Double Bill is two short collaborative creations showcasing the talent of the Soulpepper Academy. The Academy is described on their website as “a twelve month paid training and performance residency for actors between the ages of 22 and 26 years old. While at the Academy, actors will receive intensive professional training in ensemble and creation performance…”
The first play is (re) Birth: E.E. Cummings in Song. I love E.E. Cummings very much and I was delighted by their treatment of a selection of his poems.
A note on capitalization: his name is often spelled in all lowercase letters because he did not use capitalization in standard ways in his poems. However, the internet leads me to believe he had no preference for his name to be all lowercase, so I will capitalize it.
In a show such as this, the audience member obviously wants to see their own favourite poems represented and the creators want to cater to their audience at least a bit. So they did include popular favourites such as anyone lived in a pretty how town and may my heart always be open to little birds. It was not, however, a Cummings hit parade – there was no in Just-, or all in green my love went riding. It was an ideal mix of the well-known and the not-so-known. Continue reading Review: Double Bill (Soulpepper) →
Queer Bathroom Monologues is based on a book called Queering Bathrooms by Sheila Cavanagh which includes 100 interviews with LGBT and/or intersex peoples in major North American cities. This means it had quite the potential be a bunch of talking heads but I wasn’t afraid because I knew it was dramaturged by Alistair Newtown. Newton’s work with Ecce Homo Theatre company is always derived directly from historical and other text and records so he is well acquainted with livening such material up for the stage.
