Cruel and Tender lacks emotional depth despite the talented cast.

Stage Review

Production: Cruel and Tender

Author: Martin Crimp   

Company: Canadian Stage

Director: Atom Egoyan 

Principal Actors: Arsinée Khanijian, Daniel Kash, Abena Malika, Jeff Lillico

Venue: Bluma Appel Theatre

Location: Toronto, Ontario              

Run: January 21 to February 18, 2012 

Reviewed by James Karas

If you are searching for Greek tragedy in Toronto, you probably won't be surprised to find none, but may=y we say “almost” none? Canadian Stage has brought something akin to it in the form of Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis. Entitled play Cruel and Tender Crimp's adaotation is now playing at the Bluma Appel Theatre.

Sophocles’ play tells the story of Heracles and his wife Deianira who inadvertently poisons him when she attempts to win back his love. Heracles is away waging war but his objective is a woman, Iole, who is not a simple conquest. To make sure that Heracles remained faithful to her, Deianira gave him a tunic soaked in the blood of a centaur. But instead of acting like a love charm, the tunic caused unbearable pain that spelled the end of the great hero.

Crimp is reasonably faithful to Sophocles’ play. Amelia (Arsinée Khanijian) lives near an airport and is waiting for her husband The General (Daniel Kash), to return from the war on terror that he is waging. As with Heracles, however, the General’s objective is a woman, Laela (Abena Malika), and not the rooting out of terrorism. In fact Laela is brought to the General’s home as a war victim-cum-trophy.

Amelia is worried about her husband’s feelings for her and pours the contents of a vial on The General’s pillow having been promised by a chemist that the chemical will restore her husband’s fidelity. It causes excruciating pain instead.

The performance lasts ninety minutes and the first two thirds are dominated by Amelia who is anxiously waiting for the return of her husband. Khanijian, directed by her husband Atom Egoyan, gives a highly physical performance. She uses her hands, arms and body almost constantly. She seems to be conducting herself as she delivers her lines. The interesting part is that there is relatively little emotional depth in her performance or in the entire production.

Sophocles’ Chorus of Women of Trachis is replaced by a Physiotherapist (Cara Rickets) and a beautician (Sarah Wilson) and they are joined by the Housekeeper (Brenda Robins). Other characters include Jonathan, a government minister (Nigel Shawn Williams), and a journalist named Richard (Thomas Hauff). The Chorus and these characters deliver most of their lines like messengers. There is scant emotional involvement.

The General’s son James (Jeff Lillico) does show some emotion but what he and Laela have to offer amounts to relatively little.

In the final half hour we see The General who is in agony and more or less demented. Kash invests his performance with pain and emotion and we are given projected close ups of his contorted face.

The single set consists of stark off-white walls with narrow windows at the top and a staircase in the middle. There are almost no props except for a chair.

The opening line of the play, delivered by Amelia speaking to the audience, is: “There are women who believe that all men are rapists.” She does not believe that and there is no evidence in the play to support that proposition. True, her husband is waging war for a woman but his means of acquiring her is military conquest not rape.

Crimp has done a reasonable job of being faithful to the plot of Women of Trachis and transferring it to the 21^st century. Egoyan delivers a cerebral production which despite some dramatic acting by Khanijian and Kash, I found surprisingly unmoving. What a waste of talent.

The strands of The Golden Dragon's plot move slowly and the action is slow and tortuous.

Stage Review

Production: The Golden Dragon

Author: Roland Schimmelpfennig

Company: Tarragon Theatre

Director: Ross Manson

Principal Actors: David Fox, Lili Francks, Tony Nappo, Anusree Roy, David Yee

Venue: Tarragon Theatre

Location: Toronto, Ontario.

Run: January 18 to February 19, 2012

Reviewed by James Karas

One of the many plot lines of The Golden Dragon, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play now showing at the Tarragon Theatre, is that of a boy with a toothache. He screams in agony a number of times until the tooth is removed by a kitchen worker using crude pliers. Although the play does have some interesting turns and flashes of theatricality, the ninety minutes it takes to watch it were about as pleasant as a visit to the dentist.

The play takes place mostly in the kitchen of The Golden Dragon a Chinese/Thai/Vietnamese restaurant and requires five actors who play a large number of roles. The characters are describe as A Man Over Sixty (David Fox), A Woman Over Sixty (Lili Francks), A Man (Tony Nappo), A young Woman (Anusree Roy) and a Young Man (David Yee) but that is of little help in terms of the characters that we will meet and the roles played by the actors.

All five work in the kitchen and they will play a number of parts in the various strands of the plot that Schimmelpfennig devises. Two men will become flight attendants whom we see in the restaurant and their apartment. One of them will find the boy’s bloody extracted tooth in her soup and eventually put it in her mouth.

The boy will bleed to death and he will be wrapped in a carpet and disposed of in a river.

We will hear the story of an ant and a cricket, the tale of the people in the apartment upstairs and the goings-on in the busy kitchen. The action will move quickly from one plot strand to another until the 90 minutes are finally up.

The set for all this activity is on and around a raised platform in the middle of the theatre with the audience seated on both sides. The actors put on white aprons at the beginning when they are in the kitchen and make small changes during the performance such as the flight attendants putting on wigs to indicate the blonde and the brunette and wrapping on a red blanket to indicate the woman in the red dress.

Schimmelpfennig is not interested in any realistic portrayal and the characters frequently (and annoyingly) punctuate their speech with “pause” and "short pause”. He wants us to know that we are being told a story and not watching a representation of a tale.

There are a few laughs scattered here and there and the image of people in the hole of the tooth is quite arresting. But by the time you get there, you are bored out of your mind. The strands of plot move slowly, the screaming boy becomes annoying, the action is slow and tortuous. Is it the production or the play? I am not sure.

A few words about the playwright. According to Ross Manson, who directs the production, “Schimmelpfennig is the most produced living playwright in Europe.” He has received numerous awards for his plays and The Golden Dragon won the Muhlheimer Dramatists Award and was selected as Theater Heute’s Play of the Year in 2010. Clearly some critics saw qualities and virtues in the play that simply eluded me. Schimmelpfennig writes in German and what we see is a translation by David Tushingham.

I really cannot complain about the talents of the actors or their ability to move swiftly from one character to another and to give, in the end, impressive performances. Perhaps the transatlantic and translingual voyage has made an awards-winning play into a pretentious bore.

Asha and Ravi Jain share their stories without pretending to be anyone else but the mother and son that they are.

Stage Review

Production: A Brimful of Asha

Author: Asha and Ravi Jain

Company: Why Not Theatre

Director: Ravi Jain

Principal Actors: Asha Jain and Ravi Jain

Venue: Tarragon Theatre

Location: Toronto, Ontario.

Run: January 26 to February 26, 2012

Reviewed by James Karas

One definition of theatre is that it is a representation of reality. Actors pretend to be other people and we suspend our disbelief and accept them as the characters that they are supposed to represent.

When someone gets up on the stage and does not pretend to be anyone but himself then he is not “acting” but simply presenting or representing tales from his life. That is what A Brimful of Asha, now playing at the Tarragon Theatre, is all about. Asha and Ravi Jain tell us some amusing incidents from their lives without pretending to be anyone else but the mother and son that they are.

Asha Jain is Indian and she was married by arrangement to a man who became a successful businessman in Canada. On stage and - we presume - in “real” life, she is a simple woman who has strong, traditional views about love, marriage, the position of children and life in general. She wants her son Ravi to get married and settle down. The woman he marries, needless to say, must be Indian and preferably one that his parents have arranged for him or, at least, approve of.

Ravi does not share all of those views. The younger generation not agreeing with the world view of their parents is one of the mainstays of comedy. In this case however the generational gap differences are supplemented with cultural differences and that, in the hands of a talented writer, can be a source of even more humour.

In the normal course of events, children grow up and marry. But the Indian way provides an additional curl: as far as Asha is concerned, the spouse of the single young person is found, examined, negotiated and settled upon by the parents.

Which brings us to Ravi. He goes in for theatre studies, flies off to Greece and does not obey the natural course of settling down with a wife and a mortgage as his mother wants him to. Enter the Indian modus operandi for connubial bliss: take him to India and find him a wife.

Ravi and Asha tell us what happened when they went to India (he for a visit, she and her husband for wife-hunting). Ravi is a professional actor, a good story teller and knows how to work an audience. His mother is not an actor which means she does not project or enunciate and makes numerous mistakes because her English is not perfect. But she is a loving mother who wants to see her son settled and she is advertently and inadvertently hilarious.

The two of them simply tell us what happened in India as the parents went from one marital prospect to another and all of them were unsuccessful.

I have never seen an audience that is so warm and receptive to what is happening on the stage. All, I assume, agreed with Ravi that he has the right to find his own wife based on love and whatever else makes people jump into matrimony. But emotionally, the audience was with Asha. They simply loved this woman who has been happily married for thirty-eight years and believes that love grows after marriage rather than diminish.

Ravi will no doubt choose his own wife and not allow his parents to choose for him. But will he choose the right one? Maybe he should just listen to his mother.

This Why Not Theatre production is directed by Ravi Jain and even if he can’t find a wife we must give him credit for his marvelous writing, acting and directorial talent.

 Calendar Girls is  funny, rich in character and storyline, with moments of intense emotion.

Theatre Review

Production: Calendar Girls

Writer: Tim Firth (Based on the motion picture by Juliette Towhidi and Tim Firth)

Director: Rachel Ditor

Starring: Shirley Broderick, Anna Galvin, Aslam Husain, Shawn Macdonald, David Marr, Jane Noble, Wendy Noel, Lisa Norton, Linda Quibell, Kerry Sandomirsky, Colleen Winton

Running: Until February 26, 2012

Venue: Stanely Industrial Alliance Theatre

Reviewed by Taryn Hubbard (Vancouver)

A charming story of a group of women who belong to the Women’s Institute in Yorkshire England, Calendar Girls is a production that cleverly brings together themes of age, sexuality, illness, and friendship.

Between riveting slideshows about mysterious vegetables such as broccoli, or teaching tai chi out of a step-by-step book, the sassy members of the WI are clearly more committed to the friendships found in the group than to the stuffy activities that take place at meetings.

But when Annie’s (Wendy Noel) husband John (Shawn Macdonald) gets diagnosed with leukemia, the women decide to honour John by raising enough money from their annual calendar sales to buy a £500 chair for the hospital. Going against the usual Yorkshire landscape-themed calendar, these daring women decide to show off exactly what makes them the women of the WI and pose nude in a variety of different poses—with baking, knitting, jam, and tea sets. The calendar is an instant international success and all of a sudden this quaint women’s group is faced with the pressures of fame.

The high-energy ensemble cast is fantastic. The scene when the women are shooting the calendar—which is in the nude, not naked as Chris (Anna Galvin) likes to remind them—was one of the best in the play. The actors, who actually did bare all, looked like they were having a lot of genuine fun. 

Calendar Girls is a great show. It’s funny, rich in character and storyline, and also has moments of intense emotion. It is a great example of how women of a “certain age” can subvert agist stereotypes and love their bodies no matter how “old” they may be.

Calendar Girls runs at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre now until Feb. 26.