Sweat: don’t sweat it
It takes too long for the plot to hit the fan. Playwright Lynn Nottage has set Sweat in a working-class bar in Reading, Pennsylvania. A local steel-manufacturing plant defines the lives of everybody associated with the place. The central trio of women—Cynthia, Tracey,...
The Wolves: they shoot, they score, they stupefy
This is a guest review by David Johnston * It begins by throwing the audience to the wolves. We are thrust unceremoniously into a gaggle of chattering teenage girls in identical soccer jerseys. They're stretching for a match, but that's only discernable from context...
Kill Me Now: death-defyingly great
This is a guest review by David Johnston * Kill Me Now is a play that's smart enough to pretend to be the boring version of itself for awhile. That's a rather complicated compliment, so let's break it down. We open with single father Jake Sturdy (Bob Frazer) giving...
Sweeney Todd: a murderous tale to die for
Watching this production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, I felt ridiculously lucky. The show is so strong and its storefront location in Gastown so intimate that I felt like a cast of stars had shown up in my living room to perform a masterpiece....
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 combines...
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...
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