Riley A. Reid: director & playwright
My Halifax Fringe Festival Day 6 started at the Neptune Theatre’s Scotiabank Studio to see Urban Outlaws’ Theatre’s production of Riley A. Reid’s new play A Map to the Centre of Everything.
We are introduced to Pelly (Neo Alexander Ragsac) and his friend Argo (Sam Cooper) as Pelly has just completed a painting of a map to the centre of everything. The two decide that they must follow the map to find out what secrets and adventures the centre holds, in the hopes of finding a utopian place there. Along the way they meet various strange and interesting characters who confound their objective more than helping Pelly and Argo along, but who keep pushing our protagonists to explore bigger cerebral quandaries.
I could really see how the works of Samuel Beckett have inspired Reid to create this play. Pelly and Argo interact with one another in fun contentious ways similar to Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. I also saw a bit of Morris Panych’s work in that ways in which the world around Pelly and Argo are even more absurd than they are. I loved the idea of a character that is invisible to the audience mixing with characters for whom the audience is invisible. Rhys Parks’ character, Dianne, is very fully realized and the imagery around her sitting there at the edge waiting for people to show up, either in desperation or, like Pelly and Argo, who have lost their way, is very poetic and evocative.
I loved the strange physical way that Reid has the actors moving the set pieces and that it was never fully explained who they were or why they moved the way they did. Ragsac is very sweetly charming as our protagonist and his chemistry with Cooper’s Argo works really well. There’s some room for Cooper to keep playing with different ways to express the same frenzied mix of fear and excitement at different pitches and volumes, so we see more of a building of tension from him.
Overall, A Map to the Centre of Everything is full of well conceived and imaginative twists and turns and characters and performances that draw the audience along with Pelly and Argo toward the centre.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Up!
A Map to the Centre of Everything plays at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 8: 4:00pm
Next I caught Daisy Rayne’s play Golden, also at the Scotiabank Studio Theatre, where we meet May (played by Daisy Rayne), a young biracial adult in college trying to create a piece of art about her identity. She recalls the first meeting of her parents, Julie, who is white and played by Emily Ranson and William, who is Black, and played by Kanye Tariq Johnson, and is trying to reconstruct a story she was told as a child that she remembers informing the way she saw herself in a positive way.
An adorable puppet arrives who guides May back to the heart of this story. The themes that Rayne explores here and everything about the puppet is excellent, poignant, and make the play both very sweet, but also powerful. There is room for Rayne to keep working on grounding her dialogue in the scenes with her parents in realistic rhythms of speech- not worrying too much about pushing the subtext or exposition, but feeling free to take a bit more time to have those things come out naturally through Julie and William’s everyday conversations.
Overall, though, I found this piece so imaginative, unique and touching with a really genuine and beautiful message.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Up!
Golden plays at the Neptune Theatre Scotiabank Studio Theatre (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 6: 7:30pm
The “fringiest” show of the Halifax Fringe so far for me (“fringey” in a different way than Butt Suckers) is Adam Norton’s play Dat Dere Socerer of Chéticamp, which is playing at Neptune Theatre’s Windsor Rehearsal Hall.
The crux of this play is that it is set in Chéticamp, Nova Scotia in an undisclosed former century and two local French women have charged an Anglican man from Jersey (Nova Scotia?) with both harassment and being a sorcerer after a number of strange occurrences have happened since his arrival in town. The play is set up as the trail for the Jersey man in front of Magistrate MacDonald.
I love that the play is set in Chéticamp. I am not sure whether the folks involved in creating this play are from there, or if they are Cape Bretoners, but I always appreciate Cape Breton representation in plays produced in Halifax. I also really like the idea of a stranger coming to a community that is not used to strangers and this leading to a charge of sorcery. I think Norton can tighten the narrative of the play up substantially by raising the stakes for our two French characters and clarifying why the stranger is behaving in such an odd way towards them. For example, I think if we see a stronger correlation between his unrequited love for the young French girl, and that she, more so than her friend, is being targeted in strange, but also genuinely ominous and frightening ways that make the audience wonder whether he is “just” an angry vengeful man, or if, *perhaps,* there is some genuine dark magic afoot, the audience will be even more invested in seeing this trial play out.
What makes this show so beautifully fringey is that it involves a voodoo snowman, and it is delightfully silly and strange and wonderful. The magistrate clearly is just off the boat from Scotland, which works well in this context, but for the other three actors, it is a bit confusing how much they oscillate between the island’s Acadian and Scottish traditions. It’s a fun idea to play with how folks in this area may have one French parent and one Gaelic parent, and what does that look like, but it needs to be clearer if that’s the heart of the joke.
This play is written very much as well intentioned silliness; it looks like the actors are having a lot of fun with it, and I really felt a huge payoff in the audience when the snowman came out- maybe the narrative jumps the shark a bit, but I was here for it.
Dat Dere Sorcerer of Chéticamp plays at Neptune Theatre’s Windsor Rehearsal Hall at the following times:
September 5: 6:00pm
September 6: 6:30pm
September 8: 2:30pm & 5:45pm
