Best theatre stays with you long after the curtain goes down

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/12/2024 (653 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I first started reviewing theatre performances in Winnipeg three years ago, I tried to do my job in secret. But I’m pretty easy to spot in an auditorium. I am constantly moving around in my seat, leaning forward to spot a detail or tapping my ear when I notice the music is overpowering unamplified speech.

And then there’s my baby-blue binder.

The first thing I do when I sit down is make a crude drawing of the set. I look for recurrences — colours, materials, motifs — and outliers.

I dare myself to guess and to consider the “spring-loaded” elements of the stage environment.

If there’s a table, as there was at the centre of the Rachel Browne Theatre for the 28th Minute’s spellbinding production of Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, I wonder whether it will be flipped over, danced on, or both.

In Shakespeare in the Ruins’ fluid staging of Daniel Macdonald’s Iago Speaks, I watched as Arne MacPherson’s Iago sat in prison and wondered whether the iron-barred door was even locked by the bumbling jailor (the wonderful Joshua Beaudry).

Once a performance begins, I begin taking my “show notes.” I draw key, metaphor-laden props, describe costumes, and take note of when lighting and musical cues elevate, dictate or support the flow of the production.

When the show ends, I go home and try to make sense of what I’ve seen and recorded.

My understanding of the job is constantly changing, but I’ve learned during my tenure that my opinion is mine and mine alone.

I do my best to reflect the feeling in the room, to not seek out flaws but to highlight successes, to listen in the silence for the weight of felt emotion, and to search within the laughter for authentic creativity and surprise in the telling of the joke itself.

During an interview with playwrights Daniel Brooks and Daniel MacIvor, MacIvor said the worst enemy to theatre was certainty. More and more, I’ve come to agree. I am constantly reconsidering my own understanding after I’ve landed anywhere close to a fixed opinion.

A play might only last an hour or two, but if it’s lucky, it will stay with you for years, showing up in your memory when you least expect it, tranforming itself as you do the same. These are five of the dozens of productions I watched in 2024 that I’ll be remembering into 2025 and beyond:

The Lehman Trilogy, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

March 20-April 13

The colour of the United States dollar is green, and the fabric of the most impactful bill in America is mostly made from cotton, but there is nothing soft about Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, a true epic that spans 164 years of fortune.

A rags-to-riches tale, the RMTC production — starring Alex Poch-Goldin, Ari Cohen and Jordan Pettle as the sibling founders of Lehman Brothers and directed by Richard Greenblatt — is a cautionary folktale about what we lose when we gain.

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The Ethan in the Room, Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival

July 17-28

Five actors in their 20s host a dinner party for grown-ups, using an Albee-esque setting as an invitation for explosive, exploratory and propulsive conversations about gender roles, abnormal norms and regressive thinking patterns in playwright Ethan Stark’s remarkable fringe festival production.

Stark’s castmates — Sam Hodge, Sadie Kornovski, Mady Richard and Mari Padeanu — are all deserving of praise, while the director-playwright is deserving of gratitude. It’s difficult to imagine leaving this play unmoved.

A special fringe shout-out goes to a few performers who left a strong impression, including Nicolas Rice (A Side of Rice), 19-year-old MTYP alum Andrew Riley (the syringe-happy Dr. Bevilacqua in Thomas MacLeod’s House of Gold) and Heather Madill and Joseph Aragon (Between Gigs).

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The Outside Inn, Prairie Theatre Exchange

May 7-19

I wish I could’ve had a later checkout time from The Outside Inn, because when this hearty comedy from local playwrights/performers Sharon Bajer and Elio Zarrillo ended, I could’ve used a few more minutes before showing my teary eyes in the lobby.

As a reviewer, the excellence of the work felt obvious, but as an audience member, I felt a strong connection with both Bajer’s Lily and Zarrillo’s Patrick.

The way those characters — dealing with cancer and growing up and into one’s self — shift so swiftly and at times violently between tragedy and comedy felt so deeply experienced that I made sure the feeling was conveyed in my notes, where I made the same observation several times.

“This feels real.”

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Rise, Red River, Théâtre Cercle Molière

March 8-23

Playwright-director Tara Beagan’s reclamatory, declarative drama — a co-production of Article 11, Prairie Theatre Exchange and Théâtre Cercle Molièree — followed one woman (Tracey Nepinak) as she dragged the bed of a barren river overflowing with the sediment of painful histories no current could wash away.

Multilingual (Anishinaabemowin, French and English) in its presentation, multilinear in its telling and multi-generational in its approach to understanding the ongoing MMIWG crisis, Rise, Red River is an instructive, lyrically designed and shockingly self-assured production that represented a boldly futuristic approach to theatre-going in Winnipeg.

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Iago Speaks, Shakespeare in the Ruins

June 14-July 7

Before I saw SiR’s production of Iago Speaks, I asked director Rodrigo Beilfuss where I should put my lawn chair.

He pointed to an area in front of and slightly to the left of the jail cell housing Iago (Arne MacPherson).

Throughout this hilarious, existentially rooted drama of identity and external perception, I didn’t have to crane my neck once to catch MacPherson and Joshua Beaudry’s virtuous navigation of playwright Daniel Macdonald’s Othello postscript, which was my favourite production of the year.

 

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com