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...
Les Belles-soeurs: not so belles all the time
As I was watching this production of Les Belles-soeurs, I kept trying to fill in the holes. There are a lot of them, especially in Act 1. In Michel Tremblay’s 50-year-old play, Germaine Lauzon has just won a million trading stamps. (Stamps like these were part of an...
A CRITIC’S DOZEN: 11 must-see fall shows
The theatre season we’re in promises to be thrilling. As you’ll see, six of my 11 top picks will be playing at Cultch venues. So, if I were looking for season’s tickets, that’s where I’d buy. Here we go! Les Belles-Soeurs Tabernac! The cast! This Ruby...
Mustard: Don’t let this put you off condiments
Hold the Mustard. On paper, it sounds like playwright Kat Sandler might have created an engaging world. Sixteen-year-old Thai has an imaginary friend, Mustard, whom she can see and talk to. Thai’s getting sick of Mustard hanging around all the time, but Thai’s mom...
Kim’s Convenience: shop here
Ah, the appeal of an almost-racist joke! In Kim’s Convenience, the play that spawned the TV series, writer Ins Choi finds the sweet spot as he tickles the edges of transgression. Appa (Dad) and Umma (Mom) run a convenience store in Regent’s Park, Toronto. Appa regards...
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