Angela Sun is a Toronto-based fat East Asian performer, theatre creator, poet, and writer. She is currently a member of the environmental theatre company, Broadleaf Theatre. In her spare time she enjoys reading and writing about art, feminism, pop culture, identity, body image, mental health, and social justice. Ironically, she fell in love with Canadian theatre after seeing a televised production of Kristen Thomson’s I, Claudia on CBC. (She finally saw the remount on stage 5 years later and was over the moon.) You can follow her exploits on her sporadically-updated Twitter @21sungelas.
I spent an hour on a lovely Sunday afternoon watching myself (and fellow audience members) on a semi-blurry screen while listening to instructions and observations delivered by a variety of robotic voices with charming British accents. SummerWorks Special Presentation, Offending the Audience, might not be for everyone but it definitely contained many interesting ideas about what is theatre and our identity as theatre-goers.
You should go see The Living. In a sentence, The Living, playing in Toronto as part of the SummerWorks Festival, is about the process of reconciliation after genocide. How do you live beside someone who murdered your family? How do you erase years of anger and hatred?
“You probably won’t be able to laugh in this play,” the audience member beside me wisely said to her companion. The Living is complicated, brutal, raw, frustrating, satisfying, and definitely a play worth seeing.
The actors of CorpOLuz Theatre’s production, Upon the Fragile Shore, boldly stated the theme of the night at the onset: “We are here together.” A collection of tales ripped from international headlines, Upon the Fragile Shore is a thoughtful, ambitious production on the interconnectedness of human experiences and the importance of our relationship with our environment.
Guild Festival Theatre presents a contemporary Romeo & Juliet in Toronto’s Guild Park
Guild Festival Theatre’s contemporary production of Romeo & Juliet at the Greek Stage in Guild Park has a slew of commendable performances and impressively high production values, especially considering that it’s set outdoors.
So you’re running down Bathurst Street, the sun is burning down your back, you’ve just left a show and you have 5 minutes to make the next one. You haven’t bought a ticket yet and all you can think of are the words LATECOMERS ARE NEVER ADMITTED. The Mad Fringe Dash is how Frequent Fringers are made.
