I have this vivid memory of being thirteen or fourteen years old and walking into the Khyber Building during Halifax Fringe (then Atlantic Fringe). I had never been in the Khyber before and in my memory it was like a gothic palace, and we walked up and up and up and up a staircase in sweltering heat and I felt like I had gone back in time or discovered some hidden secret- something magical- like Mary Lennox or the children in Narnia. This was my first experience as an audience member at a Fringe Festival. I loved the idea of theatre happening in unexpected places- in the nooks and crannies of a city. I went to see this show because my teachers from Neptune Theatre School were involved in it. I loved that there was a place where the older teenagers I admired so much could do their own show and even create their own work. I loved that theatre didn’t have to be elaborate or fancy or expensive or flashy. Around the same time I saw a play called Etiquette, created by my Neptune Theatre School teachers Anthony Black, Zach Fraser and Angela Gasparetto, from the company that would grow up to become 2b Theatre. I love knowing that there are no limits to what you can see at a Fringe Festival. You may see the first incarnation of a Broadway musical, like The Drowsy Chaperone, you might see the beginnings of a hit TV sitcom, like Kim’s Convenience, or you may end up bearing witness to the birth of one of your favourite theatre companies. You just never know.
I love Fringe. In the theatre community many of us call it, “Theatre Christmas” because it’s the most wonderful time of the year. This year in Halifax, I hope you’ll join us. Here’s a little preview of three plays happening in the Fringe this year.
Amblemore Collective brings Rachel Blair’s play A Man Walks Into A Bar to Halifax. Blair’s play was a hit when it premiered at the 2015 Toronto Fringe Festival. Ryanne Chisholm (LunaSea Theatre) directs Michelle Langille and Jake Willett in this timely, Feminist comedy.
Chisholm, Langille and Willett are longtime friends, all Nova Scotian theatre artists who have spent the better part of a decade working elsewhere. Chisholm and Willett have been back working in Halifax for the past few years, and Langille has recently returned, bringing her plans to work on a production of A Man Walks Into A Bar, which she saw at the Toronto Next Stage Theatre Festival in 2016, directly to Chisholm. “Michelle has worked with Nightwood Theatre in Toronto,” says Chisholm, “and knowing what work excites me and the work I’ve been doing with LunaSea- [this play] was an obvious match for us to want to work on.”
The play is set in a bar where the female character works as a bartender. Chisholm, Langille and Willett all worked at the same bar in Toronto while they were living there, and Langille’s costume is the kilt that she wore while she worked there. She later sold the kilt to Chisholm. “Of course,” Chisholm stresses, “the women working at the bar had to buy this incredibly expensive kilt to wear, while the male servers just got to wear their own clothes.” The play looks at the dynamic between a female server and a male patron, beginning with the server attempting to tell a joke and having it careen unexpectedly off the rails when the man in the bar assumes she needs his help. Chisholm says, “This play was incredibly timely when it was written, [three] years ago, but it’s saying even more now. And one thing that I’ve been saying a lot about what #MeToo and #TimesUp mean for artists in this industry is that it isn’t that we are saying new things that haven’t already been said before, it’s that people are listening. That’s a major difference in how the conversation has shifted. Now this play is landing on ears that already have some blinders taken off. Looking at something from someone else’s perspective can be incredible salient in these times when we want ideas to shift, but that might have been a harder ask three years ago.”
Langille adds, “What has always struck me about this play, having worked in the service industry for fifteen years, is that this play isn’t just about Feminism and gender politics- it’s set in a very specific environment that is still incredibly imbalanced and incredibly gendered. How much of that have I been an active participant in? How many times have I thought, ‘I’m well aware of what I am doing right now, but I’m still going to do it.’? There’s a lot of grey area in this play and that is what is interesting.”
In A Man Walks Into a Bar Blair is interested in how being a “good guy” and behaving in a misogynistic way are not always mutually exclusive. Chisholm says, “The idea that misogyny and internalized misogyny makes you evil gives us nowhere to go from because it means that we can’t talk about the person that we may see as being a “good person,” who is also still behaving in a gendered or misogynist way because that’s the way we’ve been conditioned.”
The Halifax production is different from the original in one important way. As Langille explains, “Serving is also very gendered when it comes to the age that it’s considered appropriate to be a server. Men are welcome to be in the service industry for their entire lives, but I would say most restaurants won’t hire female servers if they are over a certain age. And Rachel and I got into a discussion about the age of the character because she thought that it needed to be played by someone in her early twenties and I countered that, partially because I really wanted to do the play, but also because I was like, how does it change the dynamics when it’s a female server who is in her thirties? Because we exist. We’re there. And we are a lot more solid in who we are and what we do, and I think it allows us to explore the play in a different way.” Chisholm agrees, “Having the characters be older clarifies the argument. When you make her a woman in her thirties who the audience reads as more confident, more competent, less likely to be intimidated by a “man,” you clarify the argument: this isn’t about her being young and confused or that she’s unclear about when she is safe- none of those things have bearing on this conversation and, I would argue, when we have these conversations in society, we focus on those things way too much. If she’s all of a sudden alone in a bar with a man at midnight it doesn’t matter how strong she feels, or how much that she feels that he is physically intimidating, it’s just a straight up context that is a life script: I am alone. It’s late at night. There is a man here. I need to do everything I can to keep myself safe. And that has nothing to do with what kind of man he is. He doesn’t have to be a “bad guy,” intimidating or aggressive. It’s a dynamic that has been set up and we have been taught that it’s her responsibility to keep herself safe no matter who he is.”
For Willett it has been a challenge to resist turning his character into a complete jerk. He says, I’m an unabashed Feminist, I know that there were times in my twenties when I was more like my character, because you don’t learn these things right away. But, there’s a point at the end of the play where I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, why would he do that?! I can’t stand what he is doing right now!’ and Ryanne had to say, ‘No. You know guys who behave just like this— who are nice guys.’ and she’s right.” Conversely, Chisholm tells a story about a recent walk home at night in Halifax where she came upon a group of young drunk guys who took it upon themselves to cross the street when they saw her and wished her a “safe walk.” “I think if we were all better at putting ourselves in other people’s shoes we would all be a lot kinder to one another,” Chisholm says, “and theatre is saying, ‘how can we come together and change things?” A Man Walks Into A Bar is the kind of play that encourages this kind of dialogue and this kind of empathetic response.
I love that Fringe is a theatre festival that caters both to plays written to delve into important contemporary issues and societal conversations, as well as plays that are written entirely to be fun and where silliness is embraced and creativity knows no bounds.
Dan Bray and Kevin Hartford bring their new comedy Herbie Dragons to Halifax Fringe this year. It is set in a magical world, adjacent to the Harry Potter universe, where there is a High School called Covenmyth, which has Houses and teaches young wizards. Colleen MacIsaac plays the Harry Potterish character, which Hartford wrote especially for her, but he stresses that while audiences may have preconceived notions about this character’s trajectory, “Colleen’s character is not quite who you would expect her to be.”
Kathryn MacCormack directs the show, which she describes as “a magical romp,” adding, “Colleen plays the prized pupil of Covenmyth: Academy of Spell-Crafting and General Magic and Googs (Melissa MacGougan) plays her youngest sister. Herbie Dragons is the story of three sisters, the eldest is already at the school and is the prized pupil, and now it’s time for the younger sisters to try to get in. Things go awry and… something happens,” she says, laughing, “It’s a little bit of escapism. It’s not going to make you think too hard, but hopefully it will make you laugh hard.” The show’s heart lies in the enchantment of its cast. McCormack says that when she came aboard as director the “show came pre-packaged with the world’s most charming cast. It’s been really adorable. I find Googs in the rehearsal hall, you just want to sit back and watch her. You’re always wondering, ‘What is she going to do next?’” Bray adds, “She’s like a muppet.” McCormack laughs saying, “Yes. It’s really fun and Kayla [Gunn] is an undiscovered gem, or soon-to-be-discovered comedic gold,” to which Bray agrees, saying Gunn is one of Halifax’s “best actors under twenty-five.”
As for McCormack Hartford teases that she is a “tyrant” in the rehearsal hall, mostly because she keeps tweaking the script. McCormack concedes, “I’ve been known to play around with the script. Kevin loves it. I find that in the room playwrights love when the director wants to change the script.” She laughs again, “I like bits. I’m the type of person who, when you send me your script and say, ‘do you have any thoughts?’ I’ll say, ‘No.’ But when I’m in the room and I see it, suddenly I’m like, “HERE’S MY THOUGHTS!” Bray agrees, saying that McCormack will often find ways to take an already funny joke and make it even funnier. Bray stresses that Herbie Dragons is not just a parody of Harry Potter, but that it tells its own unique story, while giving “Harry Potter nerds” lots of in-jokes to enjoy, but without alienating those less familiar with the franchise. The play also boasts of a set by Colleen MacIsaac and a score by Andrew and Martin Chandler. “It’s not pretentious at all, but pure magic.” says McCormack, “It’s like if Harry Potter was written by Hufflepuffs.”
My favourite Fringe Festivals are the ones that have long-form improv shows in them, and luckily Halifax Fringe has Hello City’s The Book Club.
Hello City is an improv company made up of local improvisers Liam Fair, Stepheny Hunter, Colin Mcguire, Henricus Gielis, Peter Sarty, Simon Marshall, Beth Dunn, and Gil Anderson. They have been performing their monthly show at the Bus Stop Theatre for just over a year, but the format for their Fringe show, also at the Bus Stop, is brand new. Fair explains that for The Book Club Gielis acts as the narrator and he “has a series of paperback novels. We will be reading the front, back, and first page of a different novel each show, and taking the protagonist and characters from the book, and we will be taking suggestions from the audience, and then we will improvise a brand new story around those characters and suggestions.” Hunter adds that the reason that they take suggestions from the audience is to “make sure the audience knows that we haven’t read these books and planned out what we are doing beforehand. Everything is improvised.” Anderson explains that in their rehearsals, rather than setting any specifics down in stone, the company instead works on perfecting their format- asking themselves questions like, ‘What makes a good opening scene?’ and ‘What sorts of suggestions might we get from an audience?’
Many of the cast members have long relationships with improv. Hunter, Fair, Marshall and Mcguire all started doing improv as part of The Canadian Improv Games while in High School. Anderson began taking classes at Neptune Theatre School when she was ten, and went on to teach there. Anderson, Gielis and Hunter are all graduates of Dalhousie University’s Theatre Department, while Fair and Dunn were doing improv together at Mount Allison. Anderson has been a professional actor for over fifteen years. They came together in Halifax with a hunger for improv, a desire to perform, and a vision of creating a show that would embed improv into the larger community of the city. Hunter says, “I’m from Winnipeg originally, and I was lucky that when I was there there was a really great improv scene happening and I was getting to take workshops and see shows with CRUMBS, an internationally known improv duo, Outside Joke and The DnD Improv Show, so I saw how improv could exist outside of improv games. When I came to Halifax for University, I started doing stuff with Make Em Ups and started teaching, coaching and performing. After Make Em Ups ended, I wanted to make sure things kept happening because I think improv is a really healthy thing to have in a community. I’ve seen it work really well in Winnipeg, and when it’s good, it’s very successful. So far with Hello City, we’ve done really well. We have sold out shows, and people seem to be very excited about what we are doing, which is really encouraging. Hopefully we can continue to grow this community bigger and bigger.”
Dunn stresses that audiences shouldn’t be afraid to come see The Book Club saying, “We are not going to bring you up on stage, or isolate you, or put you on the spot.” The main difference between a long-form improv show and a play that has been written and rehearsed beforehand is that at the improv show, “you’re there to see something brand new. We are creating it on the spot, specifically for this audience, and when it’s over, it will never be seen again.” Hunter adds that long-form improv is very different from the type of games they play on shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway, “I think that what we are doing is very exciting and very different from other types of theatre that are happening in the city.” The company notes that it’s not just fun for the audience, but it’s also fun for them to do, both as performers and as friends. Marshall says that he loves improv because, “it’s one of the only ways you get to play as an adult,” while Mcguire adds that he loves growing the technical side of the craft because he has such fun while he’s learning and becoming a better improviser. It’s obvious the cast is very interested in community building, as Anderson says, “We are all very approachable, so if you have questions, or want to get involved with improv, come and chat with us after the show.”
Connect with Hello City on Facebook and Instagram (@HelloCityImprov).
Hello City has also been nominated for “Best Comedy Night” in The Coast’s Best of Halifax 2018. You can vote for them HERE.
Halifax Fringe runs from August 30 to September 9th, 2018. For more information and to purchase tickets please visit http://halifaxfringe.ca or stop by The Bus Stop Theatre in person at 2203 Gottingen Street. The Bus Stop is the Festival Hub and the Main Box Office. You can also pick up a Fringe Guide there. You can follow Halifax Fringe on Social Media: Facebook. Twitter. Instagram.
Hope to see you at Halifax Fringe!
