A Mixed Bag of RED VELVET
Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet is primarily concerned with two things: anti-Black racism and acting styles in the nineteenth century, when the play is set. These things overlap. Ira Aldridge, the hero of Chakrabarti’s story, is a historical figure, a Black...
PARADE: Impressive, Hard to Fully Access
There is so much to love in this production — and it left me strangely unmoved. The 1998 musical Parade is based on the real-life story of Leo Frank, the Jewish supervisor of a pencil-making factory in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1913, he was accused of murdering Mary...
Dil Ka Is “Of the Heart” But It Needs More Polish
Young playwrights often need — and deserve — more help than they get. In playwright Lee Nisar’s Dil Ka, a 26-year-old Pakistani-Canadian woman named Zahra is preparing biryani for a proposal meeting, which means that she’s about to feed a potential groom and his...
AN INTERVENTION: This Show Needs One
For me, sitting through this mounting of Mike Bartlett’s An Intervention was an endurance test. I started checking my watch half an hour into its 80-minute running time, and my chair got very hard. My primary beef is with the script, but I also suspect the direction...
JADE CIRCLE: Lovely, Incomplete
Playwright and performer Jasmine Chen’s Jade Circle is a delicate, stylish, sometimes resonant piece of work that could use more concrete storytelling. Jade Circle is about reclaiming the language of one’s origin. In Chen’s autobiographical script, she shares the...
SUNRISE BETTIES: Blood will have blood
Writing about Sunrise Betties is depressing, not because of the content, which includes drug dealing, police corruption, and a ridiculous amount of gore — but because it’s all such a mindless waste of time. In Cheyenne Rouleau’s new script, which is set in the...
FATHER TARTUFFE: AN INDIGENOUS MISADVENTURE — INCONSISTENT BUT RICH
Big chunks of this production of Father Tartuffe: An Indigenous Misadventure are boring. And there are elements that don’t work at all. But the underlying premise is so good and the bits that work are so uniquely rewarding that, despite the holes in it, this show...
CHILD-ISH: Effervescence
I love this show, everything about it. And I strongly encourage you to see it. For CHILD-ish, Toronto playwright Sunny Drake interviewed 41 kids over a period of years. He also invited the kids to interview one another. And they interviewed him. The result is an...
EVERY BRILLIANT THING: Some Assembly Required
It’s fun. It’s moving sometimes. There something essentially theatrical about it. And I suspect we’re in particular need of it right now. Every Brilliant Thing is a one-actor show that was developed by playwright...
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