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),...

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...

Bears is magical—until it’s not

There’s only so far you can go on style and good intentions. Bears looks fantastic and its political heart is in the right place. But the script is badly built, so it gets boring. Sheldon Elter, who plays Floyd, narrates his character’s journey in the third person....