great images and ideas but it suffered when it got too many ideas going at once. When Siegel, Schuster, and Joanna are putting together the plots for some of the first Superman stories and acting them out together, complete with the simple effect of a flashlight prop and a light beam projection, boy did this show soar. The workshops started with the designers in a room together, before a script. This is a fascinating way to work and definitely responsible for the shows greatest strengths as well as its greatest weaknesses.
Chase and Stacey’s Joyride
Saudade — A good performance and an interesting story of revenge that could’ve used a little more structure and a little more set-up and inevitability for it’s revenge. Some cool reveals and the main character in the one-woman show is tangible and interesting.
Old Time Gospel Radio Hour — This show was put on with only a few days of rehearsal, which is impressive. The musicians of Viper Central were perfectly integrated into a series of readings and 1930s Sunday morning radio spots. A fun night of easy listening.
Charles Sketch
Moonlight After Midnight — Some great intrigue as you wonder what really happened to these two characters and who they really are. The ending didn’t quite work for me. It was a touch on the sentimental side, robbing the conclusion of its intended poignancy. It was as if the cast wanted us, the audience, to be sad instead of they, the actors, experiencing loss. I sometimes felt left out of the story.
Best Picture — Three really funny performers reenacting all 86 best picture winners (plus a few bonus ones). Worth it alone for Tara Travis’ Jodie Foster.
Kaliban — Amazing language, written in iambic pentameter in three weeks. Some very coy nods to The Tempest — though also some missed opportunities, (no mention of Stephano and Trinculo). The politics are spoken with conviction but the plot is sometimes more in service of these political opinions than a character journey. I can’t stop coming back to the language; with lines like “Nightmare awoke to find he was no dream,” the show was certainly worth the price of admission.
The Out Vigil — a really solid new Canadian play, The Out Vigil has no bad scenes, flows nicely, and features characters you cheer for.
The Beggar’s Opera — A wild, expressionistic take on John Gay’s take on Bertolt Brecht’s episodically structured tale of a thief and the two women he’s married to. This one was all about the music. Daniel Doerksen composed a rock ‘n’ roll, funk-punk score and cycle that called upon a ton of other songs (so says the program — the only one I recognized was “Santa Baby”) and, man, was it impressive. The actors were all really good too. All this in a production that is technically community theatre.
Bug — A lot of show to chew on. I auditioned for Bug and wasn’t sure I could pull it off. They definitely made the right choice and I think pretty highly of myself. I found the script to be a bit more psycho cage-rattling than necessary story. Genevieve Fleming and Jay Clift successfully tackle two very hard roles to play.
James and the Giant Peach
Greenland — A series of three monologues from three family members, performed on a boat in Granville Island’s harbour. The audience is split into three groups that cycle through the monologues. Each audience group experiences the story in a different order. The show is driven by the three performers, often inches away, and they have to replicate their portion three times per show (twice per night). That’s no easy feat. The boat setting felt a little incidental for the most part, with only the male monologue actually seeming like it could take place on a boat, but it still made for some beautiful backdrops.
Caws and Effect — Last year I fell in love with “Mind of a Snail,” and their show Plasticity Now. Caws and Effect wasn’t as strong but it was still inventive. The “Mind of a Snail” puppeteers also played bird-like characters; the effect more disruptive to the flow of their typically brilliant, overhead projected live-animation.
Hunter Gatherers — Really funny performances.
Stroke of Luck — To know Jacques Lalonde is to love him. He bounces around on stage like Robin Williams, never missing an opportunity to comment on something that’s happening right here and now. Jacques had a stroke a year ago and this is the story of his stroke and recovery. Very funny, very charming, very zany.
The Rainmaker
The Fourth Graders Present an Unnamed Love Suicide — I liked this play. It was ballsy, with purposely long monologues that commit more to the concept of being written by a fourth grader than to entertaining the audience. Sometimes that style gets in the way of substance but there were some truly heart stabbing-moments played well, in particular by Conor Wylie. The rest of the cast was great too, including Emilie Leclerc as the cool girl’s best friend who is more than a little off kilter (a good archetype that isn’t used enough). The final drop of blood from the bucket tied to the roof was a perfectly executed punctuation mark. Like Nickelodeon slime.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession — This George Bernard Shaw piece about a mother who is a prostitute was mounted in the Rickshaw, a sleazy concert venue in Vancouver. Marisa Smith did a great job with the concept and execution, moving the audience into four different areas as the play progressed, each locale very specific and different from the last. The characters were a little difficult to like and the themes sometimes felt pedantic but that’s George Bernard Shaw for you. An ambitious production that accomplished a lot of what it set out to achieve.
Mother Tongue
The Dark Fantastic — After watching the show, I’m not sure if I liked it or not but I’m definitely interested in what it did. Martin Dockery explores a facet of theatrical storytelling that I am also interesting in: Creating an entire universe with only the power of words. He weaves his story sitting at a table with several different coloured lights that don’t do much other than set mood. A constant landscape of ethereal music plays underneath. It took some time to glom onto the world in which the story takes place; less the physical environment as much as the stylistic. It’s a world that brings to mind William S. Burroughs rolling around in the gutter cities of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In the end Dockery tries to inject some truth but it’s a little hard to buy after so much imagination stretching with subjects such as Rome actually being built in a day and an artist who can control vomit flying through a single nostril in order to paint on his canvas. Absurd and inventive.
Subway Stations of the Cross — A very captivating performance. Some really lovely and moving songs. Also some great simple and symbolic storytelling. Not really a play but definitely theatre.
Now the top 25! All great shows. The best shows of the year. In order from 25–1!
25. Measure for Measure — Feeling a shred of sympathy for the villainous Angelo is a pretty great thing for a production of Measure for Measure to achieve. Simon Webb was absolutely honest. Julie Macisaac’s reactions were true and simple. It was when these two were on the stage that the play lit fire. The direction was inventive with seats on stage and many candlelit scenes. I sat on a bench onstage and was treated to my own camera work and stage pictures, frequently off-kilter but occasionally perfect. At one point, two men stood in the foreground, their backs to me, inches away. They were flanked on the outer edges by two plinths filled with candle-lit mason jars — like a bric-a-brac wedding. Between the men, Just a few feet further was Julie Macisaac on her knees appealing to them. Only I got to see that.
24. Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me — Great performances, particularly Ashley O’connell’s brusque Irishman, and non-stop chattering imagination fills a small room with only three men in it, chained and held prisoner in 1980's Lebanon. A lot of care and compassion went into the making of this production and it shows.
23. To Wear a Heart So White — Leaky Heaven puts on some weird-ass shows. This is an adaptation of Macbeth that features church services, a taxidermy puppet show, and the real severed head of a pig. Not everything is perfect in the show, but a lot of it is fantastic. I particularly liked how they cast the audience as different characters. We spoke along, call and response, to the witches’ famous lines, we closed our eyes and imagined ourselves walking down some steps, through a door, into a heath, into a castle, into a bedroom, and picking up the knife that kills the king, the front row of the audience became dinner guests at the table when Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo. While certain moments don’t work as well as others — the speaking along to the audio from the BBC’s Macbeth comes to mind — the show is an experience.
22. Wide Awake Hearts — Great acting. Great transitions. Great writing. And yet, while a good show, it doesn’t quite elevate to greatness. Something in the formula doesn’t quite ignite. Regardless, I love a show that takes risks and while the final scene didn’t quite feel connected to the rest of the play, it sure was fascinating to watch. Great performances and crackling dialogue.
21. It’s a Wonderful Life Radio Show — Dynamic direction gives this play more interest than a simple stage adaptation. You get to see the live-foley as well as actors employing techniques to bring the show to life vocally while also staying engaged physically. A wonderful production that doesn’t suffer from its very short (five and a half days) rehearsal process.
20. Aiden Flynn Lost his Brother So He Made Another — Simple storytelling aided by DIY aesthetics that get the job done in inventive ways. In one scene, a boy falls through the ice and, to tell that story, the performers put up a home-made projection of a multisided black shape. Then the actor moves further and further from the projector. Because we’ve invested, we believe he’s sinking deeper into frozen water. The whole production was an inspiring example of ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’.
19. A Midsummer Night’s Dream — For those who don’t think classics can be funny, I present Dean Paul Gibson’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a rarity to get a great performance from every single person in a cast that is 18 performers deep, Dream achieved that.
18. Our Time — During Delinquent Theatre’s writer’s retreat, in Laura Maclean’s parents’ living room, Christine Quintana performed a rehearsal of her one-woman show, Our Time. I can’t imagine many things more intimate. The play has a great narrative, full of interest and intrigue, about a soon-to-be high school graduate winning the lottery. It’s written for young adults but it spoke to me on a structural basic, filled with unexpected twists and turns. I was always yearning for what would happen next.
17. Mark and Kyle — Formerly of Picnicface, the group that brought us PowerThirst and the eponymous TV series. I haven’t laughed in years as hard as I laughed at Kyle Dooley’s ‘Cleanest Rapper in the World Sketch.’ I’ve seriously been checking the internet for clips of this bit since January. Making me laugh harder than I have in years gets you pretty high up a list.
16. The PULL Festival — A really tight evening of ten minute plays. The night started with a creepy and rhythmic two person ghost story/musical by Christine Quintana and Mishelle Cutler. I remember thinking, “Good luck following that.” But almost every short play was smart and real and precise. It’s very difficult to do a serious drama in ten minutes without coming across as melodramatic and angsty, Scott Button’s one-woman show pulled it off wonderfully. As an emerging artist in the city, the Pull Festival’s acting scared me, it was so good.
15. The Bride of Barkerville 14. The Fred Wells Show 13. Lady Overlander — Three one person shows, written by Danette Boucher (two performed by her, the other by her husband, James Douglas), these plays meant a lot to me. I saw them in Barkerville and Wells while I was living up North and they pushed me to continue to be artistically creative while working full time. The stories have excellent balance of drama and humour, never hanging in one mood for too long. They also utilize education of history and museology effectively and engagingly. Boucher’s shows have the craft that good educational theatre requires, perhaps even more so than a show produced purely for entertainment. This isn’t even to mention the beautiful performances. As actors, they truly embody character, able to live the emotional stakes and consequences of stories that took place 150 years ago.
12. Killer Joe — The physical atmosphere that Itsazoo created near the Italian Cultural Centre was amazing and more than made up for some weaknesses in the actual script. The company built a trailer park and the play itself happened inside a real mobile home. Most of the performances were excellent, Emma Slipp and Sebastian Archibald, in particular, felt like real people who lived inside the trailer. In an intimate site-specific piece, that’s essential. If someone is three feet in front of you, they better be making their words fresh or it’s going to show. Once the climax began, the play was a clattering phenomenon peaking with a final fight scene that shouldn’t have been possible, given the confines of the trailer. That last fight scene was a real triumph. Furniture flew and even a long time Itsazoo fan like me was left wondering if some of the blood was real.
11. Nashville Hurricane — A virtuoso performance by Chase Padgett. He’s best known for his Fringe Festival hit Six Guitars, where he embodies six different genres of guitar playing along with six distinct characters. In that show, the audience raved about his fretwork, but this show is all about acting ability. He swiftly shifts between an old bluesman, a developmentally disabled guitar phenom, his mother, and a crooked ex-preacher turned music manager. He plays each wonderfully. He spins a yarn that never lets you stop wondering what’s going to happen next. And what happens next is almost always satisfying. The show finishes with a one-man version of a famous country music hit that had my audience leaping to their feet with applause. It’s a well-crafted narrative with loved and real characters.
10. Bits — Patrick Kearns is an endlessly compelling performer in that he’s not an actor. This is his first show and he’s very earnest about it. The structure is genius (despite what his fringe reviewers might think). He doesn’t play any instruments but he wants to. He can’t seem to get up the motivation to learn, so he just decides to sing songs. He gives us a concert of introductions, sometimes veiled as monologues, rants, or jokes, and acappella songs. His jokes are sharp and delivered with pinpoint accuracy and the show is very moving without being sentimental. Kearns was returning home from his Fringe tour to the Sunset Theatre at the Arts Wells Festival. He had a huge audience (we had to sit on the ground at the base of the stage) full of friends and fans. Magic happened that night.
9. Little One — Little One is a truly spooky play. Marisa Smith perfectly played the young girl that the plot revolves around, carrying the bulk of the show’s serious chills. It’s a really difficult thing to get a theatre full of people scared. Smith’s character was disturbing because the character was so honest, so real and authentic, yet, had the true potential to do something terrible.
8. Peter n’ Chris and the Murder Hotel — What sets Peter n’ Chris apart from other sketch groups is their storytelling. They’ll roll in JPM’s (Jokes per Minute) as well as anyone but they also satisfy the audience with their narratives. They take classic story structures and genre tropes and pump them full of comedy steroids. They’ve created a whole repertoire of creative and hilarious sequences over the course of their four or five two-man shows and some of their best work is featured in The Murder Hotel: Peter doing the sound effects to Chris making his way into the shower, a time lapsed drive along a dark deserted highway, a bed sequence with some of their best one liners.
7. The Untitled Sam Mullins Project — He’s already one of the best storytellers in Canada and he’s only getting better. This show is four short stories working under the framework of four truths he recognized about himself during a comedy workshop. It’s a little less cohesive than his past performances but it works just as well, each story exactly the right length of time, with poignant thoughts and buttons along the way. The syntax in this show took a step up from Mullins’ previous work. Sam was snapping along, weaving words just like the best storytellers in the world, because he is one.
6. Espresso — Wonderful performances and a story that I’ve been waiting years to see. It was worth the wait. Frangione’s script is moving and engaging. The turn in the story that really got me was when a character we never even meet ends up dead in an accident that hospitalizes the protagonist’s father. Really good writing can move you with a character who is never even there.
5. Peter n’ Chris and the Kinda OK Corral — Peter and Chris are masters of repeating funny little errors, ad libs and improvs to make it seem like they’re happening for the first time. It really gives the audience the feeling that they’re seeing something special. They’ve been working together a long time and it shows with how present they are on stage together.
It seems like metafiction has become a bad word in theatrical circles because it’s so often associated with amateurism and ego. The most annoying part of metafiction is the author’s assertion that what they are doing is bold and new. Most metafictional storytelling has become mundane and common. But all ‘meta’ really means is self-referencing. The performer recognizes that the show is a performance rather than real life. It’s an acknowlment of artifice. Peter and Chris do metafiction perfectly. The reason they aren’t cringe-worthy is because they base everything on the very real foundation of their friendship. It’s never cold and it’s never just for the sake of being clever.
The Kinda OK Corral has one of the more exciting story structures of all Peter n’ Chris’s shows.
4. Magic Unicorn Island — Jayson McDonald has a style all his own. Magic Unicorn Island is the story of a not-so-distant future where every child on Earth — led by a historically savvy 13 year old — decides to emigrate to a private nation where democracy is truly followed. Macdonald tells his stories through a montage of scenes — often one character having a conversation with another, but we’re only privy to one side of the dialogue. It’s almost impressionistic storytelling, subplot on top of subplot. We are shown only precious little glimpses into the world he’s created. The end of this show packs a punch so poignant I could barely look at him when he did the fringe-traditional after-bow spiel. I was too close to crying.
3. This Stays in the Room — A performance in an intimate space, the Gallery Gachet, where four actors share stories from their real life. Directed by Mindy Parfitt, this production is incredibly moving. The actors share stories of their greatest shame, speaking about haunting things and talking about the perpetrators involved — sometimes themselves — and the process of forgiveness. The performers are so warm and gracious with their sharing that they transform the dirt and grime of some pretty breathtaking acts into a cauldron of love and empathy. The play hugs us. It tells us some hard earned truths: It’s fucking hard to be a human, we mess up all the time. So, do what you can to let go of the terror and fear, and do what you can to let your actions going forward be redemptive and life-giving. It’s getting a remount in Vancouver this coming year and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about what it means to be alive.
2. Saint Joan — a behemoth of a show that could be absolutely terrible but in the capable hands of Kim Collier and one of the best Vancouver casts possible, the show is totally captivating. The play is dense but once you get on the train, you never get off. It’s exactly the sort of show I like, lots of wordy ideas, super high stakes, and huge emotional payoffs. When I saw Next to Normal on Broadway, there was this magic vulnerability that the main actress, Marin Mazzie, brought to the performance. I couldn’t and can’t put words to it. It was primal emotion. I hadn’t seen it again until Meg Roe in Saint Joan. She shakes the world.
1. The Seafarer — Gritty, dark, and endlessly compelling. A play this long only works if you can lose yourself in it and forget where you are. All you care about is what’s going to happen next. A turning reveal that makes you go ‘of course!’ despite not seeing it coming at all. Amazing acting from all, Ron Reed disappeared in his role, Tim Dixon was funny, loveable and papa-bear-protective, John Emmett Tracey played the long game and allowed himself to be banal until he wasn’t. Andrew Mcknee was that funny, self-centered asshole you can’t help but like and John Innes built a delicate balance of hate and sympathy. In the end, when our booze-sick, disagreeable protagonists beat the devil, we jump for joy and celebrate with them in Satan’s face. But we still feel a pang of care for Lucifer as he walks out the door, wishing that he had what these down on their luck, urban under-dwellers have — peace of mind.
