Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 10:51pm
I just got in from starting my foray into the Fringe Festival. I decided that I would choose a theatre and catch as many plays as I could stand. I dropped my 90 bucks for my 14 play pass and got prepared.
I watched three plays. The first play Wedding Belles was about four women and their set of issues while preparing to be part of one of the women's sisters wedding party. I still don't get why the wedding was going to be in the woods. Over all the acting was pretty bad. All their voices came across as trying to sound like actors rather than like normal people. The yoga girl gave a really great performance in one scene when she admits to feeling guilty for her boyfriend dying in a plane crash after she got him the flying lessons. She almost brought me to tears between her expression and her acting.
Some of the scenes were juvenile and cliche.
I went back outside to get my ticket for the 2nd play and didn't I run into one of my old bosses from both the Pantages theatre and the North York Performing Arts Centre? He was planning to see the same play as me so we sat together and caught up on all things theatre and personal.
The 2nd play was, A Streetcar named Gerrard. What an offensive piece of shit. Basically it was a politician of all affiliations talking to the masses about the poor just before they demolish a housing project.
I pulled out my steno and started writing notes when he compared studying the poor for his master's thesis to Diane Fosse studying the Gorillas for years. I actually said out loud, "Oh No!"
The poor were depicted first as these sistas talking stupidness one chain smoking and the other one pregnant (they were played by white girls). Then the same white girls imitated the poor men and talked with a black street vernacular. The girls wore t-shirts that said BEER across them so somehow they were a combination of white trash and stereotypical ghetto blacks.
At one point the politician talks about moving the "normal" middle class into to live with the poor to teach them. "They'll learn how to speak English, they'll learn what a condom is."
Then the girls portray the white poor: Andrea, the intellectual (She had a grade 9 education) and Phyllis, the chain smoker and I quote, " Phyllis is 4th of 16 children. Her parents think contraception is praying."
Fuck! It was the longest hour of my life!
The songs came the closest to being clever if they weren't so fucking offensive. I get that the playwright was trying to make a statement with the play but it just ended up being so fucking offensive I'm surprised that I sat through it.
And everytime the Politician would call his wife over to hand him his fucking bullhorn which he said each time, "the white rolled up cardboard acting as a bullhorn," (if he said it one more time I was going to slit my wrists) he'd fondle her or slap her ass.
Okay! Can I just say? HATED IT!
The final play that my ex boss and I saw together was The Africans. It was actually quite good. When you're in the position where you are trying to talk to people who don't speak your language and you don't speak their language. There was more to the play than that but I'll just leave it at that. The main criticism was that it was hard to catch everything that was said because of the actor's placement on the stage. And the ending was a bit of a cop out but overall out of the three plays it was by far enjoyable.
Before the Africans came out on stage, I was actually scared that they'd be either portrayed by white actors pretending to be black or there would be stuffed animals placed as the Africans. ha ha. A streetcar named Gerrard was the cause of my worry. But thankfully they were actual black actors and African, I think!
Okay, enough said... more plays tomorrow.
EY
