Vincenzo Ravina: Actual Wizard
I had another great day at Halifax Fringe. I started my day seeing Capacity Theatre’s Woe Is Him, Woe Is Me, written and performed by Gabrielle Therrien and directed by Alina Kogas at the Neptune Theatre Windsor Studio.
We are introduced to Janelle, a young woman with a contentious relationship with her (unseen) therapist. She is working through some sort of structured therapy strategy which does not seem to be helping her, and she spends much of the play rebelling against what she is being asked to do and speaking sardonically, hoping to unsettle her therapist and prove something to herself. At other times, however, Janelle is overcome with emotion and does speak from a place of vulnerability about what happened to her, and sometimes she has moments of joy when speaking about her relationship with her dad. As the play progresses we get more and more of a sense of a mind and a heart that are in deep turmoil and react in ways that are unpredictable and erratic.
I really loved the way this play was directed and performed. Alina Kogas has the audience seated in the round and Therrien paces among us. She speaks to us directly and we aren’t sure whether we are existing within a common theatrical convention or if we are figments of her imagination. She engages with us in ways that are awkward and seem purposefully unclear, which creates an additional tension that works really well to establish that this character is a little bit off kilter. Kogas also makes really dramatic use of the lights in the small Windsor Studio space, creating some really powerful imagery- especially at the end.
Therrien performs Janelle often with a halting almost stuttering vocal cadence that works really well, like she can never fully catch her breath. Everything about her is always racing inside. She is deft at throwing herself into one extreme of emotion after another and turning them off completely just as quickly. When she talks about her father you see in poignant glimpses the girl she was before.
Dramaturgically, I wondered exactly what kind of therapy that someone like Janelle would have had in a hospital? I think the more the play is anchored in very specific true detail of exactly what the therapist is trying to accomplish with Janelle in each therapy session that the play will have even more resonance and power.
Overall, though, this is a strong piece from two young theatre artists who are making really bold and thoughtful artistic choices in this play. I was really riveted throughout and very moved by the ending.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Up!
Woe Is Him, Woe is Me plays at Neptune Theatre’s Windsor Studio (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 1st: 1:45pm
September 5: 7:30pm
September 7: 5:15pm
September 8: 12:00pm
I think a lot of people in the audience for Actual Wizard Vincenzo Ravina’s show Actual Secrets: a Weird Magic Show had seen Ravina’s show before and that we are starting to become at least somewhat accustomed to actual wizardry because while the sizeable crowd gasped, whispered excitedly to their neighbour, and clapped politely I think the appropriate response to everything that Ravina does in his magic shows is screaming at the top of your voice, “How. **The Blazes**. Did He. Do That.” If there are no children in your audience feel free to swap out the word “blazes” and replace it with a different word of your choice.
Kids love Ravina’s show. If you have children: you should take them. He is a wizard. If you are worried that your child is about to grow out of their belief in magic and you are hoping for them to hold onto their sense of wonder for a little longer, seeing Ravina make very broken things whole again might very well convince them that not only does magic exist Once Upon a Time in a land far far away, but also that it exists right here in Halifax at the theatre.
I think there are a lot of adults walking out of Actual Secrets rethinking their verdicts on magic (and wizards) as well. The things that I saw Ravina do in his show tonight, I KNOW, logically, cannot be done. I have seen him repair what cannot be repaired. I have seen him know what cannot be known. I have seen playing cards do things that playing cards cannot do, and be in places where they should not be. Everything Ravina does looks absolutely random- at times even chaotic- as he charmingly and with a great deal of humour and patience interacts with a myriad of helpers from the audience. Yet we are all seemingly hurdling toward a forgone conclusion.
How is that possible? How is any of it possible?
It is so much fun to not know. It is so much fun, in this dumpster fire world, to be given the gift of really genuinely believing in magic and luck and wizards for an hour one Friday night at the end of August in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I hope you all go see this show. It is good for the soul.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Jump!
Actual Secrets: A Weird Magic Show plays at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 1st: 3:45pm
September 4: 7:15pm
September 7: 6:30pm
I finished off Day 2 of Halifax Fringe with Urban Outlaws Theatre’s production of The Great Newspaper Heist, a new play by Riley A. Reid and Neo Alexander Ragsac.
The play centres on a girl named Taylor (Kaitlyn Thompkins) who gets roped into helping execute a convoluted scheme to expose a corrupt mayor in a small town. There ends up being five other eccentric characters who take part in this heist as well, and eventually they learn how to work together in the hopes of achieving their goal.
I think this play has a really interesting central premise of a disparate collection of townsfolk rising up against the crooked beacon of capitalism in their town. It also touches ever so gently on the theme of subverting democracy, which is unfortunately an issue looming all too large as the American election approaches. Reid and Ragsac have written some really clever dialogue and some really poetic lines as well; they do show promise as writers.
At the beginning of the play it is established that we are in Cedar Cliffs, a town of 500 people. I think it would be really interesting for Reid and Ragsac to really root this story in the reality of a community that small. What changes in the dynamics between the characters if they have all grown up together in a place where nearly everyone knows everyone, everyone is connected to everyone in multiple ways, and many people are directly related to one another. If one of the characters truly is a stranger- how do all the other characters perceive them and act towards them? How does this inform and change each characters’ relationship to the mayor and the sense of their own town’s local history? I concede it would be way easier to just take out the lines about the small town, but I think reframing it around the town being so small is much more interesting.
The other important aspect for Reid and Ragsac to keep working on is continually establishing and maintaining clear stakes for the characters so the audience feels like its heroes are facing, and then hopefully triumphing over, real danger. This means tightening up a lot of the scenes where the characters’ overtly compromise their objective just because they have more they want to say. If we get the sense the characters are ambivalent about their quest, the audience will be more likely to be ambivalent too.
There are some strong performances in this play. Jack Wiggan is especially well cast as the conspiracy-minded revolutionary Darius. He has long convoluted lines where he is almost free associating and he has a strange relationship with Taylor who he both lords power over but also trusts implicitly, and the rhythm that Wiggan has found for this character feels very grounded in truth. Giulia Piernelli and Sarah Beth Jackson both have some great physical moments with their characters, Shiloh and M respectively. Misha Bakshi is also very well cast as the haughty wordsmith librarian.
This play is a signifiant ambitious jump in scope for these two young playwrights from their two hander last year, and you can really see a lot of promise in the writing. The way Reid and Ragsac are melding a caper with a comedy reminds me of Dan Bray’s work, like in Knight of the Bat, and I think Bray is a great example of how a lot of these elements really can work together: you can be both very clear and very clever, very zany, but also still rooted in the rules of the world you have created, and, as Eugene Levy says whenever given the opportunity, the comedy is always the most rewarding when it comes organically from the characters. I’m glad to see Riley and Ragsac are continuing to write together and that they are tackling an even bigger challenge this year.
That’s really what the Fringe is all about.
Halifax Fringe runs until to September 8th, 2024 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. Neptune Theatre, The Bus Stop Theatre, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Lecture Theatre, and the Cambridge Battery are all wheelchair accessible. Neptune Theatre and the Bus Stop Theatre both have all gender washrooms.
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 last year I started 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, who came up with this phrase when she was a young kid reviewing films on YouTube.
