Ilana Lucas has been a big theatre nerd since witnessing a fateful Gilbert and Sullivan production at the age of seven. She has studied theatre for most of her life, holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton and an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia, and is currently a professor of English and Theatre at Centennial College. She believes that theatre has a unique ability to foster connection, empathy and joy, and has a deep love of the playfulness of the written word. Her favourite theatrical experience was the nine-hour, all-day Broadway performance of The Norman Conquests, which made fast friends of an audience of strangers.
Playing in Toronto, Kiss is a surprising, powerful show that could dive a bit deeper
Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss, presented by Theatre Smash and ARC and now playing at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre, is a show that goes from 0-60 at lightning speed. Audience members are initially treated to a chuckle-worthy melodrama featuring an intense love quadrangle, seemingly inexplicably set in Damascus.
But not all is as it appears to be, and the twists and turns of the play rapidly change it from soap opera to something much deeper. Kiss is a powerful show that will keep you thinking about it long after the actors have left the stage, but its deceptions and pointed commentary prove to be both its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses.
Necessary Angel explores theatre through tableaus at the Artscape Sandbox in Toronto
A City, based on playwright Greg MacArthur’s experiences in Montreal with a group of young theatre artists, bills itself as a version of a “tableau vivant” (a silent arrangement of human beings that forms a still picture). If you’re worried that means a lot of dead air on stage, don’t be; the emphasis in Necessary Angel’s production at Artscape Sandbox is definitely on the “vivant,” with near-constant motion and intimate connection with the audience in 65 quick minutes.
It’s fitting that the so-called tableaux are in motion, because the show revolves around liminal states, those moments in between when you can feel an ending coming (a life, an era, a friendship), but the realization hasn’t quite arrived. It’s a comment on our desire but ultimate inability to freeze time.
Breath in Between vacillates between “artifice and symbolism”, on stage in Toronto
“I’m sick of all this artifice,” proclaims Roger, the main character of Anton Piatigorsky’s Breath In Between. Coming about two-thirds of the way through the Crow’s Theatre show playing at Streetcar Crowsnest, it’s a meta moment, as this is a show that trades heavily on artifice and symbolism.
In fact, it walks a fine line between artifice and painful earnestness, as it attempts to ponder the constantly-switching sacred and profane in human connection. It’s a complicated and dark show about deeply unpleasant people, with a philosophical bent that intrigues and irritates in equal measure. Breath In Between will stay with you, and it’s never boring, but for a show that’s all about the heart, it’s difficult to love.
In On It is “powerful” experimental theatre, now playing on the Toronto stage
When I saw the first Toronto production of Daniel MacIvor’s In On It in 2002, it blew my high-school-aged mind. It was a piece of meta-theatre about the messiness of endings, living with disappointment, and how our expectations of life and of theatre share some uncanny similarities: we’re hoping things will satisfyingly come full circle, that they’ll work out, that we’ll leave on something pithy or fun or daring. In theatre, we can engineer an ending; in life, it rarely works out so well.
The Gut Girls, on stage in Toronto,is “funny, philosophical and savage”
It was with a heavy heart on Inauguration Day that I sat down to watch Alumnae Theatre’s production of The Gut Girls, Sarah Daniels’ feminist play about British women who live at the top of the 20th century and the bottom of society. They hang on to a precarious livelihood and some shred of autonomy by taking jobs in the “gut sheds,” where they work in pools of blood, butchering animal carcasses and removing entrails.
The Gut Girls were the original Nasty Women: coarse, rude, fierce, and above all self-sufficient, they attempted to be the masters of their own fates, only to be cut down by a society that adheres to strict social and gender roles. The play was written in 1988 to combat Britain’s trauma from Margaret Thatcher’s election, and as the 45th American President is sworn in to the sound of mass, worldwide protests, it only appears more timely. It’s a vital work that demands to be seen today, to acknowledge the past and try to change the future.
Necessary Angel explores theatre through tableaus at the Artscape Sandbox in Toronto
In On It is “powerful” experimental theatre, now playing on the Toronto stage
The Gut Girls, on stage in Toronto, is “funny, philosophical and savage”