Zona Pellucida & the Needle Exchange (A Double Bill) – Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

Review by Mark Augustine

Stephen Lawson, Aaron Pollard

Q: What do you get when you cross the Twilight Zone with Italian Opera and throw in Norma Desmond as the lead character?

A: I’ll be damned if I know.  But it’s pretty much what you can expect from Zona Pellucida – a 45 min. one person show from Montreal which played at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

My friend Earnest and I didn’t really know what to expect from “Zona Pellucida”.  The posters gave little indication of plot and the programme offered little more.  It is one of those kinds of shows where you sit there for the first ten minutes thinking “Ok, I just need to concentrate harder and maybe I’ll get the purpose here!”  By the time we hit 25 minutes I just decided to sit back and enjoy the ride.

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Stranger – Praxis Theatre

James Murray as Meursault

by Alex Rayment

It’s cold, slushy, bleak and the credit card bills from the holiday season have arrived. Happy National Depression Week everyone. It’s the perfect time for me to huddle indoors and dust off my keyboard for some good old theatre bloggin’. It also happens to be perfect setting in which to present the famous, anti-nihilistic French classic L’Étranger – the book on which Stranger by Praxis Theatre is based.

So for starters, go read the book.

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Them & Us – Theatre Passe Muraille

Them-&-Us

by Sam Mooney

Them & Us, playing at Theatre Passe Muraille, isn’t really a play; it’s a series of vignettes.  All these portraits and sketches focus on male-female relationships and the trouble we have connecting with each other.

You’re going to want to see this one with a friend, because you’re going to want to talk about it afterwards.  It would be ideal to go with a friend of the opposite sex. That way you can ask if women say “I don’t believe in romantic love” or if men say “I want to stab you with a fork…in the shoulder”, or if those seem to just be ‘guy things’ or ‘girl things’.

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I haven't forgotten you, I promise…

Clearly I have been woefully neglecting Mooney on Theatre of late.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that is likely to change.

I am basically going to be giving birth any day now, and have not been able to go to a show in quite some time, and quite frankly, can’t imagine that having a newborn is going to allow much time for such things either.

However, I do have my trusty band of writers who are going to start going to shows again, so there will in fact be content again.  Rejoice!

And, on that note, if you know of someone who would like to write about theatre, send them my way.  I’m interviewing new writers.  Best bet is to send me an email at megan@mooneyontheatre.com.  I will outline the details of what I expect, and I’ll ask for a writing sample, but they can wait until they figure out if they’d actually enjoy working with me before they figure out what writing to send.

So, hopefully in a couple months I’ll be able to see a few shows and get back into the theatre scene, but in the meantime I hope my writers will keep you entertained and informed.

And back to CanStage…

As you may remember, there was some blog back-and-forthing about CanStage a while ago.

Well, looks like Richard Ouzounian is adding his voice to the chorus.

Ouzounian seems to think we’re not talking about it, which may be true in a bigger context, but it has been talked about, maybe he just means it’s not being talked about by the right people?  In the article he says:

Yet what really makes this behemoth the elephant in the room is that everybody knows it’s there, taking up space and money, but no one wants to discuss its failure to live up to Toronto’s expectations.

 

For the history, and some of the recent discussion, in case you missed it the first time around:

J. Kelly asks the questions here first in August, then continues in this series of posts.

Then I wrote about it here.

Anyone else have any discussions they’d like to tell me about so I can add them to the pile?