Alison learned about life in the theatre from her Mom

By Alison Broverman

Last month my mother, Sue Foster, made her Toronto Fringe debut in Act Two Studio’s Leacock Live in the Tarragon Theatre Mainspace. She’s 59. I’m allowed to tell you that, because you probably won’t believe me anyway (especially if you happened to see her at the beer tent that one night when she was buying us all drinks).

A few weeks ago I trapped her in the car on our way back from a cottage and made her tell me all about her first Fringe experience. I have adapted that car ride into a short play for your reading pleasure. Please contact me regarding performance rights. Thank you.

Act 1: Inside a Toyota Highlander driving down the 400 on a hot August day. The air conditioner is on. Alison and Sue are eating Twizzlers. Sue is driving. Alison subtly – she hopes – pulls her digital audio recorder out of her purse. She feels awkward about what she is about to ask, but it is for the greater good of the Praxis theatre blog.

Alison:             So remember that night at the beer tent when you bought us all beer?

Sue:                 Yes…

Alison:             People want to hear about your first Fringe experience.

Sue:                 Who?

Alison:             Readers of the Praxis theatre blog.

Sue:                 Ok…

Alison:             So can I interview you?

Sue:                 Really? I guess so…

Alison:             So can we do it now that I’ve trapped you in the car?

Sue:                 Ok, sure.

Alison:             Ok, so…how was your first Fringe? As a performer? [My mother was instrumental my 2007 Fringe production of Expiry Dating, building and transporting the set, hosting the opening night party, and tap dancing at the fundraiser.]

Sue:                 It was fun! It made me feel like I was part of a special kind of club, even though I was a performer in a show with 15 other people. Which is kind of a big cast for a Fringe show.

Alison:             Not the biggest cast. I bet it wasn’t even the biggest cast this year.

Sue:                 I bet it was the cast with the most number of years, if you added up all our ages.

Alison:             I bet that is definitely true. [The entire cast of Act 2 Studio’s Leacock Live was over fifty, several were over 70, and at least two were over 80.] So what was your favourite thing about being in the Fringe festival this year?

Sue:                 Hm. My favourite thing about the Fringe festival. This is gonna sound strange, but…handing out the little flyers. [She laughs.]

Alison:             Why?

Sue:                 Because I got to say “come and see this show, I’m in it!” But without having the pressure of being the star or anything. And I thought our little bookmark/flyers were kind of cute.

Alison:             They were. [They really were.] Were you nervous at all before the festival, or worried about anything?

Sue:                 I was worried that it was going to be lame. That we were going to be lame. But I think we…weren’t. I hope we weren’t.

Alison:             I don’t think you were lame. [I’m a good daughter, obviously, but they really are not lame. Adorable, yes. Not lame.]

Sue:                 I was a little bit worried that we would be lame, but then once we got a bit of feedback from people who attended rehearsals, and from some of the members of Act 2 who were going out to help us publicize, I figured we wouldn’t be lame.

Alison:             You sold pretty well.

Sue:                 Yeah, we did. [Modestly] Best of the venue. So that’s pretty good.

Alison:             And what was the worst part? Was there anything that sucked?

Sue:                 Ummm…hm. Not really. Because the thing I don’t like sometimes about a big group of people is that somebody gets nitpicky and grumpy about things. But I was able to avoid them.

Alison:             Who were the nitpicky grumps?

Sue:                 Oh, just various people from time to time. Because they’re old, some of them, and some of them get tired easily.

Alison:             Did you read any of the reviews?

Sue:                 I did…but I tried hard not to take them personally.

Alison:             But some of them were very good.

Sue:                 Some of them were very good, yes. J. Kelly Nestruck was very sweet. One of our cast members responded to his first article about the Fringe, where he called us as “old actors”, and he called her back within an hour of her e-mailing him and apologized and said he was in a hurry when he wrote it, and then he gave us a really nice review once we were up and running. So that was pretty nice. The guy from…I can’t remember if it was Eye or Now, he was not very complimentary about some things, but whatever…I think I’d better take this exit and get some gas. The light just came on.

A publicity shot for Leacock Live

Alison:             Ok.

Sue:                 I didn’t just miss an exit, did I?

Alison:             I don’t think so…no, look, there’s a rest stop up there.

Sue:                 Oh yeah, perfect.

Alison:             How did you come to be in Leacock Live in the first place?

Sue:                 Well, the director asked me to be in it. I think she did that because I’d done the part before…[they arrive at the gas station and fill up the car and eat more Twizzlers.]

Act 2: Back on the road

Alison:             You were in the middle of saying something about…something.

Sue:                 Yeah, something about how the director picked me…

Alison:             Oh yeah. And do you know why Act 2 chose Leacock Live for their Fringe show?

Sue:                 Yeah. One of the Act 2 members entered the Fringe lottery on our behalf, and she really wanted us to do Leacock Live. So we figured, since it was her entry that got us in, we did what she wanted us to do. She wasn’t able to be in it because of her work schedule, but she loved it, so that’s nice.

Alison:             And what were some of the follow ups to the Fringe afterwards?

Sue:                 One of the people in the cast decided to contact Orillia and invited their council to come. And they invited us to kick off their Leacock Festival at the Stephen Leacock Museum. So we did the show there on late July, and they loved it, and said “Bring this back every year!”

Alison:             And what else?

Sue:                 What else? [Sue looks at Alison quizzically.] Got any hints?

Alison:             Weren’t you invited to a high school in Aurora?

Sue:                 Oh yeah! We were invited to a high school in Aurora. It’s a dramatic arts high school and we’re going to show them some Readers’ Theatre, I guess…And expose them, maybe, to Leacock. I was astounded to discover that Leacock is no longer taught in public schools. And it’s very sad, because he’s a historic figure in Canada. So there were many people under 30 who came to our show who actually had never heard of Stephen Leacock. You’ve read Leacock, right?

Alison:             Of course! I read Leacock in grade 7. [At the nerd high school you sent me to, Mom.] So did you spend a lot of time at the Fringe tent during the festival?

Sue:                 I spent a few hours there…I at least passed through at least six days, and a couple of those days I stayed for a couple of hours. So yes, I guess I spent a good amount of time at the Fringe tent.

Alison:             And did you see anything else good?

Sue:                 Yeah, I think I saw about 12 shows. [They babble for awhile about how Craplicker was such a great show with such an unfortunate title.]

Alison:             Any other thoughts you’d like to add about making your Fringe debut at the age of 59? It is ok if I put your age in there, right?

Sue:                 Sure, I don’t care if you tell people I’m 59. They won’t believe you anyway. I just think it might be fun to do another Fringe show sometime, something different. It made me think anything’s possible.

Alison:             Do you feel differently about the Fringe now, having been in a show yourself?

Sue:                 Not really…I think I’m going to take Black Creek. We should go to the Danier outlet.

Alison:             Ok!

[Alison and Sue drive to the Danier outlet, where Sue buys Alison a blue leather jacket as a belated birthday present. You see what happens when you try to interview your mom?]

*  Act 2 Studios offers theatre training for people over the age of 50.

*  To see Alison’s new jacket, try to run into her sometime in the fall. It’s too hot to wear it yet.

Alison Broverman is a Toronto-based arts reporter and playwright whose mother taught her to drink at an early age

]]> http://praxistheatre.com/2010/09/leacock-live-the-inside-story/feed/ 0 http://praxistheatre.com/2010/08/why-stephen-harper-will-continue-to-attack-the-arts/ http://praxistheatre.com/2010/08/why-stephen-harper-will-continue-to-attack-the-arts/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:44:49 +0000 Michael http://praxistheatre.com/?p=3906

Someone forgot to tell the PM that encouraging Nickelback actually reduces Canadian culture...or did they?

by Michael Wheeler

Shortly after the 2008 Federal election, Peter Donolo, soon-to-be Chief of Staff to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, addressed a select group of executive directors and organizational leaders at an industry seminar organized by The Arts Advocate. In his role as pollster for The Globe and Mail during the election, Donolo had accumulated extensive data on the arts and how it had impacted the race. One piece of information from his presentation produced audible exhalations and dismayed nodding of heads:

The highest polling numbers the Harper campaign ever saw in the province of Ontario were on the day after his Ordinary People Don’t Care About The Arts statement (Sept 24/08).

However much it seems retrospectively the comments were a careless slip that may have cost the government a majority, the reality is there was an emotional resonance to this message that initially gave him momentum in a battleground province. Eventually, these numbers receded in the weeks before voters went to the polls, leaving the merged Canadian Alliance and PC parties short of a majority government with the support of just over one third of the electorate.

Seen in this context, comments made by the PM to the national media that he was “concerned” by Catherine Frid’s play Homegrown at the 2010 Summerworks Festival begin to fit into the government’s larger agenda as a strategic exercise by a government no longer able to communicate through rational discourse.  These comments point to a desire to use emotionally charged signposts to frame discussions and talking points, rather than the merits of programs and policies based on data or logic.

Will we talk about the arts next election in relation to harnessing our imaginations and creativity within a complex and multidimensional culture? Or will we discuss the arts in relation to whether we should use tax dollars to support terrorism? These are the types of paradigms that are being established in the discourse leading up to the next election.

If Harper succeeds in connecting arts funding and supporting terrorism, it will fit in well with a campaign that paints public funding for political parties to replace the influence of massive donations by corporations and unions as supporting separatism, a coalition government as advocating socialism, and an inquiry into the largest series of civil rights violations in Canadian history at G20 as supporting anarchism.

Of course none of these references are true, but it doesn’t matter. Every mainstream reviewer who saw Homegrown went out of their way to specifically address the allegations by the PM and his office that the play “glorified terrorism”. Each one reached the identical explicit conclusion that the play in no way justified or supported terrorism. What matters is that arts funding and taking a “sympathetic” view of terrorism are now a cultural meme that some people will remember. Mission accomplished.

This type of highly emotional and dramatic hyperbole will be backed up by an impressive war chest accumulated by the Conservative Party that has been significantly out-fundraising the opposition since fall 2008. In the lead up to the next election, this will back a multi-million dollar wave of negative ads in every media geared at emotional flashpoints in an effort to define complex policy issues with simple narratives that elicit a kneejerk response from sub-cortical “reptilian” elements of the brain.

By hoping to communicate with voters through fight or flight stimuli, the goal is to avoid any rational or substantive debate. Next year, without any reliable or detailed information available through the census, there will be even less data available to evaluate and discuss policies and programs. The heavily partisan bent of the Harper government has forced it to abdicate a knowledge-based discussion of their policies, save a few economic statistics that neglect to mention the sizeable budget surplus Canada had when they took the reins of government and the huge deficit they have generated five years later.

When Kory Teneycke (l) was Communications Director to the PM they both lunched in NYC with Fox News President Rupert Murdoch. Four months later he left his position to lead Quebecor Media's attempt to rewrite CRTC rules in their favour to start Fox News North, which he is pictured announcing.

This embrace by Conservative strategists of US Tea Party-style political tactics is set to be joined by the biggest weapon in regressive populist media: Our very own Fox News. Upset that the current CRTC head won’t fast track a special Category 1 licence for a national TV station to be run by Harper’s previous spokesperson, Harper is set to replace him with someone who is willing to break CRTC rules to allow him a national TV station dedicated to supporting and propagating his ideology.

Who owns the station “applying” for this licence? You guessed it: SUN Media. The very same SUN Media that created the Homegrown controversy in their Toronto newspaper and scandalously asked Harper about the play with one of only two English language questions available to the media in Harper’s first comments to the country in over a month. It has since been revealed that virtually every other journalist in attendance had already agreed to ask him about the census. (What the entire national media didn’t think Canadians from coast-to-coast were dying to hear the PMs thoughts on a summer indie theatre festival?)

There is an unfortunate logic to politics that right-wing parties are succeeding when they are talking about the military and the economy, and failing when they talk about things like education, healthcare and culture. By framing culture as a “spending” and  “national security” issue they are effectively taking a topic that is a loser for them and turning it into a winner. Combine that with the strong numbers in Ontario after Harper’s anti-arts statements in 2008 and the fact the Conservatives have given up completely in Quebec, and we may be looking at another election where arts and culture is again under attack.

This is not necessarily a great strategy for Harper – where last election arts and culture supporters were caught off guard being attacked by their own government, this election they will be organized, have lists of active supporters in every major city, and have identified leaders and organizing strategies that target swing ridings. They are also way better than them at gaining earned media and using the internet. At the end of the day, it will be up to the opposition, the non-Quebecor owned press, and civil society to shift the debate out of the highly emotional, into factual analysis of the policies and parties that will best serve the country.

Lately, it has been the subject of some media as to whether an emotional, ideologically-based discussion of policies and programs can become a substitute for rational debate that includes data and information.

It can not.

This is a trailer for a play! (sort of)

by Michael Wheeler

During the film shoot last winter the stage of The Stanley Theatre was used to get a almost a hundred extras into period hair and make up. This fall the show premieres on the same stage.

Last winter I wrote about my trip to British Columbia to learn more about the work director Kim Collier and The Electric Company are doing combining live and recorded performance as part of my investigation into the relationship between direction and design as Director in Training at The Tarragon Theatre. On my first trip to Vancouver in February 2010 during The Cultural Olympiad, I spent two weeks on the set of the film shoot for the production Tear The Curtain!

As of today I’m back for round two of this project, attending rehearsals and learning as much as I can in the lead-up to opening night of this hybrid film and theatre piece production that will have its world premiere presented by The Arts Club Theatre Company at The Stanley Theatre on September 15. Stay tuned for more about this project as opening night approaches!

This year's SummerWorks Awards designed by OCAD student Chao Gao.

SummerWorks Prize for Production:

Winner: Ride the Cyclone

Contra Guys Award for New Work:

Winner: Post Eden

National Theatre School Award for Set or Costume Design:

Winner: Theory

Honourable Mention: Iphigenia at Aulis

Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation:

Winner: Avatar

Canadian Stage Award for Direction:

Winner: Steven McCarthy, Bliss

The Spotlight Award:

Winners:

Edwige Jean-Pierre, Even Darkness is Made of Light

Adam Lazarus, Wonderland

Honourable Mention: Rosemary Dunsmore, Kayak

The Steam Whistle Emerging Artist Award:

Winner: Johnnie Walker, Redheaded Stepchild

Honourable Mention: The entire crew of Countries Shaped Like Stars

RBC Arts Professional Award:

Winner: Foster Child Play

The NOW Magazine Audience Choice Award:

Winner: Ride the Cyclone

On Monday, August 16th, City Council’s Executive Committee will be meeting to decide on a long-term plan to increase funding to the arts, with new money made available from the recently implemented billboard tax.  Join BeautifulCity.ca in Committee Room 1 at 10am to show your support.

Background information on the 10-year battle of public space advocates to create a Billboard Tax for Art in Toronto can be found here, here and here on the Praxis website, and here on BeautifulCity.ca.

See you there!

Next Stage in the Factory Theatre Mainspace:

At The Sans Hotel
Created & performed by Nicola Gunn Designed by Nicola Gunn with Rebecca Etchell, Gwendolyna Holmberg-Gilchrist and Luke Paulding

In a deserted Hotel strewn with familiar remnants, a woman is marooned in a bathtub. She suggests something terrible has happened or is about to happen…

Duel of Ages
by True Edge Productions (with a cast of 21)

This anthology of duelling scenes begins in the 16th century and goes, all the way to its impact on the modern psyche in the age of cinema.

Fairy Tale Ending: The Big Bad Family Musical
Presented by Role Your Own Theatre from Toronto
Music and Lyrics by Kieren MacMillan & Jeremy Hutton

Fairy Tale Ending is a topsy-turvy yet touching tale of a young girl coming to grips with loss and the reality of growing up. NSTF’s first family show for kids and grown-ups – matinees and kids pricing TBD.

The Grace Project **World Premiere**
by Judith Thompson & the ensemble

The Grace Project features courageous young adults sharing their true, life-shaping experiences living with chronic illness.

Next Stage in the Factory Studio Theatre:

The Apology
by Darrah Teitel
Directed by Audrey Dwyer, Performed by: Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, Natasha Greenblatt, Sascha Cole and Daniel Chapman-Smith.

Teenage sexuality coupled with inspired political ideology fan the flames of this anachronistic work set in early 19^th century British high society that discusses the tensions between maternity and feminism, ideology and love in an original story of sexual revelation.

Eating with Lola
Presented by Sulong Theatre
Written and performed by Catherine Hernandez, Directed by Ann Powell

Part confession, part revelation, Lola’s epic tale unravels the entire modern history of Manila from the time of the Thomasites to the second wave of Filipino migration to the United States – one spoonful at a time. A one woman (and one puppet) tour-de-force.

Swan Song of Maria (A Tragic Fairy Tale)
By Carol Cece Anderson
Directed by Mark Cassidy, Music Performed by Hilario Duran, Featuring Lili Francks, John Blackwood and Bridgett Zehr

Inspired by Swan Lake, the piece combines Afro-Cuban-Latin-Jazz, various dance styles and story to navigate a the forty year relationship.

Tom’s a-cold
By David Egan
Directed by Daryl Cloran, Featuring Shane Carty & Brendan Gall

In 1845, HMS Terror and Erebus set sail from England seeking the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Neither ship was ever seen again. Three years later, two men sit in a lifeboat.

“It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise then should I call it love? It’s so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greeting card saying, ‘Congratulations on your Engagement’. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me.”

IMAGE:

SOUND:

(don’t watch…just listen!)
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Laurel Green is an Associate Producer with the 2010 SummerWorks Festival. She is spending her summer vacation helping to organize their first-ever Performance Bar: a collision of theatre, music, and performance hosted by improv heroes The National Theatre of the World.

Fiasco Playhouse runs August 5 – 14th at 9PM on the Ground Floor of the Lower Ossington Theatre (100A Ossington Avenue). PWYC. Full Bar. Air Conditioning

Hipster dance classes are taking off in LA. Photo credit nytimes.com

by Michael Wheeler

The past week has hosted some novel conversations on contemporary theatre and how it is developing. Most interesting is how all of these perspectives are contributing to a larger conversation about what form theatre can take to engage, well, anyone under 40 who isn’t already in theatre. Here are some recent highlights:

In The Guardian, Lee Hall laments that the 20-30% arts funding cuts will bring down the curtain on British theatre’s golden age. At the core of his argument is that the new budgets will leave theatres unable to take artistic risks or be able to nurture and mentor the next generation of artistic talent:

“The post-1945 consensus understood this completely. The need for municipal theatres, the need to fund the experimenters (who of course become the next establishment), the need for national institutions, the need to represent the rich diversity of our society – allowing a place where we can all become richer by including the excluded – was centrally important to the interventions made. But more than this, there was an implicit understanding that our greatest talent could not be nurtured without support.”

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Huffington Post critic Monica Westin has a decidedly more upbeat perspective on Why Hipsters Will Save Theater in her review of David Cromer’s Cherrywood. Her thesis proposes that the ironic disengagement that permeates hipster culture has the potential to create a new kind of  theatre, that combines both “alienation effect” and “happening”. They (we), are capable of creating and enjoying this new approach to art as “the first generation of bohemian youth culture that’s not going to look like idiots–like the hippies and the punks–later for pretending to have all the answers, when all we had was a new way of dressing stupid.”

“But it’s the combination of the alienation effect and the happening that makes Cherrywood so important. In 1968 Peter Brook declared in The Empty Space that “The alienation effect and the happening effect are similar and opposite–the happening shock is there to smash through all the barriers set up by reason, alienation is to shock us into bringing the best of our reason into play… leading its audience to a juster understanding of the society in which it lived, and so to learning in what ways that society was capable of change.” How does alienation work? According to Brook is can use any rhetoric: “It aims continually at pricking the balloons of rhetorical playing–Chaplin’s contrasting sentimentality and calamity is alienation.” Brook couldn’t imagine a theater piece in which both could happen at once; life now demands this of theater, and Cherrywood delivers it.”

The TKTS iPhone Ap

Of course you can’t be a theatre-conscious hipster looking for the latest, coolest, cheapest tickets you can find without this new Ap for your iPhone, which lists all the Broadway and Off Broadway shows and discount rates that TKTS has available each day. This sort of technology is probably much better suited to attract the new generation of potential theatregoers that make same-day plans and aren’t looking to fork out an arm and a leg for a night out on the town. Is there the potential for indie companies to collaborate through this same technology? Now that we have thrown out the notion that we have to perform in the same space to have marketing/ticketing alliances shouldn’t we be all over this?

If you used your iPhone to get tickets, maybe you should keep using it once the show starts? Over at 2amtheatre they had a multi-perspective post and conversation about the type of interactive, invite the audience to communicate with their PDA during the performance type of stuff Praxis was experimenting with in March at Harbourfront Centre.  The consensus opinion seemed to be that imposing tweets on pre-existing scripts was a recipe for disaster, but that tweeting during shows had the potential to expand the medium if the pieces were built with this level of interactivity in mind. Travis Bedard provided some questions that should be considered while choosing to make work this way:

“But what can this technology enable for a playwright or deviser creating NEW work?

This is another possible tool on the utility belt for writers. It is indeed another entire plane of existence for characters.

Can extra-stage characters exist only in the Twitter-verse? Can the audience team up with one another for or against the stage characters?

What does the interaction between the sequestered, in-space audience and the free range Twitter audience look like?”

How well can the playwright and director control that?”

This last question is probably why there hasn’t been a HUGE amount of experimentation with this sort of thing. It is a process that confers less power to both playwright and director. Unproven methods that reduce the influence of the artistic leaders of a project are tough to get off the ground. I’m also a little confused about why Twitter is the only option being discussed as a technology to do this sort of thing. Facebook statuses, texts, tweets, IM, email, skype – we’re all using interactive digital technologies to improve our capacity to communicate. Why stratify it to a single tool exclusive to, well, hipsters? If we’re going to save theatre, we’re still going to do it with everyone else. It’s also important to remember what can happen when we get obsessed with a particular brand of technology.

Every year IAS destroys the lives of thousands of performers. This short video is proof positive that no case is hopeless and that this syndrome is treatable if spotted early enough. Watch this video for early warning signs – do you know anyone showing signs of IAS? Identification and treatment may be their best chance for recovery.