A Campus Connoisseuse

A common phenomenon facing Theatre UBC subscribers is that of “oh shit, I have tickets to a play tonight.” Getting all our tickets at once, it can often be a shock to remember just in time that you’ll be attending a play later that night. And so when my Google calendar decided to tell me that the Jade in the Coal was in five hours, it had entirely snuck up on me. I came into this play expecting little. I knew nothing about it, and the most recent plays I’ve seen have been a string of failures.

So it was a shockingly pleasant surprise that the play was actually good. First off, it was more than a play. For the most part, it was Cantonese Opera. My first Cantonese Opera, too. I really liked it. The impressive acrobatics done in the performance left me wishing that Western Opera were so visually dramatic. There were a lot of shouts of praise along the way, entirely deserved.

What also took me surprise was the story. I expected something pretty basic since it was opera. I instead got a stimulating exploration of the immigrant experience, set around Chinese coal miners come to Vancouver Island in 1900. The protagonist, Sally, is a first-generation Chinese-Canadian: too loudmouthed and headstrong to be accepted as a Chinese woman, but not accepted by the white Canadians as one of their own. Stuck between both cultures, Sally’s interactions with the other characters paints an environment of hope and disappointment. Around her are Chinese immigrants who had come to buy into the Canadian dream, only to be segregated off and to be overrun with requests to send money home.

Sally’s story, particularly the romantic subplot, is reinforced by the opera. A Cantonese opera troupe comes to town to perform, and their performance is dispersed throughout the play. It was well done and highly enjoyable. Worth your time to check it out.

So, I’m behind on my posts. I’ve actually seen a number of plays (and one opera) since my last review. A quick summary:

The Madwoman of Challiot – this play was fun. Well, it always is. Read it if you aren’t familiar with the story: it’s a good one. You actually have to try to make this one flop. Madwomen, oil companies, saving the world – this stuff apparently never gets outdated. The acting was excellent. The blocking was a problem, however: many scenes left speaking actors completely obscured while on stage. Nevertheless, an excellent time, and excellent play entirely deserving of its status as a theatrical classic.

Rum and Vodka – easily the worst one-actor play I’ve ever seen. Its biggest failure was the protagonist. He’s a total coward and an idiot, and it’s entirely impossible to empathize with him. The entire performance is a downhill experience: he just keeps getting worse and worse, from raping his wife to running off leaving her and their child without any money. Never are we convinced to root for him, yet the play is not set up for us to see it as a case study of “this is what happens to the poor, depressed alcoholic.” No, this play leaves one wondering what, exactly, the point of the story is.

Don Giovanni – marking the reopening of the renovated Old Auditorium, Don Giovanni was a great experience. Highly amusing, and wonderfully melodic, this opera taught me that opera can actually be effective and interesting. The classical set and costumes were a wonderful treat. My only complaint was the scene transitions: total blackout, often with no music. Not that the music always helped: the fist seven minutes of the opera was music with the curtain down, so all one had to look at was the conductor’s head. Considering how well they did everything else in the performance, the amateur scene transitions stood out as a confusing and disappointing mistake. Overall, though? Still a great performance anyway.

The Flu Season – this play was awful. Simply, and truly, awful. Don’t see it. Don’t go anywhere near it. And don’t pay for it. This play epitomizes the stereotype of ineffective, over-the-top storytelling accompanied by bad acting and questionable directing. It wasn’t even bad in a good way. I will say one positive thing, however: the actor playing the Doctor was actually funny. Did it make up for the awful, unneccessary double-narration? Not even partly.

The Madonna Painter – take Unity (1918) and The Lark and combine them. The result? The Madonna Painter. Another not-worth-seeing play, it tells the tale of a young pastor commissioning the painting of a Madonna in the hopes of staving off the Spanish Flu. The play is unsuccessful in a lot of ways: the flu isn’t stopped before loads of people die, the painter ultimately fails to use his love interest for the model, and by the end of the performance I was in disbelief that I’d ever payed money to see it happen. Worse than The Lark, this play simply overdoes it on the monologues. They’re excessive, preachy, and completely unbelievable.

Well, I’m certainly feeling affected right now. I just came out of “Dissolve” at the Dorothy — a one-woman play written and performed by UBC alumna Meghan Gardiner. It was amazing, powerful, and inspiring. And on top of that: free.
And so I cannot help but lament that only an entire row of chairs had to be added to the theatre at the last minute to accommodate all the people who came — I cannot help but wish a call for a larger auditorium was needed.

Once again a beautiful theatrical jem went unnoticed by the larger campus population — I myself only heard about it about five hours before I went. It was put on by the UBC Sexual Assault Awareness Initiative rather that Theatre UBC, and unfortunately not well advertised in advance. But talking to one of the organizers after the play, she hinted it may return again next year.

But anyway. What is this play about, you may wonder? It is a play about drugs and rape. Together — it is the story of about the use of drugs like Rohypnol and GHB in sexual assault (never heard of GHB? Look it up. It’s bloody frightening.). It is the story about victimization, and about the countless bystanders who stand by and do nothing to do stop it. And, in the talkback, we learned something more: it is the story of Meghan Gardiner herself.

Gardiner did an excellent job of acting. Every character she took on was excellently done — especially the bouncer at the beginning. It was a beautiful job, with every switch between characters going between wordless the “everygirl” character that she starts and ends the play with. There is humour. Rage. Wistfulness. Insight. Distress.

It’s not a light topic that this play centres around. But it’s an important one, and I feel this play addresses them in a great way. I’m sick of the stereotype of men as assaulter, and sick of the women-are-victims-men-are-evil mentality that many of these plays have (*cough*Eve Ensler*cough*). It did not take this approach. This was a play that mentioned sexual assault of men. This was a play that purposeful did not ever show the perpetrator of the rape, nor ever fill in any details about him. It was a play about any person — be it you, me, your brother, your best friend — who is drugged with (presumably) GHB — and then raped, by just about any other person. And as Gardiner described in the talkback — most effectively of all, it is a play, not a safety brochure.

It does not pander to the stereotype of rapists hiding behind bushes, or of nobody being able to stop it. Instead, it depicts a harsh reality of blaming the victim: acquaintances taking photos of the drugged victim, not understanding what’s going on; the victim waking up in the morning confused, not remembering what happened to her; the neighbours calling for her to get evicted for her immoral; her friend not believing her tale on the phone, playing down her concerns and telling her that she wasn’t raped and it was a good thing. It shows a world of what shouldn’t be and is.

Normally I absolutely hate it when a play lacks catharsis. This one did on purpose, and it should. We don’t deserve catharsis when we live in this world. The play begins and ends with a person getting ready for a party. This is a play that reminds you: let’s make this a world a better place for them. Only then can we get that release.

http://www.meghangardiner.com/dissolve/

Well, this is rather belated, but fact of the matter is there’s not that much to say. Theatre UBC’s production of Arms and the Man was certainly droll, and definitely a good time, but admittedly, not too notable an experience.

The play, much to my surprise, was a comedy. The only previous works of George Bernard Shaw I’d been exposed to were of the serious variety — Saint Joan, for instance. And so I came expecting something of the sort. I opened up the production notes and found myself a bit baffled by the intro: “Because many of the characters in [the play] are posers…”

And indeed. All the main ones were. The unraveling of their postures made for many good laughs and certainly, an interesting take on the Serbo-Bulgarian war.

The set work was excellent, as was costuming. I liked the use of props. However, the set transitions were awkward, and the singing during them was an unfortunately unpleasant juxtaposition. Directing for the most part was good, although there were more than a few dry and quiet moments that I expect were good in rehearsal but flopped quite a bit with an audience sitting around, coughing and moving around in their chairs.

All in all, good times, worth my money, friendly to non-theatregoers, but not a must-see.

I left the closing performance of The Vagina Monologues yesterday at the Freddy Wood theatre not entirely sure how I felt about this year’s performance. This would be third year I’ve gone to the UBC VDay performance, and the first in which it was held at that venue. I wasn’t really a fan of the previous one (the Music Auditorium), so I thought this was an improvement.

I think the biggest problem with the performance was the costumes. Normally this isn’t a problem, so it took me a while to see it as one. The costumes just didn’t work. I couldn’t believe the actors were the people the monologues were supposed to be from. It wasn’t the actors were worse than the ones in previous years. They just often weren’t good enough to get past the inappropriate costumes.

For me, the “Coochie Snorcher” monologue was worst for this — the actor’s glistening pink cocktail dress just wouldn’t let me believe she was the girl in the piece. I mention this monologue for a second reason — each time I see it, the more it disturbs me. Its message just doesn’t fit with the rest of the play, and with it, seems to say, “rape is good for you if women do it.”

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I’ve gone to The Vagina Monologues every year since I got to UBC — and this term, with the new play A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer I decided I’d change it up and go to that instead. With the deadline to WCCCE looming and my coauthors still sending me revisions, I figured only one of the two would be enough for this weekend.

And so this afternoon I was off to the play. I was told it had male actors, and would be about gendered violence. I got my hopes up — finally, we would see a more complete picture of gendered violence than the women-are-victims-of-men depiction of The Vagina Monologues. And naturally, I was disappointed. The male-led monologues didn’t deal with violence against men, nor did the women-led ones. The male-led monologues showed how violence against women hurts them. And it does. And I don’t want to demean the very brave message of protesting violence against women. But wasn’t it supposed to be about gendered violence?

If violence against women is swept under the rug, where is violence against men swep to? Bolted under the hardwood floors?

The play started off being fairly crappy, with an irritating duo about a single mother and her son. But it eventually did move to some powerful, meaningful stuff: the Maurice monologue about a date rape, the Blueberry Hill monologue about fighting back against a gang rape, and a monologue written by NY Times journalist Nicholas D Kristof about prostitutes in Cambodia. This was good theatre. It got you feeling, it got you thinking.

And then, after getting me engaged, getting me impressed — the ending sucked. It ended without a catharsis like Reclaiming Cunt from The Vagina Monologues. Worse, it ended with cliches: the actors standing in a line saying words in the most painfully stereotypically avant garde way possible. Instead of coming out of the play wanting to do better in the world, I came out feeling like I’d been subjected to Full Moon from Sex and the City.

And so, as I left, I couldn’t help but buy a ticket for The Vagina Monologues on my way out. My day won’t be done until Cunt is Reclaimed.

***

A better ending I saw recently was that in the opera Louis Riel last weekend. It was epically done and wonderfully foreshadowed by the death of Scott earlier in the performance.

I found the performance of John A. McDonald and his cronies to be quite engaging. The aria in Cree done by Marguerite was also impressive. I found the solo bits and the chorus parts to be both well done, but whenever a handful of people were singing as conversation, it was horribly cacophonic. It seemed not to be well synchronised, which was disappointing.

Also disappointing were the subtitles: the number of typos in them was embarrassing, as was the French translations during some parts. Nevertheless, the story was solid and the acting well-done. It was worth my time, if not only to learn the lesson to see operas at the Chan centre from the balcony rather than the lower parterre; I began the performance down below trapped in between fidgety people who clearly didn’t like opera. Moving to an empty seat in the balcony during intermission was probably the largest enhancement of my experience of the performance.

Having just gotten out of William Yang’s China, I cannot help but rush to praise this work of live art. In one word, it was beautiful.

Yang is the sole speaker in the production, which is a narration of his pilgrimages to China and his discovery of a connection with his Chinese roots. Yang, a gay, second generation Australian, was charismatic and a wonderful monologuer. His story was enlightening, a view into a world I’d never seen before, fantastically illustrated by his photography of the journey.

The performance setup is simple: Yang, speaking, with two visual backdrops, showing his photographs, and a musician playing traditional Chinese instruments to it. The wording, displays, and music are exquisitely chosen to work together. I’ve long been a hater of using visual backdrops on stage, but having seen for once this technique used properly has personally called this stance into question.

It was presented at the Frederick Wood Theatre as part of the PuSh Festival, which I can only hope is overall just as good, and certainly worth checking out.

His story was engaging, and wondrous. I’d strongly recommend seeing it. It was a work quite earnestly deserving the standing ovation it got.

What wasn’t so deserving of a standing ovation, I found, was Theatre UBC’s Romeo and Juliet, which I saw last week. The play had been unusually sold out in advance with staggeringly long standby lines, so I’d come into it expecting that it had better be good. It wasn’t.

I’m certainly open to reinterpreting Shakespeare — but painting Romeo and Juliet into clowns, with awful makeup and costumes reminiscent of sixteen-year-olds that shop at Hot Topic, and jarring music accompanying songs not worthy of a B-movie — was not particularly pleasant for me to watch. I found the juxtaposition to hinder, rather than enhance the story.

I wasn’t exactly imparted with the impression that the director wanted to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, I think she just wanted to have a Tim Burtonesque fantasia, which on its own certainly could be fun. And I must say, the firespinner in the bikini did make for some good entertainment. What it has to do with Romeo and Juliet is still lost on me, but she was quite the spectacle.

The poster for the play appeared to promise nudity, and was a disappointment of the night — there was no nude Juliet, not to mention her performance sucked.

Speaking much more positively of the experience, Ben Whipple’s performance as Mercutio was stunning. It made the play worth the 10$ I paid for it. I enjoyed his performance as Fred Phelps in the Laramie Project, and was totally impressed with his job here. It was, in conjunction with the firespinner, the only reason worth seeing the play.

And as for the play being sold out — they’d removed about a dozen seats from the audience to make room for the atrocious band, and for Juliet’s balcony — enough to host most of the poor students waiting for hours in the standby line to the play that didn’t deserve it.

This weekend I was treated to not one, but two nights of live drama. First, this Saturday, there was the three-hour performance of the AMS Emergency Council Meeting, in which the theme of betrayal was emotionally examined in student politics, and pizza was had.

But much more enjoyably, not to mention more artistically, this Sunday I got to see Nicola Cavendish perform the one-woman play Shirley Valentine, to raise money for theatre students. The writing was insightful and hilarious, and so was Cavendish. She has an excellent sense of timing, allowing the audience to laugh at the jokes and sympathize at the conflict.

Like any good work of art, the story had a clear thesis: to enjoy life, not to let it bring you down and lose yourself in the mundane. The protagonist’s journey towards this was touching and universal, and not likely to get dated anytime soon. The play, for me, felt like a female-version of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, another work exploring the same topic of a middle-aged Briton breaking out of their lifeless routine and finding vitality once again.

Cavendish did a great job with the altered routine for the night — the play involves a set with many props to allow the actor to remember the lines as they do the actions. For the stripped-down service performance, most of these were absent; Cavendish had to refer to the script a total of eleven times throughout the play, always doing so with great humour and patience; and in doing so, breaking down the fourth-wall to wonderful effect. For me, the play illustrated what matters with a play — you can pull of forgetting your lines, as long as you have the right rapport with the audience and execute the lines and action with the appropriate timing and emotion.

With a play this great, I was sad I could not help with the fund raising — in the play’s programmes, they included enveloppes for donations. Instead, as a poor undergraduate with an impending exam in partial differential equations, I worked out a solution to the wave equation all over this envelope while I waited for the play to begin. Once, however, the play had started, Cavendish kept my undivided attention.

The play is on for one more night, and I would heartily recommend it. This is a play worth procrastinating on exams for.

At last night’s performance of The Laramie Project, a play about the town of Laramie after the brutal attack of Matthew Shepard, I was at first a little confused as to why the people there were making such a big deal about the director, Nicola Cavendish. Then the play began.

I’ve been a subscriber to Theatre UBC for two years now, and I’ve found the directing to range from mediocre to dismal — and then I saw the Laramie Project. For once, for this one beautiful time, a good play was not brought down by bad timings or awkward stage movement. It was refreshing and wonderful to see some intelligent directing accompany the great acting and set work typical of a good UBC play.

And this was a good UBC play. I’d urge anybody reading this to see it while they have the chance. The play is powerful, emotionally complex, and well-told. It has a clear, well portrayed message of hope for the LGBT community.

For me, the play hit home — I grew up in a small Southern Albertan city much like Laramie. I sobbed my way through the phenomenal second act of this play, thoroughly appreciating that for once a Theatre UBC director gave their audience enough time to soak in the emotions of the story — making this the second play I’ve ever seen to make me cry. What would be the other play? The University of Lethbridge’s 2007 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a work which was referenced numerous times in the Laramie Project.

Like Angels, The Laramie Project has its share of humour — in this case, the angles encircling Fred Phelps and singing Amazing Grace was nothing short of hilarious and uplifting.

Theatre UBC been in need for a play both uplifting and provocative for at least as long as I’ve been here, and man, am I glad this finally was produced.