A Brief History of Human Extinction: barely a whimper

You’d think that a play about the last days of the human race might have some kind of tension, some kind of stakes, but nope, not this one. In A Brief History of Human Extinction, which was created by Jordan Hall and Mind of a Snail (Jessica Gabriel and Chloé Ziner),...

Krapp’s Last Tape: the reel thing

This is a guest review by David Johnston * It’s as frustrating as hell. Except that’s a feature, not a bug. Honestly, I think most Samuel Beckett scripts, if done right, are going to occasionally frustrate the hell out of audiences. The Irish modernist...

Incognito Mode: not stealthy enough

Incognito Mode examines porn—while wearing rubber gloves. Amazingly, given the subject, there isn’t a millisecond of eroticism and there’s no real immersion in shame. This might be a dangerous thing to say of a show about porn, but I wanted it to go deeper. To create...

A Vancouver Guldasta: welcome nuance

It was like meeting real people. And they took me places I’d never been. In A Vancouver Guldasta, playwright Paneet Singh introduces us to the Dhaliwals, a Sikh Punjabi family living in South Vancouver in 1984. It’s June. Sikh militants who want to create a new nation...

Testosterone: not the hormone bath I’d hoped for

I wanted to like Testosterone so much more than I did. Written by trans man Kit Redstone, the script declares early on that it’s going to examine what it means to be a man, but its exploration is so rudimentary that it could barely be called Maleness 101. Don’t get me...