Written and performed by Laurel Brady, Surfacing is a story of a young woman telling her mother about her mental illness. In the programme notes, Brady confesses that the show was inspired by a monologue that she wrote about her own depression and anxiety. These are stories we are often afraid to tell other people, […]
Lawrence Dial’s latest play, DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA should come with a warning: If you are contemplating having children, spending 90 minutes…
John Patrick Shanley is likely best known as the writer of Doubt: A Parable, the Pulitzer-Prize winning four-hander that was turned into the slightly over-embellished 2008 film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, adapted and directed by the writer. But Shanley is an impressively prolific writer, with a long, vibrant list of works to […]
The final piece in Filament Incubator’s 8-plays-in-8-months experiment, Caitie Graham’s Paradise Comics is the perfect strong finish to a rocky but rewarding exercise in ambition and opportunity creation, combining the best elements of everything that led up to it- the quick banter of Rowing, a lighthearted approach to darker issues like ‘Til Death, the brutal […]
I’ve seen a lot of theatre this November but nothing’s surprised me quite like Echo Productions’ Dog Sees God, a tiny, under-marketed labour of love with only one week left in The Second City’s John Candy Box Theatre around the corner and two flights up from the rowdy mainspace. The trappings read like student theatre- […]
Secrets of a Black Boy (Playing with Crayons/Theatre Passe Muraille) A constantly evolving mix of storytelling and narrative theatre, playwright Darren Anthony’s moving and evocative Secrets of a Black Boy brings five very different black men together for one last game of dominoes before their community centre closes. The play begins with a theatrical montage […]
‘Til Death (Do Us Part), the penultimate play of the Filament Incubator’s ambitious inaugural season, is a sketch/improv/collaborative-scripted-project hybrid that’s part romantic comedy, part practical feminism manifesto, part dystopian horror story, part searing societal allegory. With its bar setting (the Monarch Tavern), intermittent improv, random dance breaks and generally casual vibe, ‘Til Death is the […]
A few years back, November was a pretty quiet month theatre-wise in Toronto, but it seems that everybody figured that out at the same time and decided to do something about it… at the same time. So now November is insane. According to the Canadian Theatre Opening Night Directory, there are 30 new shows opening […]