Lovers, folkies, sad-asses: reviews from the Fringe

THEATRE

POLY QUEER LOVE BALLAD Be still, my heart. I defy you not to swoon as Sara Vickruck’s Gaby, a butch dyke singer-songwriter, and Anais West’s Nina, a bisexual poet, meet and fall in love on open-mike night at Café Deux Soleils. That opposites attract becomes clear in their concise getting-to-know-you exchanges, like: “Nina: Do you read? Gaby: Harry Potter. You? Nina: Novellas. Gaby: What?” The complicated intimacy between oldfashioned romantic Gaby (“Do you believe in God?”) and polyamorous Nina (“You into threesomes?”) is beautifully mapped in Vickruck’s songs and West’s passionate poems, which celebrate sexual ecstasy and cozy domesticity, sometimes within a single beat. Vickruck plays guitar, sings, and uses a loop pedal to create music that is rhythmically and emotionally adventurous, and her lyrics are often hilarious, with references to gender-neutral bathrooms and the Naam. Under Julie Mcisaac’s direction, West is the grounded anchor to Vickruck’s frisky puppy; both are thoroughly charming. Go see this and make it the hit it deserves to be. At the Revue Stage on September 14 (10:15 p.m.) and 16 (5:15 p.m.) > KATHLEEN OLIVER

WOODY SED What a life. What a show. Thomas Jones plays American folk music icon Woody Guthrie and two dozen other characters in a play that’s packed with as much joy and heartbreak as Guthrie’s own eventful life. Jones plays a beat-up guitar and sings Guthrie classics—including “This Land Is Your Land”—in an economically paced portrait of the man who fled Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl, lived as a hobo, and eventually became one of the most influential American songwriters ever, before succumbing to Huntington’s disease. Jones’s characters are extremely well-differentiated—he even does a brief but uncanny Bob Dylan—and his singing is life-affirming. This late addition to the Fringe is a must-see for folk music fans. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on September 15 (5:30 p.m.) and 16 (2:30 p.m.) > KO

MARTIN DOCKERY: DELIRIUM Martin Dockery’s distinctive storytelling style is marked by his scratchy voice, wild hand gestures, entertaining digressions, and, most of all, intimacy. Dockery likes to dial down the intensity of his stories from time to time to prepare us for their impact, but his racing mind is frequently hilarious: in a declaration of long-term love, he qualifies, “I don’t wanna actually watch you grow old, but if you’re gonna grow old anyway, I’ll watch.” And he packs a lot in: while you’re hearing tales of a tense airport border crossing, an unexpected encounter at the Burning Man Festival, and the loss of a beloved pet, you’ll also learn about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, reflect on how much everyone loves moving sidewalks, and be let in on a fundamental rule of comedy: “For it to be funny, you need to have someone there who thinks it’s funny.” Works for me. At the Waterfront Theatre on September 13 (8:45 p.m.) and 15 (8:15 p.m.) > KO

BLACKBIRD In David Harrower’s 2005 play, Una tracks down Ray, the much older man who sexually abused her 15 years earlier. He’s at work; the play begins as he drags her into the lunchroom, where they slowly peel back the layers of the truth about the past. Ray served a prison sentence and Una was a figure of contempt in the small community she never left. “I hate the life I’ve had. I wanted you to know that,” she says. Harrower’s script relies heavily on contrivance, but director Omari Newton’s positioning of the audience around the perimeter of an actual workplace lunchroom—harshly fluorescent and strewn with debris— gives the shifting power balance between the two characters a powerful immediacy, and Stephanie Elgersma and David Bloom ride the script’s emotional roller coaster with finesse. At Shoreline Studios on September 13 (8 p.m.), 14 (8 p.m.), 15 (8 p.m.), and 16 (2 p.m.) > KO

WEIRDO Magician Robbie T is a charmingly offbeat delight, and his illusions are genuinely impressive. The final five minutes of the show are made up of one mind-boggling reveal after another. And yet to truly earn its title, Weirdo could be about 52 percent weirder. He’s funny and self-deprecating, but the bulk of his actions that supposedly demonstrate his strangeness—he sniffs felt pens, he has his childhood stuffed elephant on tour with him—are kind of shrugworthy. One of T’s running gags is brilliantly effective, though—a simple idea, but his execution is perfection: pulling foil confetti out of his pocket in a small flourish whenever he wants to signal “Magic!” It’s T’s body language here that really delivers on his “weirdo” promise. At Performance Works on September 14 (6:45 p.m.) and 16 (2 p.m.) > ANDREA WARNER

A SAD-ASS CABARET One thing I love about TJ Dawe’s shows is that I always learn so many fascinating facts. Dawe is a master of transforming research into riveting stories, and here his tales from the lives of well-known musicians are complemented by the music of Lindsay Robertson. These two “sommeliers of tears” let us in on Hank Williams’s final concert, Judy Garland’s tragic childhood, Bessie Smith’s badass defiance, and Sufjan Stevens’s faith in the power of love. Robertson’s dusky voice and gentle acoustic guitar pair seamlessly with Dawe’s carefully

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Poly Queer Love Ballad

crafted prose to make a thoroughly enjoyable hour. At Havana Theatre on September 12 (9:40 p.m.), 14 (6 p.m.), and 15 (6:35 p.m.) > KO

FAKE GHOST TOURS Wow, I never knew how haunted Granville Island was! Apparently, “You can’t swing a dead cat on this island without hitting that cat’s ghost.” Self-professed identical-twin brothers Shawn O’hara and Abdul Aziz are professional ghost hunters (they earned their credential in vampire studies at Langara), and on this tour, they’ll fill you in on the tragedies and horrors that have afflicted the site over centuries. O’hara and Aziz are skilled comedians, specializing in deadpan absurdity and strategic repetition; their humour is both topical (Railspur Alley’s “old ghosts are being pushed out by younger, hipper ghosts”) and irreverent (Emily Carr was the “witch queen of Canada”). Well worth the walk. At the Fringe Hub on September 12 (7:30 p.m.), 13 (7:30 p.m.), 14 (9 p.m.), and 15 (3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.) > KO

PRECIOUS LITTLE American playwright Madeleine George has created a sneaky little play. Brodie, a single lesbian, is pregnant at 42, having put her academic career before family. George takes nearly half the play to set up the stakes, letting Brodie go on at length about the (fictional) dying language she’s studying, the inappropriate gorilla habitat at the zoo, and the “statistical precipice” her late pregnancy puts her on. We get it, she’s an academic, but for a long time, it feels like nothing is happening. It’s only after the turning point that all this setup begins to pay off—in a way that is genuinely moving. Director Mika Laulainen directs a solid cast: Sara Andrina Brown is a grounded, no-nonsense Brodie; Thérèse Champagne’s irrepressible warmth imbues her multiple supporting roles, including Cleva, one of the last speakers of the dying language, and the Ape, who wears a black dress and pearls. Elizabeth Holliday’s multiple roles could be better differentiated in terms of pace and intensity. Laulainen creates some beautiful stage pictures, supported by Jared Raschke’s set and lighting and Zoë Wessler’s wistful music. Recommended. At the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab on September 13 (5:15 p.m.), 14 (9:40 p.m.), 15 (12:30 p.m.), and 16 (8:05 p.m.) > KO

SELF-ISH Since her father (appa in Korean) died a year ago, Esther hasn’t really felt like herself. Now her mom wants her to hide her appa’s ashes from her visiting uncle. The ensuing emotional crisis is very entertaining, thanks to Kuan Foo’s witty, nuanced script and Diana Bang’s lightly self-mocking stage presence. Foo’s descriptions of the other characters in Esther’s world are concise and razor-sharp: her boss, Daryl, is “probably the closest a human being has ever come to existing in a state of pure math” and her rage-aholic mother is “a cyclone with a perm”, with whom Esther is constantly at war (“I have a lot of buttons and she has a lot of fingers”). Bang’s only props are a set of cardboard boxes that she manipulates throughout—often ingeniously, but too often on the whole. Director Dawn Milman could easily cut some of the physical business and trust in Foo’s text and in Bang’s connection with the audience. At the Revue Stage on September 12 (10:15 p.m.), 14 (8:30 p.m.), and 15 (2:15 p.m.) > KO

RUBY ROCKET RETURNS! “I don’t have a very good memory on account of I drink a lot and I’m not great with details,” Ruby Rocket confides near the start of this improv mystery, saturated in film-noir atmosphere. “That’s what makes me a great detective.” Stacey Hallal has a hard-boiled good time with a rotating cast of improvisers; on the night I saw the show, Briana Rayner, Amy Shostak, and Shawn Norman were hilarious in the search for a stolen brooch made partly of cheetah. The send-up of noir conventions—accents, liquor, projected black-and-white imagery, and, best of all, live keyboard accompaniment (a terrific Matt Grinke on my night)—and Hallal’s playful, loose grip on the reins of the story make this one a lot of fun. At the Waterfront Theatre on September 14 (8:55 p.m.) and 15 (2:40 p.m.) > KO

BIG SISTER Inspired by her older sister’s real-life 70-pound weight loss, this complex 70-minute,

Fake Ghost Tours,

Paul Blinov and Amy Shostak display their love of language in Sean Casey Leclaire’s follows teens growing up in Châteauguay, Quebec, and stumbling into adulthood, with mixed success.

Town Boys Gossamer Obsessions; Small