Scorch, Stacey Gregg’s award-winning play about one teen’s struggle with gender identity and the legal system, is ‘based on a true story’. Beneath that lifeless description Scorch’s real power is in telling the true stories of a larger family of people, who find their right to write their own story under attack, without claiming to […]
“Why should I fight the white man’s war, when men like you take everything away from me and my people?” This incredulous question strikes at the heart of Gods Like Us, a deep resonating expression of the complete disconnect between the priorities of two men from very different backgrounds. The undercurrents of racial divide and […]
I am an elementary school teacher. I have participated in hundreds of parent-teacher interviews, but I’ve never had an experience like the one portrayed in Jordi Mand’s Between the Sheets! Oh sure, when I walked into the Small World Centre at Artscape Youngplace, I was transported into what could have been any elementary classroom anywhere […]
Writer/director Bobby Del Rio’s ambitious attempt to take on the ever-relevant themes of rape and trauma is an admirable undertaking with an uneven execution. Del Rio points out in the programme that you might assume this piece was written in response to #MeToo. In fact, he wrote the first draft six years ago. The script […]
Two small, run-down apartments are the settings for two new George F. Walker plays, which taken together complete his Parkdale Palace Trilogy (begun with last year’s The Chance, which I must confess to not having seen), which are being staged at the Assembly Theatre in a double bill. Put on by Low Rise Productions and […]
After a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Maddie Rice brings her comedic one woman show Pickle Jar, directed and developed by Katie Pesskin, to the Soho Theatre in London and delivers a skillful and hilarious performance. Rice successfully establishes the world of her main character, known only as Miss, as well as cleverly portraying all […]
Norman Yeung’s Theory is an ambitious meditation on thorny and topical issues, from free speech in academia and society to race and representation in media. Isabelle, a proudly progressive film professor, sets up an anonymous and self-moderated discussion board for her radical new syllabus. Students flood the forum with vicious comments and a campaign of […]
The proof is in the pudding is a strangely apt synopsis of The Art of Degeneration, a solo show by Louis Laberge-Côté. Why so? Because the climax of the show is him dipping his hands in chocolate pudding and smearing it all over this body. But here is the crazy part: it is absolutely appropriate […]