Ilana Lucas has been a big theatre nerd since witnessing a fateful Gilbert and Sullivan production at the age of seven. She has studied theatre for most of her life, holds a BA in English and Theatre from Princeton and an MFA in Dramaturgy and Script Development from Columbia, and is currently a professor of English and Theatre at Centennial College. She believes that theatre has a unique ability to foster connection, empathy and joy, and has a deep love of the playfulness of the written word. Her favourite theatrical experience was the nine-hour, all-day Broadway performance of The Norman Conquests, which made fast friends of an audience of strangers.
Amsterdam is an ambitious new play that gets lost in its execution, on stage in Toronto
Amsterdam, by Dan McPeake, presented by new company Wilde Bunbury Theatre and presented at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, is a 50-minute one-act play that speaks about the nature of time and its ability to shift identity, and the different personas we have at different times and for different people. It’s simultaneously linear and non-linear, asking us what it would be like if time merely ceased to exist. It’s a philosophical play by a young, developing playwright, and it shows. In the end, there’s an ambitious and interesting concept here that unfortunately doesn’t quite work in the execution.
I and You is “powerful”, “gut-wrenching”, “beautiful”, on stage at the Tarragon in Toronto
Lauren Gunderson’s I and You, an Outlook Theatre production now playing at the Tarragon Extraspace, falls squarely into the teen “sick-lit” genre of books like The Fault In Our Stars, where chronically, seriously ill high schoolers are humanized and given a chance to speak, explore life and death, and even find love.
Gunderson was the most-produced playwright in America (save Shakespeare) by far this past year, and it’s clear why. Her play is witty and self-aware; it’s charming, well-constructed and features nuanced, likable characters that challenge our assumptions and stereotypes about both teenagers and the chronically ill. It feels very safe and comforting, with enough theatrical flourish to bely that safety and not seem generic.
Sharp, insightful, “unfinished by design” play explores identity on the Toronto stage
What is it like to be mixed-race in a society that seems equally fixated on getting you to choose a singular self and asking, “no, where are you really from?” That’s the question plaguing the central characters of Mixie and the Halfbreeds, now being presented by fu-GEN Theatre at the Pia Bouman School, Scotiabank Studio Theatre. As in the quest for identity, there’s no straightforward answer.
Canadian play talks memory, storytelling, and voice, now on stage in Toronto
Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy, currently running at Theatre Passe Muraille, is one of the most produced Canadian plays of all time. It features a familiar societal conflict: urban versus rural, actor versus tractor. Somehow, in all my theatre education, I had missed seeing this play thus far, and was excited to hear that Passe Muraille was bringing it back in honour of its 50th season.
What makes The Drawer Boy so enduringly popular with theatregoers, I think, is its exploration of the power of story and theatre; in particular, how story is so inextricably linked with memory and identity. When we change the stories we tell to and about ourselves, we can’t help but change who we are.
This is the same paradox the play explores, using the setting of Chinese shopping malls as “racialized spaces of cultural creation and clash.” Text writer David Yee asks us: what does it mean to be Chinese? What is it like to feel like a foreigner in your own country, or to your own background? Do you belong everywhere, or nowhere? The questions are universal; the way the play deals with them is unique, fascinating, and thoroughly amusing.
Amsterdam is an ambitious new play that gets lost in its execution, on stage in Toronto
I and You is “powerful”, “gut-wrenching”, “beautiful”, on stage at the Tarragon in Toronto
Sharp, insightful, “unfinished by design” play explores identity on the Toronto stage
Canadian play talks memory, storytelling, and voice, now on stage in Toronto