Haunted Hillbilly is a great whopping romp of a play and a fabulous send up of all the country and western clichés one has come to know. There is also a touch of the gothic as naïve Hyram Woodside (played with infectious energy by Mathew Raudsepp) sells his soul to the evil cowboy couturier, Nudie. Greg Kramer is magnificent in his role as the cowboy designer who has serious designs on  the young Hyram, bringing a kind of poignancy to the vampire Mephistopheles persona.

Hyram discovers that in order to achieve the stardom that Nudie offers, he must betray the woman he loves and give up his own reach for happiness. Graham Cuthbertson, who adapted Derek McCormack’s novel for the stage, plays a slimy but wonderful Pastor Ray, warning us from the get-go that this is a “cautionary tale.” In short, do not hang out with gay vampire couturiers and then let them manage your careers.

Daniel Bruchu is truly unfettered in his role as Erskine Mole, the king of country, and his performance is a stomp in the country ho-down style of the play. Kyle Gatehouse is terrific as Nudie’s side kick, Dr. Wertham. With just a raised eyebrow he was capable of bringing the house down. Katie Smith is delightful as  the tough Audrey Woodhouse, and Alexis Taylor is wonderful as Bobbi.

There was the captivating score of Matthew Barber. And the band was perfect in their music and interaction with the cast. There was also the professional hand of Andrew Shaver directing. Susana Vera did the costumes proud.

The play is a sure delight, and the only thing that could be criticised was that it was a little too slick. The original version, which I caught at the Segal Centre, had rawness and energy that this version did not quite match. But that is a small quibble. If you can get to this really hot show, y’all better get a ticket before they run out.

Centaur Theatre: May 8 – June 3, 2012

Box Office: 514-288-3161

A comedy about a couple who are married but not to each other and agree to meet every year on the same date at a motel, Same Time Next Year premiered in 1975. It’s a terrific play for summer stock theatre because it has only one set and two actors, but also very dated – just the kind of shmaltzy old time sentimental pap that seems to target the Segal’s silverback audience. I thought that when I heard the pre-show music, and I was right.

The Segal production also has R.H Thompson, who could probably make the phone book palatable, and Michelle Giroux who is a fantastic Doris. The direction was not outstanding and the first act had some of us dreading we would have to sit through every minute of the not spectacularly interesting lives of George, the CPA/piano player, and Doris, the housewife/hip student and entrepreneur.

You know a play has problems when the transitions are terrific yet a number of your fellow audience members choose to snooze through long stretches of act one. The transitions were meant to wake them up; the music and newsreel-like projections and videos were loud and fantastic. The action starts in 1951 then moves to 1956 1961 1965 1970 1975. There is something beyond nostalgia in the projections of the news of the day in those years rolled against the astonishing music of those eras.

Some scenes really did not work. The real-time viewing of photos of offspring brought yawns all around. However, one does marvel at how well R. H. Thompson looks as he plays a much younger man. At one time, Doris asks her paramour whether her hair is too blond, and of course it is brown, but the audience is too sleepy to notice. The costumes were delightful and the set done with great mission style furniture is too.

Which brings me to the obvious question: why does a well-endowed theatre like the Segal bring in a road show from Ontario? Yes Bernard Slade is officially a Canadian playwright, but surely we did not need another “warmity” (a play that is neither comedy nor tragedy, but leaves you feeling warm all over) in May.

Then there are the many Montreal women directors who could have done something daring interesting and well, theatrical. For what it’s worth, the 1978 filmed version of Same Time Next Year can be rented on DVD or Netflix. Unfortunately, both the film and this production maintain the feeling of the many sitcoms for which Mr. Slade is famous.

At the Segal Centre to May 20th: Segalcentre.org / 514 739 7944

Pinocchio is one of my favourite stories and, according to my Italian speaking friend, it is a verb in that country which means you are fibbing and comes with an equally adorable gesture which starts at the nose and then moves away from the face.

The story is about an elderly wood carver who receives a magic piece of wood from his pal and carves this into the mischievous trouble-seeking little puppet. Dean Patrick Fleming is a veteran director who really does know how to create magic onstage and his kabuki-like shark interiors and terrific timing show a rare and well developed skill.

The script was not only enchanting for children, who whooped and yelled as the hero made one bad decision after another, but there were enough adult lines like ”You really can make money in the theatre,” to keep the grown up audience in stitches.

Mellie Ng was a fabulous Pinocchio and played him with a magical consistency. Alain Goulem was really delightful and heartbreakingly poignant in his portrayal of Giuseppe. His other personae were delivered with great energy and panache. Amanda Kellok was delightful addition to the cast and her “cat” was a perfect balance of whining and obstinacy. Antoine Yared delighted as the fox and managed a moment of sheer magic with his mini puppet show.

The itty bitty puppets were a bit tawdry and not well manipulated and although they were just used as segues in the narrative they were not up to the rest of the production. In terms of the narrative, the final appearance of the fox, brilliantly embodied by Antoine Yared, was bit unclear, and that loose end never really got tied up. I also thought that the puppet troupe and their interaction with the hero were terrific, and merited a bigger space in the story.

Ana Cappelluto delivered a really simple and lovely set, and it worked like a giant puzzle to serve the multiple locations and scenes. The lighting by Michel Charbonneau was equally up to the challenge. Cathia Pagotto costumes were clever and gave the animals a punk-like appearance which suited and amused. The issue of the burnt feet and the final reveal were also well designed.

Harry Standjofski’s script was a terrific adaptation of a great story and, as one  has come to expect, Geordie has another hit.

SAT MAY 5 @ 1pm & 3pm / SUN MAY 6 @ 1pm & 3pm

Centaur Theatre. (514) 845-9810 / 453 Saint-François-Xavier Rue  Montreal.

Intimate Apparel at the Centaur is truly well-crafted, well acted, and brilliantly directed. It is the story of a not too young woman who makes corsets for both upper-class women (Mrs. Van Buren) and women of the night (Mayme). Lucinda Davis shines as Esther, the creator of the intimate apparel, and in her portrayal she displays an astonishing and delightful range of emotion. She moves us when she vents her hatred for another woman’s good fortune at getting married at last, and she has us yearning with her when she touches, briefly, the forbidden shoulder of a Jewish fabric dealer who actually cares for her. Lucinda’s portrayal of the heroine is convincing and engaging, creating a persona with whom one can empathize completely.

Quincy Armorer is terrific as the perfidious George. He is true to the character as an island man who finds a way to escape the drudgery of digging the Panama Canal. He has the charisma necessary to make believable his power over the women he attracts. Armorer takes the stage and then he takes the stage.

Patricia Sommersett is very good as Mrs. Van Buren, who tires of her husband and lives vicariously through her seamstress. Renee Lee had a rough beginning as Mrs. Dickson, but soon finds her way, and ends up well.

Tamara Brown is magnificent as Mayme. She brings the humour, passion and musicality of her character on stage from the moment she graces, playing her part with a flamboyance and magic that is rarely seen in this city.

The most remarkable performance was that of Eloi ArchamBaudoin as Mr. Marks, the ultra-orthodox Jewish Romanian fabric merchant. He is not only totally convincing as an orthodox Jew, he manages to give the play’s ragtime music a klezmer charm. His physicalization is almost Talmudic, while his subtle haunting relationship with Esther is heart breaking and beautifully portrayed. This performance alone makes the evening worth seeing.

Micheline Chevrier is a seasoned artist with a great sense of timing and she directs the wonderful actors splendidly. Most amazingly, she makes the many transitions in the play not only amusing, but often touching and beautiful as well.

The choreography posesses humour as well as drama and every beat had compressed passion that is stirring and strangely beautiful. This is a wild and delightful play and the Centaur was very clever to have it in this season.

Intimate Apparel, Directed by Micheline Chevrier

March 27^th to April 29^th: THE CENTAUR, 453 St. Francois-Xavier

State of Denial is by far Raul Varma’s best work as a playwright since Bhopal. Most astonishing is that he has mastered the voices of women in crises and in extremis with elegance and poetic savagery. This is a painfully difficult play to produce, but Teesri Duniya has taken the challenge and for the most part succeeded where no other theatre company would dare to go.

For five years, Montreal Life Stories, a project of the History department of Concordia University, has been exploring the histories of Montrealers who have survived mass violence and displacement. As the daughter and sister of holocaust survivors, I was particularly drawn to the play that grew out of this massive gathering of oral histories. Just last year I was asked to work with Colombian refugees in Northern Ecuador who had been thrown off their land by multi-nationals who wanted to grow chocolate.

The acting by the three women in this play is very moving. Rachelle Glait manages to be utterly convincing as Suhana, the Turkish woman who dedicates her life to helping Armenian survivors. She then tranforms into the wife of a Turkish Colonel, and has the talent and audacity to make us laugh out loud in the midst of a horrendous tale. Rachelle is a veteran Montreal actor who demonstrates once again that there is no role she cannot bring to life.

Helen Koya is convincing as the Rwandan Canadian who has a difficult story to tell and an impossible quest to fulfill. She maintains a balanced and forthright performance while delivering really difficult lines. Natalie Tannous is powerful in her interpretation of a serious difficult set of roles. Her final scene is truly heart wrenching and sensational.

Davide Chiazzese manages to deliver a convincing performance of evil without going over the top. Oliver Lamarche maintained our interest while playing a bureaucrat, which is no easy task. Mathew Kabwe gave a good performance while speaking in neutral English — a bit odd while all the other actors had some kind of accent

State of Denial is about genocide and that is one hard subject to broach, and for the most part the play makes it possible to follow the horror and accept the lives that are being portrayed.

But there were some moments that are problematic, theatrically. In terms of the direction, the set is established with slides and videos and does not require the endless set changes. But it is disconcerting to watch the actors constantly carrying furniture about. This also breaks the emotional crescendo of the story. There is a moment when the Rwandan student is describing behaviour while the Turkish woman is performing the actions, all of which felt awkward and amateur.

Raul Varma can write very good plays. One hopes that one day he will meet the dramaturge or really strong professional director who will help him write spectacular ones.

STATE OF DENIAL, March 16-April 1, McCord Museum

690 Sherbrooke Street West / Box office: 514-848-0238 / info@teesriduniya.com

Vigil is an elegant farce concerning a misanthropic young man who abandons his boring job at a bank and races a thousand miles across the country to be at the bedside of his dying aunt. Marcel Jeanin was brilliant as the sociopathic nephew, using a comic time that has a fierce ruthlessness. He played the part with balletic assurance and inhabited the role with nebbish-like klutziness that was nothing short of stunning.

Kim Yaroshevskaya was equally magnificent as the aunt. Just the lifting of her shoulder had the audience in stiches. Her madcap New Year’s dance was a magnificent comic achievement. Just to see this lovely seasoned actor holding her own with the few lines she was given was worth the price of admission. An English audience should feel privileged to witness her grace one of our stages.

The play did slow down about half way through. One understands the need for the blackouts but they did not have to be quite as drawn out. Perhaps it was the exigency of the English rehearsal schedule, but the play could have been cut by about ten minutes. The curtain was held for an unconscionably long time. The Segal seems to believe that punishing the 98% of the audience who arrive on time is seemly. I think it is rude and bad theatrical practice. If the show was advertised as starting at eight, well then it is unacceptable to hold it.

Vigil is classic Morris Panych and has been done all over North America, recently premiering in French at Théâtre du Rideau Vert. This co-production with that theatre at the Segal is significant because it had Martin Faucher directing in English.

One hopes that the next co-production will feature an English director working at the Rideau Vert. There are quite a number of talented bilingual directors in our very own English theatre community. The Segal has been very active in importing talent from elsewhere or from the French side; what a truly inspiring radical move it would be to promote one of our own for francophone audiences.

March 11 to April 1^st At the Segal Centre,  5170 Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine

It is never a good sign when they hold curtain on opening night. There is usually a great reason, but the audience gets restless and hostile and, in the case of Scientific Americans, very sleepy. I thought that the actors did remarkably well and the play may have had really important things to say. But it was very dated and not just because it takes place in the eighties. The main issues seem less relevant today.

The romantic story centres on the relationship and conflict between Jim, a math genius well played by Trent Pardy, and his fiancé Carol, performed by Julia Course. When Jim goes to work for the Defence Department in New Mexico, Carol, a computer designer, becomes disillusioned with his willingness to do the math that might cause war.

Graham Cuthbertson plays a Freudian psychologist whose droll comments provide a kind of chorus to the action. Michael Blake is convincing as a military man who seems to have to whip the poor physicists into a lather to invent better weapons faster. Daniel Brochu is delightful as the nebush scientist, and Susan Bain is really very good as Jim’s mother, and the whiny woman scientist.

The play had no centre. Aside from a very feeble attempt at farce during a messy dinner party centred on stealth missile shaped cookies, there was no conflict or great passion. When Jim throws some wine at Carol, she accuses him of being violent. If that was violent, these are some well protected scientists. There was a moment when there was almost a bit of passion between the two young leads, but no, they were too polite for any actual physical displays of affection and they were on the incredibly long cold floor of the Segal stage. The huge distance from stage right to stage left made almost all the transitions really long and often dull if not downright awkward in underwear. This is a stage made for Kabuki.

The set was something out of Star Trek and so was the video art, although I particularly liked the furniture which came on and off by itself. However, the sterility of the set only contributed to the feeling that the play itself was lacking in feeling. The lighting was so dim that my guest and I were counting the number of audience members who had snoozed off.

One wants to like a work by John Mighton, the winner of so many awards. One is very loyal to Andrew Shaver, the wunderkind of the Montreal theatre community and author of so many fabulous nights at the theatre. I am not very mathematical and therefore often at a loss to find scientific work even vaguely interesting, but I tried and this play just did not hold my interest. I remember seeing the play In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer decades ago. For some reason, while dealing with a real live scientist who was actually responsible for the bombs dropped on Japan, it haunts me many decades later.

Scientific Americans plays at the Segal Centre through February 26th. 5170 ch. de la Côte Ste Catherine. 514 739 7944.

Photo: Andrée Lanthier

In Absentia at the Centaur is a play fraught with symbolism. There are bare trees, a frozen river, the endless winter and the barren (or is she?) heroine of the piece. When Collette’s husband goes missing in Colombia while working for an oil company, she hunkers down and plays psychic possum. Her older sister Evelyn, brilliantly performed by the unstoppable Susan Glover, comes to take care of her.

We hear the subtext – “The most depressing person in my family is here to cheer me up” – addressed to the absent (yet present) Tom, her perfidious husband. She has also planned some infidelity with an unbearably nice neighbour, Bill. At one point she even attributes the kidnapping of her husband to a kind of karmic retribution for her contemplated betrayal.

One day a mysterious young man (played with charisma by Jade Hassouné) appears on the frozen lake and waves to her. His new age psychobabble is one of several irritating aspects of the piece. But it is worth braving a cold February night just to watch him prance around wearing and not wearing the absent Tom’s clothing.

Paul Hopkins is perfect as the philandering kidnapped hubby. He plays the projected and imagined spouse with terrific elegance and takes the bland dialogue to depths of feeling. Carlo Mestroni as the neighbour described as “pathologically decent” is convincing, unfortunately.

Jillian Fargey has the habit of delivering all her lines, and they did feel like line readings, in a monotone. English is a tonal language and without adequate modulation the audience loses the thread of the sentence. Sadly there were a lot of these sentences and they were uniformly dull. It may be a minor point, but what costume designer would allow a Canadian woman to go for a walk on a frozen lake in a short skirt?

The set was spectacular and even before the lights went down several audience members said they wanted to move into the building on stage. In Toronto, “cottage industry” means buying and selling five bedroom cottages. This was one of those.

The beautiful shimmering trees and snow falling projections were spectacular. The moving bed was really fine, but underemployed. What was missing was the playwright who had written Gordon, a brilliant play which premiered at the Segal last year. This play was repetitive and cliché ridden and one had to struggle to care at all about the main character. Even Jasper, the mysterious young man, didn’t give us enough of a hook for any kind of emotional empathy, which made the ending moot. If this play is what passes for passion on the Pacific coast, it still does not cut the mustard in Montreal.

In Absentia, at The Centaur Theatre at 453 St. Francois Xavier St. in Old Montreal through March 4. Most performances are at 8 p.m., but some Wednesday and Sunday performances are at 1, 2 and 7 p.m. Box office at (514) 288-3161 or www.centaurtheatre.com to learn more.

Veronica Classen designed a fabulous set at the Bain St. Michel and the device of having poetry and text messages projected on the high tech grey walls was delightful. She also dressed a cast which was supposedly sweating in the office of a tiny poetry magazine bereft of air conditioner, in seriously dark and heavy clothes … and in a Montreal heat wave only one character wore actual sandals.

The actors in Ars Poetica are a who’s who of Montreal theatre, and Noel Burton was actually terrific as the scoundrel publisher of the magazine. He delivered his overwrought lines with terrific aplomb and almost convinced us that he might have had a fling with the ingénue, delightful Elena Dunkelman. But he was just a tad long in the tooth to be playing the part, even though we were delighted that he did.

He was utterly convincing when sparring with Howard Rosenstein who gave a terrific performance as the father-lawyer persona. Rosenstein shot out lawyer jokes which fared less well. “What’s the point of being a lawyer if you can’t take other people’s property?” Not a bad line but a bit of a machete cutting daisies in this play.

Danielle Desormeaux played the part of Diane Langlois, a cliché writ large who was neither funny nor believable. This is an actress with outstanding skills and her comic timing saved some of the really awful moments in the play. We have all had our share of run- ins with heartless arts bureaucrats but some of the writing was just over the top. It was hard to believe that someone would lose their job at the Canada Council for endorsing a small poetry magazine which couldn’t come up with a strategic business plan. Paula Jean Hixon was terrific as the true believing editor of Ars Poetica and her performance was nuanced and moving.

Ultimately the comic zingers – such as: “Greenfield Park is the deep south … practically Atlanta” – were not enough to live up to the play’s promise of delivering an actual farce. The definition of a farce is that every entrance and exit must be hilarious. The play was about a poetry magazine and there was a great deal of actual poetry both spoken and projected. Perhaps that is just too wordy a topic to sustain the lightness and buffoonery necessary for farce. The wordiness slowed down the action and the blocking was actually uninteresting. A beautiful set which had everyone in tiny quarters only becomes part of the comedy when there is a lot of movement in the tiny space, think state room and the Marx brothers.

Neurosurgery is easy; comedy is hard. This is not a bad first theatrical effort by Arthur Holden at getting the laughs out, but it did not get the audience on this freezing night to generate even one loud guffaw.

Ars Poetica, by Arthur Holden, runs Tuesday to Feb. 12 at Le Bain St. Michel, 5300 St. Dominique St. Tickets cost $10 to $20. Sunday matinee on Jan. 22 is pay-what-you-can.

The minute you walk into the Theatre Sainte Catherine you realize that Cornered is a play that required a considerable amount of thought. The entire interior has been reconfigured as a boxing ring. Then Vinnie, perfectly played by Christopher Moore, comes bouncing onto the stage/ring and starts shadow boxing and you know you are in for a dramatic ride.

Vinnie is the apprentice of the cornerman Rex (brilliantly played by Howard Rosenstein) and Vinnie is constantly being reprimanded and corrected. Moore’s portrayal of this intellectually challenged, hero worshipping loser is right on the money. His timing and emotional nuances are perfectly calibrated.

In spite of a heavy Brit accent, Howard Rosenstein gives an astonishingly dramatic performance. His fears and frustrations as the cornerman of an adolescent boxer are moving. He winds and weaves his way around the younger and faster Vinnie in brilliant almost balletic blocking, and his voice with its considerable range plays our nerves like the taut strings of a harp. Rosenstein gives a performance which is intelligent and literally knocks one’s socks off.

The entire piece is like the elaborate dancing and weaving of a really good fight with just the right amount of verbal jabbing and circling of players until the final knockout punch. Van Dyke has paced the play so that the tension keeps building in irresistible waves until the final moments.

Christopher Moore as Vinnie is the perfect foil to Rex’s digs and plunges. One hears resonances of other plays in this “two hander”: the clowns who wait beneath a blasted tree come to mind. They are the outsiders who are always living in the margins, and looking at the real action from the periphery. These are two grown men with the feeling of the little kids pressing their faces against the window of the candy store.

Jim Burke is a formidable playwright and this play has deserved its awards. The language is really fine and the characters grow on you, until you are there in that boxing club sweating it out, and afraid that the villain will show or “the lads” will enter from the alley to beat up whomever they encounter.

I recommend this to anyone who has the desire to see something really well written, beautifully directed and brilliantly performed.

Cornered runs at Theatre Sainte Catherine (264 Sainte Catherine Street East) through December 3. Tickets: (514) 284-3939 or info@theatresaintecatherine.com.

Ned Cox and Alexandria Haber are really good playwrights and one looked forward to great writing and good laughs in a new collaboration. The cast was impressive as well; featuring some of the most interesting actors in the city. I should have read the fine print.

There are three things which have never thrilled me: Weddings (not even my own,) Hockey (which often seems brutal and meaningless to the uninitiated), and Christmas (the time when people spend money they do not have to buy things that nobody needs to impress people they really do not like).

There were four little women in this story, and one of them, Jane (Paula Jean Hixon) was supposed to get married. She gets abandoned at the altar by Randy (Carlo Mestroni), an avid hockey play who treats the audience to a fair measure of verbal abuse and obsessive hockey behaviour. His buddy James (Shawn Campbell) is expelled from his marriage to Marie (Paula Costain) for cheating on her.

The rest of the play has the in-fighting of the four sisters including Tilly (K.C. Coombs) the peacemaker, and Sabina (Amelia Sargisson), the baby of the quartet. Alexandria Haber plays Beth the “bad girl” of the four.

Maybe one needs to have experienced family Christmas with a plethora of siblings, epiphanies on the hockey ice or a happy marriage and/or redemption (men being forgiven by women for utterly unforgivable behaviour) to really appreciate this play. Ordinarily just watching Paula Costain and Alexandria Haber would be enough.

This is supposed to be a comedy. The best scenes were the scene changes which were made delightful by Dina Aziz’s sound and Amelia Sargisson’s dance moves. When Neil Napier does his little narrative shtick and comes back as a blue collar Santa, I admit there was adequate cuteness of a comic nature. This is a warmity; neither tragic nor comic, but it does try to leave the audience feeling warm all over.

How could this have happened? They had a great (huge) cast, and two terrific playwrights and a director. Aha, now it comes out. In the distant past, a person went through four years of intensive undergraduate training to direct. One learned how to block, draw floor plans and lighting plans and costume history and design and how to inspire motivate and direct actors. There was theatre criticism, classic and modern, and literature sociology psychology and upon graduation a long apprenticeship with experienced professionals.

Hardest of all is directing comedy: Neurosurgery is easy, comedy is hard. The timing of the set ups and delivery have to by sharp and more precise than a Swiss watch. The actors must deliver without milking every line and actors ought to work on physicalization without cliché repetitive movements.

This play had actual potential: it begged for a director who could make it work. We had characters hiding behind plants and Christmas trees in repetitive unfunny shtick. Sadly, no amount of neo-Dickensian references by Napier could make this play funny.

Four Minutes If You Bleed, part of the Brave New Looks at Centaur Theatre, runs through December 3. Go to the Centaur site for tickets.

Muriel Romanes, the artistic director of the Scottish company Stellar Quines Theatre, has been working for three years with director Serge Denoncourt and writers Clare Duffy and Yves Pierre Lemieux under the aegis of Clare Shapiro at Imago Theatre. The result is ANA, a world premiere in French and English with subtitles in both.

ANA, opening tonight at Espace Go, is the story of one woman through history. She is cursed with the gift of splitting, of becoming someone else, in a different time, in a different place. Ana lives through her own family tree of selves, starting from one girl born 5000 years ago in Ur, the first city of the world, to an itinerant artist in 2012, living in the underground malls of Montréal.

Clare Duffy: I was born in London but have been living in Edinburgh for seven years. I come from many generations of Londoners, but my ancestors come from Ireland on both sides of the divide. I studied theatre in Leeds.

Rover: Why Leeds?

Clare: During the miner’s strike I was in London and all the news reports about the strikers sounded like they were from another country and I wanted to find out more of what was actually going on in my own country, so I decided to study at Leeds.

Rover: What did you study?

Clare: I studied English literature and theatre studies. Not so much playwriting as devising, directing and acting. I left university and set up a theatre company which is still going after fifteen years: Unlimited Theatre. It is a company that works in collective creation.

Rover: So you do the writing?

Clare: Well Jon Spooner is artistic director and he writes as well and Chris Thorpe is also a writer and we write together and Jon directs the show.

Rover: How did you come to this project?

Clare: Through Muriel Romanes, the artistic director of Stellar Quines, a female centred theatre company. Female centred but not exclusionary. Some element of the show is woman centred: the direction or writing or performance. This project started as a proposition that we want to do some work about women, mental health and creativity. We workshopped for a while and then Pierre Yves joined us as a writer.

Rover: Did that change the dynamic?

Clare: You are in a creative process and you are happy to have someone join the party. He’s great and there are all sorts of interesting developments.

Rover: So he joined the writing process and the play is in both languages. How did it affect the process?

Clare: I think it changed when Serge joined as the director. It is impossible to say what the effect of this was; it is Yin and Yang … you need structure and you also need the creative chaos to inspire the work. We are still in the “processus”.

Rover: How did you come up with the name?

Clare: Well the play is about a woman who splits. Ana is a palindrome: it can be read backwards and forwards, one half reflecting the other half, and the creative process includes mimicry or mimesis. Mimesis also means represent; and we were engaged with the question of representation and how women were represented in the arts.

Rover: How does that work on stage?

Clare: It is about a woman, Ana, who splits over a trauma of a birth. In one version of her life she keeps the baby in another she kills it. She splits in the trauma of that and keeps spitting. It is traumatic and awful but the split is the result of a sort of impossible choice.

Rover: What is different about the way you wrote this play?

Clare: The bilingual aspect is really different.

Rover: You did a workshop and then worked in a group.

Clare: It is still evolving.

Rover: Does that make the actors crazy?

Clare: Not at all.

Imago Theatre’s ANA, a collaboration between Quebec and Scotland, runs at Espace Go through December 10. It will receive its European premiere at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh on March 2, 2012, followed by a tour of Scotland.

Pictured: Clare Duffy with co-writer Pierre Yves Lemieux.

Every once in a very long while you get to see a performance that reminds you why you keep going to the theatre. God of Carnage was such a performance. Even before it started, “the curtain spiel” was delivered by the voice of a little boy. It was smart ass and cute but it was also perfect.

It has been called a comedy of manners without the manners. It is a kind of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for our times. Two couples get together to discuss the misconduct of one of their children against the other. What begins as a seemingly innocuous chat in the haute bourgeois apartment of one couple ends up as a free for all of gigantic proportions.

Ellen David gave a performance that knocked one’s socks off. She started elegantly as Veronica Novak and built the character into frenzy which left the audience gasping from too much laughter. Marcel Janin was superb as Alan Raleigh, the self-absorbed business lawyer, and at one point in the play he expressed anger by turning a pirouette and sitting abruptly on the floor, a moment that had to be seen to be believed. The audience was laughing so hard that the silence following this was really necessary. Janine Theriault was impeccable in every way. Her timing was fantastic and her moment of triumph was shared by all the people in the theatre. Mark Camacho was delightful. His frustration and his rage when they finally surfaced were hilarious and poignant.

The set by the fabulous Michael Eagan, with its elongated book cases and beautifully neutral furniture, was a perfect metaphor for the pretentions of the couple who lived in it. The costumes were great, and particularly the attention paid to the women’s shoes; gorgeous and very uncomfortable.

Roy Surette has hit it out of the park. There was a great deal of comedy in this play as it flitted over some of the really profound issues of this century. Veronica never fails to remind us that she is a beacon of “civilization”, even as she pounds her husband with her fists. Marcel Jeanine cannot take time off from scamming the public about his client’s dangerous drug long enough to wipe his wife’s forehead. Surette’s blocking was balletic; the movement around cleaning up a sad accident and the subsequent minuet between the characters was nothing short of brilliant.

Years from now, those fortunate few who got to see this production will remind themselves of this spectacular production.

Yasmina Raza is worthy of her accolades and here are her own words about writing for the theatre:

“Most writers don’t know that actors are never better than in the pauses or in the subtext. They give the actors too many words. Writers who’ve never acted tend to write ‘full up.’ All the writers who have flat spots and empty places in their dialogue are writers who’ve been on stage, like Pinter. In a play, words are parentheses to the silences. They’re useful for the actors, but only that; they aren’t the whole story.”

God of Carnage is at Centaur Theatre through December 4th. 514 288 1229

Warona Setshwaelo walks onto the circle of black tiles at the Mai theatre and greets everyone in the audience for being there and then proceeds to grab their hearts and tear them into shreds. Stori Ya is a marriage of traditional story telling with its elliptical repetitions and chants and character morphs, and the great one woman show of the Canadian repertoire.

It takes us from Maria’s beginnings in the care of her grandparents through a difficult childhood onto a horrific adolescence and finally to Canada. There was a great deal in this story that was familiar to me, as a part of a great migratory generation of Canadians that was born elsewhere and had to scrape together an identity and sense of home and belonging as best we could.

The most creative people are the ones who are self-invented, because that is the hardest creation of all. The skills one acquires during this invention are transferable and apparently they are present and strong in Joan M. Kivanda, because she is a masterful playwright.

It is never a problem that Maria chants and speaks in Swahili and Nyamwezi as well as English. The movement from one language to another is so smooth and musical it punctuates the changes in persona and adds to the pleasure of listening to this amazing journey.

Women who are abandoned by their mothers before the age of seven are at great risk in their relationships with men. This is universal; as is the sense of loss and threat to one’s identity. What is amazing in this performance is that all this is evoked without any didacticism. At the end of the lovely poetic performance when Maria turns to the audience to help her to fight to keep her house her home her identity, one is tempted to leap onto the stage with her and stand by her side. The work is so powerful and understated that the most horrible moments are left to the imagination of the awe struck audience.

Millie Tresierra provided just the right amount of blocking and pacing for this lovely piece and Dumisizwe Vuyo Bhembe designed a perfect blend of music to lift the words and emotions in the performance and send them directly to the heart.

Warona is magnificent as Maria; it is a case of the perfect text for the perfect performer. She manages to create a world for the audience while dancing and moving around the enigmatic set by James Lavoie. The visual was confusing and created a cipher. One idea was that it represented the precariousness of the life of Maria and the layers of events in her survival story. Colour is difficult, but more evocative, and the grey and black background to the military green costume did not in fact add to this wonderful piece.

Stori Ya is at the Mai, 3680 Jeanne Mance, Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8pm Matinees: Sundays, 3:30pm. 514-932-1104. Through December 4.

You can’t help but admire Catherine Kidd. Her ability to create performance art and deliver it in a most astonishing way is magical. Hyenas are generally familiar to most, but it may be fair to say that the particulars of their (mythical) hermaphroditic outlaw status in the animal kingdom have never been explained or performed with such agility and brilliance prior to Kidd’s Hyena Subpoena: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hyena.

Kidd has created this performance piece out of the cloth of childhood injustice and the horror of mental institutions and what remains is this bright and shimmering effect.

The narrative has many twists and stages, beginning with the flight of central character and heroine, poet Mona Morse, from negative criticism about her Literature for Livestock work when she heads for South Africa’s Kruger Park. Her fascination and delight with hyenas is riveting, but then she morphs back into a frightened child who is brutally institutionalized, drawing a parallel to the hyena’s misunderstood status in the human mind.

The flashbacks take Mona back to her impossibly cruel experiences in junior high school, including recollections of her best friend Molly, who ends up suffering from schizophrenia. There is the antelope that Molly meets which gives her a chance to meditate on the predator/prey continuum, and the dying lioness – whose image is projected in the huge space – who inspires her to think of civilization and its woes.

These different facets of the performance would have been impossible to link if Alison Darcy had not been the director. She managed to make the large space work for the story and had Kidd cavorting at different levels and from a variety of angles that made the transitions seamless and workable. Darcy is truly one of the most interesting directors in this city and her work with Kidd was breathtaking. Sadly the two week run of Hyena Subpoena was too short. I hope along with the privileged few who got to see it, that the granting gods make it possible to mount this small jewel again.

Hyena Subpoena at Les Ateliers Jean Brillant (661 Rose De Lima – Metro Lionel-Groulx), at 8 pm, until Oct. 29

For more info, visit www.catkidd.com

Once again Talisman Theatre has mounted an English production of a French play, this time Coma Unplugged. This time it’s a black comedy and therein lays the problem: The central idea that we are entering the mind of a man who has suffered a cerebral trauma and is in a coma gives playwright Pierre Michel Tremblay an enormous amount of leeway in introducing and exploring material – perhaps too much leeway. He succeeds some of the time and, sadly, fails at others.

Tremblay is very witty and some of his one-liners are worth repeating, but the repetition of the lines, over and over for humorous effect, is done so often as to become irritating. Moreover, possibly due to cultural differences and/or a failure in translation, a great deal of the gender-based, testosterone driven scenes just weren’t delivering the laughs.

The acting was flawless. Eloi Archambaudoin was riveting as Daniel. From his first song to the final moments of the piece, he held one’s attention. Archambaudoin was onstage for the entirety of the play and did not lose energy or focus throughout. Lines that were rather trivial he made poignant, and he delivered with conviction.

Glenda Braganza was spectacular as Marjorie and her performance made the play come alive. She did have some tedious lines as well, but delivered them with a flair and professionalism that was breathtaking.

Susan Glover gets comedy, and of all the characters hers was actually funny. As Daniel’s mother on meds she was manic to within an inch of credibility and understood with great instinct the need for “set up and delivery.” Chimwemwe Miller had the thankless part of Ishouad, the Twarek warrior, but his physical presence was enormously charming and worth watching, even when he was delivering lines like “A woman is the sash around a man’s waist.”

Donovan Reiter as Roger had the hardest role and the least likeable. He did what he could and played his macho gazpacho part with great energy.

The set was terrific and did things that truly conveyed the strange passages in the mind of the unconscious. Furthermore, the lighting and sound were great and the costumes worked very well.

Years ago, Bob Fosse gave us All That Jazz and created an all-time impossibly high bar with the tale of a man dying of heart failure. It was also about the inside of a man’s mind when the body is giving up, but it was fantastic. Coma Unplugged touched upon dozens of important subjects: materialism, the nature of greed, and the meaning of a writing life when others are sacrificing theirs to save the lives of strangers in distant lands. But the concepts were rattled off so fast they were never given the weight that they merit, and the humour was often physical and puerile.

Coma Unplugged was a great success in French but it lost a lot in the translation. That said, Talisman should be congratulated for their efforts, especially on the fantastic cast.

Coma Unplugged, written by Pierre Michel Tremblay, translated by Micheline Chevrier and directed by Zach Fraser, at the Conservatoire d’art dramatique et de musique (4750 Henri-Julien), until Oct. 29

For more info, please visit: http://www.talisman-theatre.com/

When my companion saw that a grown actor would play the alien Prince in Geordie Productions’ staging of The Little Prince, he shrugged his elegant Argentine shoulders. I was less sceptical because I had seen the preview, and knew that Daniel Brochu was magic onstage. His physicality, gestures, and his voice were all perfection. He embodied the little extra-terrestrial with terrifying grace. Many have read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry but seeing Brochu’s performance truly brings to life the delight and sensibility of childlike wonder.

Alex McCooeye may have been cast as the aviator because of his formidable height, but his straightforward performance and special narrative style really complete the portrayal of the stranded pilot. He is acting is understated and he has the perfect pitch for interactions with Brochu’s Prince.

Danielle Desormeaux is fantastic in all her roles, but I was particularly delighted with her as Rose. She had just the right combination of comedy and vanity. Bill Rowat had a kind of sad elegance in his interpretation of the King, and Harry Stanjofski was, as always, inimitable. He played music throughout the performance without ever letting it dominate or interfere, and his cameos as the businessman, the geographer, and half a rosebush were hilarious. He is a generous actor who gives the stage to his fellow actors and never misses a beat in his comic delivery.

The set was a delight; one has come to expect this kind of magic from set designers Ana Cappelluto and James Lavoie. There was a simplicity and cleverness to it that completed the show’s brilliance. The lighting was discrete and terrific. The costumes were full of whimsy and the puppets were just right.

Geordie has consistently been delivering some of the best theatre in town. Director Dean Patrick Fleming seems to have a gift for delivering great stories on stage. This is a wonderful rendition of a classic and Fleming’s direction had touches of playfulness and elegance all the way through it.

I would recommend that you grab the nearest kid in your environment and book a ticket before they sell out. This is a play that is marvellous entertainment for audiences of any age.

The Little Prince, presented by Geordie Productions, plays Centaur Theatre Oct. 22-23 at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. For more information, visit www.geordie.ca.

Paleontology is easy, comedy is hard. Colleen Curran knows how to write comedy, and Montreal audiences have had many opportunities to laugh until their toes curl because she has written memorable and fantastically funny plays. There are scenes in True Nature that reveal her comic genius; one is a rehearsal of a skit to be performed at a fundraiser, which was supposedly written by enthusiastic high school students. The scene’s hilarity grew from the constant references to nineteenth century writers, the bickering about the lines, and the timing of the music. There were further opportunities for laughter during an amusing dream sequence.

The plot is basically a romantic comedy; the romance between a paleontology professor who is dedicated to the work and history of Mary Anning (a remarkable fossil finder who received no credit for her amazing discoveries during her lifetime), and a fellow paleontologist who cleverly interrupts her lecture on the subject.

The rest of the play, however, seemed like a series of unfortunate relationships. One character had serious problems with a best friend, played by Mary Harvey. Here was a very competent actor playing a ridiculous role. Mary dressed like a slightly artsy twenty year old, while apparently working at a high school and performing biological miracles. Then there was the fabulous Michel Perron, who can play anyone and sing anything. His character is entangled in one of the unfortunate relationships but otherwise he does not have a purpose.

Felicia Shulman played Mimi – the over-the-top Jewish sister of the romantic lead – like Joan Rivers on steroids. Her Yiddish pronunciation needed work and thus was doubly funny when she corrected the Yiddish pronunciations of the female romantic lead. Mimi’s materialistic forays into Latin America to try to improve the lives of the poor by buying their crafts at ridiculously low prices, only to have a junta supposedly take over did seem a little extreme.

As someone who grew up surrounded by really sexy, funny, male Jewish intellectuals, I couldn’t buy Bruce Dinsmore as Mitch.  The men I knew had sharp wits and were known for their snappy repartee. Unfortunately, this character was not given enough of those qualities, and his dramatic response to the crisis within his relationship did not make sense in a 21^st century context.

Leni Parker is one of the city’s best actors and she did hold her own throughout this play. Her opening lecture/flirtation is worth the price of admission.  I wish the other characters were as well-written and realized. I must also say that the set starts out by looking like an iPhone and ends up being truly beautiful and astonishing. The lighting was also spectacular.

We were all looking forward to this play, especially those of us who had been to the reading at McGill. It has a lot of intelligence and humour. The problem was that we got a lot of “set up” and not enough “delivery”. Nevertheless, I do congratulate the Centaur for producing a local playwright and engaging so many talented local actors.

True Nature runs from Oct 4 to Nov 6 at Centaur Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit the Centaur’s website: http://www.centaurtheatre.com/43_truenature.html

This Thursday and Friday, the State of the Arts Summit, presented by the English Language Arts Network (ELAN), will bring together the creative talents and cultural professionals from Quebec’s English-speaking arts community to analyse the issues driving our community’s successes. They will discuss this community’s contributions to the province, and will celebrate the artistic diversity that binds us together.

The 2011 State of the Arts Summit is an unprecedented interaction of ideas, in a community whose many factions often work alone and without a collective voice. Here, ELAN continues to promote the understanding of the English arts community as a vibrant component of Quebec society. ELAN will be building on the success of past projects such as the videos, histories and artist profiles available at http://www.RAEV.ca.

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The Summit, a two-day conference entitled “Creative Solutions for a Creative Community”, will take place at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT, 1201 St-Laurent Blvd). These working sessions will gather 120 of the province’s active and influential cultural professionals within the English-speaking arts community – alongside members of the French-speaking arts community and representatives from the education and government sectors – in order to develop a viable action plan for the growth of this thriving cultural sector.

While the working conference is restricted to invited guests, other events within the 2011 State of the Arts Summit program are open to the arts-loving public! ELAN has partnered with several of the city’s leading arts organizations to present a series of English arts-appreciation events intended to spotlight the hot talents currently working within the major creative disciplines that thrive in Quebec.

On Friday, September 23rd, ELAN, Guernica Editions, and Telefilm Canada will host a celebratory soirée in honour of the imminent publication of Minority Report: An Alternative History of English-Language Arts in Quebec.  First commissioned by ELAN Quebec as part of its Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles! project of 2010, this significant collection of essays by several of Quebec’s most prominent arts critics reconsiders the historical narrative of the major Quebecois artistic disciplines by explicitly focusing on the English-language contributions that have often been left out of the traditional storyline.  Published by Montreal’s Guernica Editions this fall, this important work will be launched at the historic Centaur Theatre (453 Saint-Francois-Xavier St; 6-8pm, free to public) in Old Montreal.

On Saturday, September 24th, ELAN will host an afternoon of thought-provoking panel discussions at the Atrium de la Maison du Conseil des Arts de Montreal (1210 Sherbrooke St. East; noon – 4pm, free to public). Well-known journalists and intellectuals will discuss the economic and ambassadorial value of the English-speaking art community’s contribution to the province, as well as dissect the old but still prevailing stereotypes of what entails a Quebecois Anglo in the 21st century.

Moderated by CJAD, Radio-Canada, and Hour Community columnist Anne Lagacé Dowson, the first panel is entitled “Many Peoples, One Official Language” (noon-2pm).  Speakers Jack Jedwab (Association for Canadian Studies) and André Courchesne (Carmelle & Rémi Marcoux Chair in Arts Management at HEC, ex-Head of Theatre at Canada Council,) will offer a historical perspective on the evolving social contract between Quebec’s Francophone majority and the minority English-speaking communities.  For the second panel, entitled “Invisible or Too Visible?” (2-4pm), Brendan Kelly (Montreal Gazette), Philippe Couture (Le Devoir), Janet Lumb (Festival Accés Asie) and D. Kimm (Les Filles électriques/Festival Voix d’Amériques) will share observations on the growing presence of English-speaking artists in Quebec and debate possible scenarios for the future.

On Sunday, September 25th, we join our friends at Pop Montreal, with whom we’re collaborating with for our grand finale! At the Theatre Outremont (1248 Bernard Ave. West), ELAN Quebec and Pop Montreal, in association with the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts, will present the world premiere of a brand-new musical, The Season, written by left-of-centre indie-rapper Socalled and starring musicians Katie Moore, Yves Lambert, Narcy, Joe Cobden and Hanako Hoshimi-Caines.

For more information, please visit: http://quebec-elan.org/pages/about/StateoftheArts-Summit

In 1976, on my way from Boulder Colorado to Montreal, I stopped in New York City to see Equus, and I remember with great clarity that at the intermission I could not breathe. The play had stolen all the oxygen in the theatre; it was that good. Douglas Campbell played the psychiatrist Dysart with enormous compassion and that richly timbered voice. It felt as though all the tough decisions I had made about a life in the theatre were clarified that night.

It was with some trepidation that I went last season to see the same play at the Rialto and I was surprisingly delighted. Noel Burton was so comfortable and warm in his performance that the entire play was immensely satisfactory. I remember Nadia Verducci’s splendid work and the heroic choreography of Jacqueline Van de Geer. Paul Van Dyck had done an admirable directing job and it all worked on a tiny budget in an awkward and intimate space.

I understand why the Segal would choose to mount this classic. It is determinately theatrical and every viewing of this work brings new things to mind. On the struggle of the psychiatrist with the job of turning the passionate into the banked cinders of acceptable behaviour, playwright Peter Shaeffer wrote: “The average made lethal”. His writing is flawless.

The Segal’s production, directed and choreographed by Domy Reiter-Soffer, was indeed as astonishing and beautiful as one might have hoped. Reiter-Soffer’s choreography was a delight. The horses were beautifully danced and Dan Jeanotte gave a magnificent performance as the disturbed Allan Strang. Jeannotte’s passion was magical; his acting utterly convincing. It made the rest work.

Daniel Gilford was excellent as Allan’s father, Frank Strang and Patricia Summerset was a quite convincing Jill. Susan Glover had some very nuanced moments in her role as Hester Soloman, but often these gestures fell on Dr. Dysart’s back as he faced the audience down center. Ellen David, who is usually in command on stage, did not quite find her feet as the mother.  Her voice seemed to be caught at an awkward pitch, which given its beauty, made for a strained performance. Jean Marchand as Dysart seemed to suffer from a lack of security in his delivery. Perhaps it was the accent. He rallied in the final scene, but many of Shaeffer’s stirring monologues did not reach the powerful heights they should have hit. He seemed to be always down center facing the audience.

It seemed a bit odd that a company that spends thousands on a production could not find two believable wigs. The set was fabulous and for the first time one had the sense of the immensity of this stage. But no one ever used those great curved structures. Much of theatrical blocking, even during the dialogues, had the actors awkwardly addressing the audience.

These, however, are merely quibbles because Shaeffer’s text remains such a runaway train of drama and exhilaration, that no one who loves the theatre should miss the experience of watching this production and its fantastic lead.

Equus plays at The Segal Centre for the Perfoming Arts until October 2. For tickets, visit the Segal’s website.