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The Fringe theatre movement is probably my favourite new growth in the cultural ecosystem we navigate in early 21st century Hamilton–Niagara.
The last century began with Vaudeville as king, and now Fringe Festivals are sprouting up all over the English speaking world. They are the street hustlers and wandering gunslingers of yesteryear born anew and running amok after your buck with all the creativity, charm and audacity starving artists have displayed since Shakespeare loaded wagons and hit the road.
Just a degree more complex than busking, the Fringe show is a short sharp jab requiring only a small investment of your life and your pocket book. Under an hour long, and Hamilton, tickets are still less than 10 bucks, the Fringe Festival is a great place for local artists to test their mettle by appearing alongside artists of national and international origin. This year we can expect artists from as far afield as Newfoundland, New Orleans, Mexico, South Korea, and Australia. We usually hold up pretty well, considering.
Vineland native, and champion illusionist Nick “baby–face” Wallace is back again this year, for the third year running, with a show called Nick Wallace: Mind Reader. It’s hard to imagine he can keep pulling metaphorical rabbits from his hat, but if the last two years shows are anything to go by, he’ll have all new illusions in an all new package. This guy could reign supreme in a Fringe anywhere from Florida to Victoria, but so far, he’s all ours.
Sherri Vandermolen, a Grimsby girl made good, is making great strides in the local theatre scene lately. She’s appeared in the best of Fringe showcase, the Aquarius Stagewrite series’ Bittergirl, to say nothing of directing Mamet’s Oleanna at the Staircase. This year she is presenting a two woman show about pastry and maternal strife. Although Minced bypasses Vandermolen’s prodigous vocal talents, she is exercising new muscles by writing this show - and that’s exactly what a Fringe is for; discovering new talents.
John Bandler is another local playwright stretching his wings. His contribution to the festival this year, 59 Minutes in the Maxwell Suite, has his trademark intensity and intellectual density, as per last years Julibee Motel. This is a writer who knows how to raise the stakes. This year, however, he is moving into science fiction territory, tackling technocracy, terrorism, and sexual tension.
This year’s playwrighting contest winner, Hamilton’s Stephen Near, is also going futuristic with a mysterious ensemble piece called Interface about the birth of new technology and impossible love. We’ll see if director Patty Cannon can live up to this very ambitious text.
Festival president Brian Morton, who has had more than one Fringe hit in the past, is lending his talents to a show called Escape which mingles mental health issues and the career of Harry Houdini.
This is without mentioning efforts of the well–loved Make.Art.Productions, or Green Party nominee Peter Ormond’s annual offering of alternative viewpoints, or the Corktown players remount of Waiting for the Go.
A good Fringe festival is a frenzy of creative opportunity where artists and audience intermingle and support creative new growth. Not every show will be a hit, but you’ll take something away from all of them, and they all deserve your patronage. Some more than others, yes. Which ones go home with money in the bank, and which ones scrape by...all this is in your hands Hamilton–Niagara. Go to it. V
[ROBIN PITTIS]
HAMILTON FRINGE FESTIVAL
July 14 through 24.
@ Theatre Aquarius.
190 King St. W., Hamilton.
@DAC Studio.
28 Rebecca St., Hamilton.
hamiltonfringe.ca
A little madness provides any Emerging Artists Series the element of risk it needs, and in its second production of the current 2011 Series, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, EAS puts itself on the teetering edge of disaster, believe me. A director taking on this play for a Hamilton production must come with at least a measure of theatrical insanity, a mad desire to make the impossible seem possible, the unworkable to work, should see the makings of a play in its pieces before even it’s written. That given, the director needs to connect with the writer, and in this work, to breathe despair as she does, to smell the rot of wasted love as she smells it, to feel the broken shards of sanity in his mouth and the blood she tastes from it. He must hear the existential screams of hopelessness she hears from the unchained beast of her insanity. Kane, a respected British writer, never saw her play performed, having killed herself a few years before it was ever staged, almost Plath–like, in a deep depression. (4:48 a.m., the hour before dawn, before the light, is a prophetic time for a suicide.)
Director Damon Leclair found the makings of Kane’s play in a jumble of emotional outcries for help, all waiting for some sorcery to find what connects them all. Barely four years (by his own admission) into a theatrical career, young Mr. Leclair has this to say about the challenge he faced: “….there’s no plot, setting, blocking or even set characters. I had to break up all these fragmented and confusing thoughts and turn them into characters and a storyline.”
Do we have here then, an emerging artist with the right stuff to breathe, smell, feel, bleed, and hear the play trying to come out? From what I saw today, it seems so. In a bold and gutsy move, he invented a love story into which he could fit the fragments of a mind in melt down, and found that the pieces fit themselves to each other through their imagery to support and sustain the conceit. No credit is given for technical help, so I will assume the projection of a grainy film of the lovers in happier times was Leclair’s work, and if he did not himself do the necessary trickery to achieve the right effect, he owes someone dearly. With this substructure in place, the concept he devised held the whole together. He names the principals “The Patient” and the “The Lover.” A doctor is added around whom the mounting disconnect of the lovers swirls and in whom The Patient appears to vest her only shreds of hope for rescue from the terrors of her pathology and her awful heartbreak.
Allison Warwick as The Patient may have more to give than her interpretation permits. Anger is the prevailing energy she uses, but I hoped for a tincture of wit and mischief in her madness. A gifted performer in a huge role, she is most convincing in the love she has to offer and in the hurt and helplessness of the rejection that overcomes her. Taylor McPhaden, a confident actor, plays The Lover with cool dispassion. A chorus of Mind Fragments enhances and defines much of the text, played effectively by Kate Jackson, Sierra Tischler, and Natalie Welland. I was impressed with actor Andrew Vowles, The Doctor. He has superb stage presence and a commanding range of expression which he uses with ease to give credibility to the goings–on. It is Leclair’s good fortune having Vowles’ variety to use in the workings of his conceptual plot.
Lighting, sound, costumes, make–up, general design get high praise, but the highest kudos goes to Damion Leclair for finding and realizing a compelling story out of the poetic shards of Ms. Kane’s dark journey to self destruction. Smoothing the rough edges of his staging skills undertaken, here is an emerging artist to watch. V
[TOM MACKAN]
4.48 PSYCHOSIS
Emerging Artists Series/Black Box Fire
by Sarah Kane
Part of the Emerging Artists Series/
Black Box Fire
@ Hamilton Theatre Inc.
140 Macnab St. N., Hamilton.
@ Theatre Aquarius Backstage Space
during Hamilton Fringe.
July 14 through 24.
hamiltonfringe.ca
twitter: @blackboxfire
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