Stage/Theatre

Highlight: Peter Sarty’s hyperactive sound design, made up of air horns and 2000s pop hits
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Though it at first plays dumb, Prude turns out to be a cathartic, meaningful event.

Can a solo show with a sparse visual world be maximalist? Before seeing playwright-performer Lou Campbell’s Prude, I might’ve leaned toward no — but this rocket-speed hit from Fringe 2022 is a nonstop sensory assault.

From the start of the 50-minute show, director Stevey Hunter and sound designer Peter Sarty blast 2000s pop hits, many so overplayed they now feel detached from reality. To these raucous tunes, Campbell, dressed in a kind of morphsuit (plus a Runescape-esque party hat), moshes around the stage without restraint. Their character soon introduces themselves as the King of the Party, promising to teach the audience how they, too, can have a similarly rockin’ time at social events.

Prude feels very Gen Z, with its hyperactive sound design and jittery rhythms resembling a social media feed in more ways than one. In a vacuum, I’d have complicated feelings about this approach — should theatre really try to compete with the dopamine-generating machine that is the Internet? It seems like a losing battle. But as Prude progresses, the King of the Party’s bombastic surface reveals itself to be just that — a surface, beneath which course rivers of insecurity and regret. Though it at first plays dumb, Prude turns out to be a cathartic, meaningful event.

Highlight: A poetry reading that breaks the fourth wall
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Playwright Louise Casemore raises thoughtful questions about the value of employee-customer relationships.

Like Prude, Louise Casemore’s Gemini takes place in Buddies’s Cabaret space, a bar-like setting perfect for the slow-burning drama’s present-day timeline, in which Ben (Vern Thiessen), a gruff author in his 50s, reads out sections from his only published work, a poetry collection that managed to weasel its way onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Casemore breaks up this sombre literary event with two-hander scenes involving Julie (Casemore), a recently hired bartender, and Ben, a regular of the pub. Over several months, their relationship blooms from strangers to seemingly close friends — although a key question the play raises is whether such a relationship can ever transcend its transactional contours.

These highly realistic scenes drift along in a lackadaisical fashion — while directors Chantelle Han and Mitchell Cushman render the action in considerable detail, Gemini is on the edge of playing out too gradually. And though the Cabaret offers a nice ambiance, I found myself wondering if the control offered by a more traditional theatre space could’ve helped focus these scenes further: Gemini often seems to be unfolding from afar, when its intimate content would seem to demand close-ups. That said, after this central relationship has had time to marinate, the show becomes rather flavourful; its final 20 minutes are particularly intoxicating.

Highlight: John D. Huston’s endearingly heightened performance
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: The show’s engagement with Canada’s dark history is far from superficial, with playwright Keir Cutler even pulling in quotes from primary sources.

With its twisty, stylized approach to Canadian history, Keir Cutler’s solo show Civilized, performed by John D. Huston, wouldn’t be out of place next to one of Guy Maddin’s experimental cinematic jaunts into the annals of Canadiana.

Performed in the round in the Buddies Chamber, the blustery, hour-long satire concerns William Blank, a civil servant from the era of Wilfred Laurier, whose government is hugely in favour of residential schools. To make clear he’s a fan as well, William repeats talking points about their so-called civilizing influence in a lecture that eventually spins into chaos.

Though the subject matter is pertinent, a framing device that involves Huston breaking character to explain Cutler’s intentions dulls the show’s edge. Satire needs to feel dangerous — which means trusting the audience to work out what’s being said. It doesn’t help that William is an extraordinarily easy target: almost anyone who’d buy a ticket to see Civilized would likely already agree he’s a turd.

Huston’s performance is endearingly heightened, with director Paul Hopkins at times pushing things into an almost Brechtian realm. Another resonant element of Civilized is its engagement with primary sources: Though most know this history on a big-picture level, it takes on a new level of immediacy when you hear the actual words used by the government to justify these evils.