RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem), a Toronto Fringe Festival show put on by Sketch Platform Productions–currently playing at the Robert Gill Theatre–is an unsettling play.
The audience is taken into a complex realm of dreams and nightmares, where reality blurs and questions of morality take on an importance impossible to handle, to a place where certainty is impossible. The haunting intensity of RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) makes this show worthy of attention.
As the Canadian population ages, the question of the sort of end we each might local becomes more pressing. Modern medical care may be able to ensure an extended lifespan, while not being able to guarantee a high quality of life in this extra time so given. Living Will, a show put on by The Living Will Company at the Factory Theatre Mainspace as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival, is a sensitive and always watchable dramatization of an issue relevant to us all.
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Different people have different habits, vices even, and judging by the contents of many bookstores’ self-help sections, everyone has at least one. Hooked, by Pepper Dance Projects, running at the Factory Theatre Mainspace as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival‘s slate of dance shows, imagines what might happen if one day everyone was forced to simply stop. The answer that Hooked provides, through its talented cast and its careful narrative, is proof of the ability of dance to tell moving stories.
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It can be frustrating to be a person who wants to make a positive difference if you live in a society that does not make this easy to achieve. How can you stand out if you live in communities where being different is difficult? What would you being sufficiently desperate be willing to do to make that sort of difference? RAGE AGAINST The Complacent, a show put on by The Four-Penny Operation Foundation currently running in the Toronto Fringe Festival at the Robert Gill Theatre, uses the world of social media to provocatively frame this dilemma in a compelling drama hour of drama.
A play without characters or a traditional plot but with a lot of sociological theory may not seem like obviously compelling theatre. Nevertheless, Cluster Fucked, a show put on by Incomplete Productions currently running in the Toronto Fringe Festival at the Tarragon Theatre Solo Room, does just that, its talented cast taking a smart script and using it to make their audience understand important facts about our world. Namely, the power of Big Data to distort the lives of people in the early 21st century with frightening ease.
Continue reading Cluster Fucked (Incomplete Productions) 2018 Fringe Review