Megan McArton as Sarah in Brown Wasp
If there is one thing that I love more than a new Canadian play, it’s probably a revival of an older Canadian play. True revivals of plays written by Canadians are rare gems, and seeing one at a Fringe Festival is like happening upon a cool vintage pop bottle on the beach.
Caravan Theatre brings Brown Wasp by Meah Martin to the Halifax Fringe, a play that won the One Act Canadian National Playwriting Competition back in 2000. The playwright revisited the work last year for a production at the Winnipeg Fringe. It tells the story of Sarah St.John, played by Megan McArton, a woman who has recently found a lump in her breast and has embarked on a healing journey to a cottage at Manitou Lake in Saskatchewan. The trouble is that Sarah can’t seem to get out of her own way. Everything with her has to be just so, except the lump has thrown everything into chaos. In fact, Sarah’s breasts have been thwarting her plans since she got her very first training bra. All of her reproduction organs have gone rogue on her in one way or another, including her uterus, which tried to make a dramatic run for it when she was pregnant with her second child in a manner that was truly horrific to hear, but equally important to hear as well. I wondered if this play was the first to discuss endometriosis, as that was certainly not something I was at all familiar with back in 2000. With all this in her backstory, Sarah has a hard time seeing the other women at the lake changing outside of the cubicles, feeling comfortable in their nudity, and having the audacity to have bodies that are fat, imperfect, and/or old, and refusing to be ashamed. There is also a layer of internalized colonialism touched on in this play, as Sarah also tries to wrap herself in her husband’s Britishness and uses it to feel a sense of belonging that veers on ownership of her Prairie home, and a way to “other” those women who weren’t born there.
Megan McArton gives a really beautiful performance of someone who sometimes is a bubbly free spirit who thinks she might be able to cure her cancer by soaking in the magic salt waters, and who visits a fortuneteller in Hawaii and believes what she is told, but also someone who is very repressive and judgmental, especially of herself, and who can literally freeze herself with her own Anxiety and stress when she feels like her plans have been ruined. At the heart of the play, though, is Sarah’s openness to learn something new about herself, to have a new experience, and to think about things differently. This is made all the more fulfilling because it is a challenge for her.
It’s unfortunate that this play still resonates so much in 2023 as it did in 2000 in the way it depicts cancer, women’s health in general, and aging in all its messiness, and also its moments of unexpected humour and beauty. It’s nice to see this short play be revived and given the opportunity to find new audiences to connect with.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Up!
Brown Wasp plays at the Neptune Theatre Imperial Studio (1589 Argyle Street, Halifax) as part of the Halifax Fringe Festival, closing on September 10th at 5:00pm. The show then tours to parts of Nova Scotia:
September 14: Kentville at CentreStage Theatre, 7:00pm
September 15: Harbourville at Harbourville Hall, 7:00pm
September 16: Wolfville at Al Whittle Theatre, 7:00pm
September 17: Annapolis Royal, Kings Theatre, 3:00pm
Tickets for the tour are $15.00 and are available HERE, tickets for the Kings Theatre show are available HERE.
The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company and Théâtre DesAssimilés are trying something bold with Human Intelligence/ Intelligence Humaine in that they have created a mostly scripted show with improvised bits to explore one scenario for what might happen if a troupe of improvisers had an Artificial Intelligence Robot as a scene partner.
The crux of the play, however, is that AI robots aren’t funny, and can’t do improv, so the human performers need to find a way to make it clear that the improv with the robot isn’t working, while also making the show entertaining enough to actually work, and this is very meta-theatrical and also challenging. They’re also trying to do all this in some bilingual capacity as well. There is a lot going on.
The biggest question I had though was quite basic. With all the current discourse around Chat GPT, I was curious why the robot in this play, C.R.A.I.G, looked to be about the same age as me. In this context even if C.R.A.I.G is terrible at improv, perhaps there’s some newer model of AI Improviser who is excellent at it.
C.R.A.I.G aside though, there were some great moments of improv in this show, and I love the idea of bilingual improv. I’m not convinced these performers need a structural gimmick to justify playing improv games and showing off their skills, but I also think playing around with the concept of AI is interesting. In theory C.R.A.I.G should have slayed as the character at the party who speaks in sitcom theme songs, because he should have been able to play recordings of the actual theme songs seamlessly. But that’s not improv, is it? Surely that’s cheating? Right? I can see the play being developed more along those lines. Where might AI truly shine as a performer, but is that actually performing?
There’s a lot to think about here, and certainly the beginnings of some really interesting and potentially frightening conversations.
Human Intelligence/Intelligence Humaine plays at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio (1589 Argyle Street, Halifax) on September 10th at 6:45pm as part of the Halifax Fringe Festival.
Hanlon Uafas-Álainn’s Liminal idEntities takes us to Hell and introduces us to George, our demon narrator. Here we are introduced to a number of different characters, all of whom are experiencing some sort of suffering in a world plagued by climate change and capitalism.
The scene that I will be thinking about for a long time to come is set in the near future where medically assisted dying has become an automated process. It invites us to contemplate whether medically assisted dying is inherently compassionate or if there is a line at which it becomes irresponsible. Certainly watching this person sitting alone in a room grappling with ending their life, listening to an automated recording, is deeply sad, and feels wrong and disturbing. But, these same thoughts and feelings exist also surrounding most depictions of suicide. How much of these judgements are helpful or kind?
I also really liked the use of the (literally old school) overhead projector to provide backdrops and secondary characters to the scenes. It is a thoughtful melding of the recent past with the near future, and is suggestive of how we grow nostalgic, how future generations find inspiration in the past and revive older trends, and how things age from being dated, to being vintage, to coming back into fashion again. In the same way, the problems in Uafas-Álainn’s image of the future here are (accurately) recycled from our own present time, only magnified.
I found Liminal idEntities to be quite heavy in tone, despite the fun energy of George, but I was thinking about it all the way home, which definitely feels like the playwright’s intention.
Liminal idEntities plays at the Neptune Theatre Imperial Studio on September 10th, 2023 at 8:00pm as part of Halifax Fringe.
Halifax Fringe runs from August 31st to September 10th, 2023 in a myriad of venues throughout the Downtown and the North End of Halifax. For more information and to purchase all your tickets please visit this website. Masks are mandatory again this year inside all Halifax Fringe spaces. For more information about accessibility at the various venues please check out the 2023 Program Guide here.
You can follow Halifax Fringe on Facebook. Instagram. TikTok.
A Note On TWISI Fringe Ratings:
I have never liked rating Fringe shows, or any shows, using the 5 Star system as I have done in the past, so this year I’m doing something new. From now on I will just be highlighting what I think are 4 or 5 Star Fringe Shows. A Two Thumbs Up Rating equals roughly to 4 Stars, while A Two Thumbs Jump Rating equals 5 Stars. I have stolen (with permission) “Two Thumbs Jump” from my friend Lenny Clayton, who is awesome, as she has used it in her film reviews in the past.
