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.
I’m not good at making noise in public. I’m always the person in a group who gets uncomfortable when the noise level gets too loud, worrying that we are bothering the people around us. So, when I was given a homemade, portable speaker to carry around during Listening Songs: Listening Choir, a Live Art event at the 2015 SummerWorks Performance Festival, my anxiety was heightened and I was initially hesitant to push “play.” There were rewards to be had, though, in being loud and quiet at the same time.
The Hum (A Theatre Gargantua SideStream Cycle with the GzAp Collective), playing at SummerWorks 2015, is a sweet family show about the magic inherent in the natural environment around us. It’s presented by venerable Toronto company Theatre Gargantua, created by and starring Julia Aplin, John Gzowski, and their ten-year-old daughter, Jenny Aplin.
The show was inspired by Jenny’s paintings, and tries to tap into the hum of the Earth. Much like a ten-year-old kid, though, it’s a show that has high aspirations (and a promising opening monologue) but doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet.
The Unpacking (7th Cousins), playing at SummerWorks 2015, is the culmination of a month-long walking trip undertaken by Erin Brubacher and Christine Brubaker–or perhaps it’s just the first step in a new journey. When it seemed like everyone wanted to know if they were related, they began to joke that they were “7th Cousins.” Turns out that was a misnomer – they may actually be 6th cousins – but as they looked into their heritage, a long voyage by an ancestor from Pennsylvania to Ontario sparked their curiosity.
They wanted to recreate the trek, walk through their own fields, ford their own rivers, scare off their own bears (okay, that last one was more a necessity than a desire). Soon after the idea emerged, the planning began, and they were on their way. They gave themselves a limit of thirty days. Last night they returned home, and The Unpacking began.
The Tall Building (It Could Still Happen), now playing at the 2015 edition of SummerWorks, takes place in a building that keeps growing floors. Meanwhile, a city much like our current Toronto (but run by a mysterious “lady mayor”) slowly devolves into a coyote-strewn, apocalyptic wasteland of fire and wind.
In a series of intriguing vignettes, three characters – a closed-off, suspicious woman named Sulla who owns a single pair of magical, fraying pants (Molly Flood); a credulous and sweet 12-year-old boy with absent parents, his own street newspaper, and a 7-11 obsession (Philip Nozuka); and a pompous, ineffectual assassin (Clinton Carew) – reach an uneasy détente as the world outside burns.
the marquise of O- (the red light district), adapted and directed by Lauren Gillis and Ted Witzel for SummerWorks, is loosely based on an 1808 short story by Heinrich von Kleist, filtered through Kant’s ideas on reality and knowledge, and the remix culture of Reddit.
This story, about a widow whose life and honour are saved from an encroaching army by an instantly-besotted count, and who later mysteriously falls pregnant, is both devotedly retold and revised into a modern exploration of how we treat rape, and how belief and rationalization can be tenuous and dangerous things.
