I stole the title of this article from one of the productions I’m reviewing within it. It’s a great title that hits perfectly on the unifying theme of the many plays I’ve seen this week. I hope they don’t mind my stealing it.
Angels in America (That Theatre Company in association with Buddies in Bad Times)
Tony Kushner’s 2-part, 7-hour theatrical epic is one of the greatest undertakings in the modern canon. It demands incredible creativity from its director and designers to execute a multitude of stage directions that are literally humanly impossible. It demands an extraordinary cast of eight players with athletes’ stamina and incredible range both technical and emotional. It demands bravery and skill and honesty and plain old hard work like no other text I can think of. It’s a privilege to see Angels in America performed live, a privilege that is understandably but heartbreakingly rare. The relatively young That Theatre Company has not only found a way to produce the impossible piece, and produce it incredibly well, but to make it accessible in every way. Kushner’s dense text is structured humanely with breaks approximately once per hour and the performers in director Craig Pike’s beautiful production keep the pace fabulously brisk without rushing or overrunning important moments of silence. There’s a section of seating set aside for anyone who needs to leave and re-enter the theatre mid-act. And tickets (this is the really extraordinary part) tickets start at $25 for general admission with $10 rush tickets available at the door. That’s less than $3 an hour; you can’t go anywhere for $3 an hour.
I could spend a few hundred words talking about Pike’s evocative solutions to practical problems like breaking his angel’s wings so she cannot fly, or how thrilled I am to see Shaw Festival favourites Ben Sanders (Louis) and Wade Bogert-O’Brien (Joe) reunite in front of a Toronto audience who might not know them yet. I could wax poetic about the beautiful balance in Allister MacDonald’s breathktaking performance as Prior or write an essay about Kaleb Alexander’s tender Belize and Brenda Bazinet’s fierce Hannah, laying out my thesis that they are the real angels in America. But I really would rather you just went to see it. Even the luckiest theatre town is likely to get Angels in America maybe once a decade and a cast this uniformly excellent is a rare find for any text, let alone this one. So just go.
*addendum because I absolutely must criticize every single thing I see: I did not like the costumes. We get it, Joe’s going through some life changes, we don’t need to see him experiment with leather jackets to literalize that journey.
Letters From Max, a ritual (Necessary Angel Theatre Company at The Theatre Centre)
This straightforward production brings to life a text by and about Sarah Ruhl that pairs melancholy narration with personal letters to tell the story of the writer’s relationship with a former student named Max. The play is an earnest portrait of platonic true love, a beautiful and complex thing that is tragically rarely thought of as worthy of portraiture. Director Alan Dilworth is often quite literal but that directness benefits him here, appropriately keeping the focus on Sarah & Max’s words with few bells and whistles. As is often the case, his work is elevated by wife and go-to leading lady Maev Beaty who mines every word for maximum meaning. The role of Max, however, feels miscast with the very capable but also very strapping Jesse LaVercombe playing an idiosyncratic and ailing young man. LaVercombe lacks the specificity and vulnerability that Max expresses in his letters, struggling to sell the oddness of manner that makes Sarah take note of Max in the beginning and the physical weakness that makes the story hard in the end.
Withrow Park (Tarragon Theatre)
Set against a show-stealing set from dependably great designer Ken MacDonald, this swift and talky Morris Panych dramedy thrives through subtext, charms on the surface, and gets a little lost in its own thematic tricks. The play’s strength is in the doldrum drawing room reality of its three main characters, ageing and sniping but generally getting along as they gaze out the windows of their lovely East End home at the titular park beyond. Nancy Palk is particularly wonderful as wry and steady Janet, processing her hurt with an efficient but foreboding ‘let’s just get on with it’ attitude. She’s contrasted brightly by Corrine Koslo as her spitfire sister, sucking up the room’s oxygen regardless of whom else may need to breathe. Things go awry with the actual action of the play, centered on the arrival of mysterious stranger Johnathan Sousa. In spooky speculation about who he might be or what he might represent, the play loses its focus on the people at its heart and becomes a lackluster message-heavy mystery stifling the poignant portrait underneath.
Monster/Here Lies Henry (Factory Theatre)
Factory’s Daniel MacIvor double bill consists of Monster (directed by Soheil Parsa, on stage in the studio space until Dec 10) and Here Lies Henry (directed by Tawiah M’Carthy, on stage in the main space until Dec 17). Both plays feature extraordinary solo performances from immensely versatile and energetic performers (Karl Ang and Damien Atkins, respectively). The texts demand a lot from the actors and they both easily rise to the occasion. Though Atkins has the more emotional content, the extravagant vocal theatrics of Monster create the pair’s most unforgettable moments and it’s a thrill to see Ang in a role that fully shows off his abilities. Precision work from the team of stage management (Meghan Speakman, Laura Baxter), technical director/production manager (Courtney Pyke), and lighting designer (Trevor Schwellnus, André Du Toit) further elevates the clever programming though neither production is fully able to overcome the scripts’ confusing storytelling and themes that are either too transparent or too opaque. Both scripts make a lot of noise without saying quite enough, no matter how hard the artists are working to make sense of it all.
Bad Roads (Crow’s Theatre)
Like the double bill, Crow’s Theatre’s production of Bad Roads does a lot right but comes up short on a fundamental level. A brutal, uncompromising portrait of war based on real interviews with those living through the current conflict in Ukraine, it’s bold and thoughtful programming that’s been staffed excellently with a renowned director of Ukrainian heritage (Casey & Diana‘s Andrew Kushnir) and some of the best actors in the country. Kushnir’s strong use of space and darkness (set by Sim Suzer, lights by Christian Horoszczak) allows the audience room to fill in extra horror without pulling back from the story’s extreme violence, and standout performances from Michelle Monteith and Andrew Chown make an outsized impact. But, ultimately, lauded Kyiv-based playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s script is too much of a mess to do her worthy story justice. Caught between verbatim and poetic styles, the text lives in a confusing middle ground where the audience is left to guess whether any given moment is truth or metaphor. The cast list is an impenetrable puzzle, coyly refusing to clarify exactly who is who and if they’re related and whether we should be looking for connections or accepting thematic coincidence. Half the cast (most egregiously Seana McKenna and Diego Matamoros, of all people) has very little to do and romantic melodrama more than once squanders a brilliant dramatic premise. The particularly horrific scene that is surely the reason I was warned by multiple people that this is a nearly impossible show to sit through to me felt manipulative, like a backstop built in to the script to ensure no one left undisturbed. Bad Roads is very disturbing, you’d have to be a monster to leave the theatre unshaken by Katherine Gauthier‘s screams, but hard art isn’t automatically good art and, despite her affecting subject matter, Vorozhbit hasn’t crafted her story well.
I Love You and it Hurts (Theatre of the Beat at Hart House)
I went in to Theatre of the Beat’s one night engagement at Hart House Theatre (the first stop on their national tour) expecting a fairly standard evening of one act plays. I was particularly excited to see new work from Jessica Moss, a playwright I’ve long loved but haven’t seen much from in recent years. The production turned out to be very different from expectations. Theatre of the Beat engages in “Forum Theatre”, a kind of communal art form that sees the audience reacting to and influencing the work onstage. Though interesting in theory, in practice this meant that the work itself was fairly insubstantial- ten minute shabbily produced little vignettes designed more to give the audience something to tinker with than to engage with as a complete piece. The moral rather than dramaturgical bent of said tinkering gave the evening a sort of HR seminar vibe and, despite being a fairly long evening, the event ended just as we were collectively getting to the good stuff. Of the three plays up for collaboration, only Moss’ had enough character complexity and contradictions of motivation and experience to yield anything but obvious and superficial results from the audience observations (Lindsey Middleton’s play also has potential but it unfortunately gives the audience a bit too much opportunity for moral righteousness) . Though the format as currently presented doesn’t work as well as I was hoping once I learned what I was actually in for, I’d be intrigued to see the whole performance time devoted to a single complex piece to see if, when forced to push past the first things that come to mind, there might be something brilliant waiting for an audience to unearth.