My last show to review for the Toronto Fringe Festival and it’s Sunday evening, 10pm at the Tarragon.

Sundays have always been my favourite night of the week. They’re underrated, cool, for they’ve got that post-party, post-weekend daze to them. If I went on dates I would always choose Sundays. Because you want everybody at ease, right? None of that, ‘So, what kind of music do you listen to?’ over steak and muffins kind of awkward.

In lieu of a date: Stop Kiss by gun shy theatre, which, oddly enough, felt like a nice, uncomplicated rendezvous.

So tell me all about it, you beg? Okay.

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The lights dim and the door through which the audience entered slams OPEN. A grubby young man (Allan Turner) barks at the attendant outside. He’s followed by a clown-faced sidekick (Chloe Payne), whose responses are limited to squeaks and gestures. The odd couple bounce around, play tricks, engaging all sorts of shenanigans. They break more than just the fourth wall, if there are any after the fourth. And then some.

This is Sour Grapes, put on by The Aft End. It’s the beginning of the play. No, the middle of the play. No, no, the beginning of some people playing. No, no, no, characters beginning to play.

Right, characters fooling around in association with the Toronto Fringe Festival.

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Going into Guayoyo Creative Collective’s (GCC) production of Exit for the Toronto Fringe Festival, I was wary of what I was about to see. While I am a fan of almost anything experimental, I’ve also been disappointed enough times to approach self-proclaimed absurdists with caution – caution that is when it concerns my limited finances. Of course, reviewing for Mooney has its merits…

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With a tagline as gaudy as, “You are not going to believe what happened at The Oak Room”, The Oak Room is a play that is so much smarter than advertised.

The foreboding ‘description’ of the performance by Fracas Theatre for the Toronto Fringe Festival sets both the eerie tone and the precision of writer Peter Genoway’s style that is apparent in The Oak Room. Genoway’s fascination with narrative underlies the sneaky plot of his play, in which a single story line has been broken up and pieced together very elegantly with a bright cast of five men.

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Theatre of the Beat borrows its name from the Beatniks. It is a theatre company that looks to deliver the kind of nervous energy that fueled the polemical practices of the Beat writers – a loose group who I’ll identify here by its common dissatisfaction with the times, people who could no longer stand the passivity of citizenship. This is the appeal of This Prison Or: He Came Through the Floor, Theatre of the Beat’s contribution to the Toronto Fringe Festival this year.

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