Fringe reviews #14: The actors identify you as the playwright after the show

THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE

Saucy Gal Productions

Planetarium (Venue 9), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐ ½

Just like us, and just like her father, Leigh-Anne Kehler was born into an imperfect body, but the Winnipeg storyteller uses every page of this 45-minute medical history to heal the fractures of repetitive trauma.

What begins as a play-by-play of her dad’s ongoing tug-of-war with the afterlife becomes the performer’s meditation on her own impermanence. Well-layered and engaging, Kehler’s story is told with considerable empathy and a refreshing paucity of shame, shading in the contours of invisible disabilities to encourage understanding.

Affected for over a decade by a rare brainstem disorder that flares up in unpredictable and debilitating fashion, Kehler reflects on her own perseverance while examining religion, science and the inconsiderate fate of epigenetics.

— Ben Waldman

THE BIG BIG IMPROV SHOW

The Probable Cast

PTE — Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage (Venue 17), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐ ½

Before revealing Secrets & Lies or turning Gilbert and Sullivan Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh began his career in the theatre, where the British film director learned to favour improvisatory rehearsals with the workaday actors who turned barren studio apartments into timeless character suites.

In The Big Big Improv Show, a highly abbreviated version plays out in Director’s Cut, a game wherein four improvisers prepare genre pictures on extremely limited time budgets, with the audience determining which reel reaches the credits. On Monday, Stephen Sim led a doomed space expedition, Dave Morris helmed a grade-school Macbeth, Tony Beeman piloted a dead-in-the-air noir, and Jeanine Clarke choreographed a menstrual “romantasy.”

As a study of communication styles,  the game is thrilling, but the most entertaining action usually occurs when the direction is brief and to the point. “Let’s get out of here quick so we can improvise the ending,” Clarke said, right before the son of the goat king peeled the impenetrable orange with his lover’s period blood.

— Ben Waldman

BUGJUICE: A BEETLEJUICE PARODY

Meraki Theatre

CCFM — Antoine Garborieau Hall (Venue 19) to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Performed by three rotating 12-member teenage casts, this 50-minute musical was created by co-directors Taylor Gregory and Kennedy Huckerby as a vehicle for students of Winnipeg’s Meraki Theatre school.

Inspired by both the 1988 movie and 2019 Broadway musical (“minus the adult jokes” stresses Huckerby), the show is lively and zany, with fun local references such as Ms. Fringe (Madeline Somers), a ghost who sings sadly about missing her times onstage at the Winnipeg fringe while alive. The song was written by Meraki’s student music director Micah Buenafe.

July 18 performer kudos go to Calum Goetzke, 15, who channelled Michael Keaton’s craziness as Beetlejuice/Bugjuice so well it was spooky.

There are typical student productions issues: some players are far stronger than others, and some are running out of voice by the end. The show is further hampered by a venue and stage that’s simply too small for the production, with poor sightlines owing to the seating style. But none of that should scare you away.

— Janice Sawka

CLIQYOU

Here’s Hoping Theatre Co.

MTYP — Mainstage (Venue 21), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐ ½

Tension … and anticipation … are currently typing in local playwright Maia Woods’ CliqYou, a paean to the supportive, anxiety-inducing and frequently antagonistic universe of the long-distance groupchat.

After bonding two years earlier via an online role-playing game, seven perfectly likable friends (Katie Welham, Lainey Grueneklee, Reynaldo Gomez, Mike Swain, Sid Fiola, Brandon Case and Woods) who’ve never met in person approach a tipping point, questioning what — aside from routine, guilt, GIFs and would-you-rathers — is holding them together.

Directed by Anika Binding, CliqYou is a cautionary tale of FOMO, selective friendship and the fraught nature of digital togetherness. “Is it self-reflection time?” one character asks. Isn’t it always when the GC is ready to read you for filth and keep your ego in check?

— Ben Waldman

GENDER PLAY, OR WHAT YOU WILL

Will Wilhelm and Brandon Bowers

Tom Hendry Warehouse (Venue 6), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The runtime is accurate, but don’t think of this show as 105 minutes long. It’s about 35 minutes short, in this reviewer’s opinion. You could listen to the marvellous Chicagoan Will Wilhelm recite the Bard for days.

The premise: Shakespeare messed with the roles and labels and allowed his era and ours to see past the duty and the doldrums and walls and barriers and chains that were so much a part of Elizabethan times and our own. So we are all invited to explore gender in real time, including the lucky patron who gets to spend time on stage with this blazing, joyful soul.

So much of the best work this year has been from queer artists reclaiming ancestors from dominant and false histories that hide their full personhood and glory.

No mic, no great panoply. A trained voice, a dagger-sharp wit, the vulnerability of Hamlet, the reformed wisdom of young Henry, Lady Macbeth and of course, Romeo and Juliet. For the cost of a cocktail, you can open a trunk full of treats: full of gasps, tears, guffaws, all revealed in an atmosphere of lightness and love. Unmissable!

— Lara Rae

THE GET LAID* SHOW (*OR A DATE? DEFINITELY A HIGH FIVE.)

TheOtherVNameProductions

Duke of Kent Legion (Venue 13), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐

Veronica Ternopolski wants people to connect. She wants people to have interesting conversations. She wants people to date. She wants people to get laid.

And if she can’t, she’ll settle for a round of high-fives.

The local performer, who goes by V, is an energetic bundle of positivity who longs for the good old days of face-to-face communication and wants people to follow the four rules of good relationships: participation, risk, vulnerability and honesty.

During the 60-minute interactive show, she invites audience members to follow those guidelines while offloading their emotional baggage, talking about their worst rejections and disclosing a series of personal beliefs via a show of hands. She opens up about her past using numbered eggs to recall good and bad long- and short-term relationships.

V takes a poll of available singles, so there is a chance of meeting someone new. But if not, audience members are guaranteed at least one high five. With consent, of course.

— Rob Williams

IMPROVISION: ANTI PASTA

ImproVision

Duke of Kent Legion (Venue 13), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐

ImproVision’s Alan MacKenzie and George McRobb are local short-form improv veterans who can always be counted on by comedy fans looking to fill their laughs-per-minute quota, and this year’s offering is no exception, judging by Saturday’s fast-paced 50-minute set.

The duo plays a variety of improv games and uses suggestions from the audience to incorporate into scenes. The pair knows how to wrap segments up quickly and never let things drag on too long, whether they are acting out a man’s day using puppets, reading an audience member’s phone texts to create a new scenario or having the crowd “direct” a scene by calling for an increase of various emotions, leading to what could be the first instance anywhere of people randomly shouting, “More ennui!”

And, if you somehow aren’t having a good time, the legion’s bar stays open during the show.

— Rob Williams

JEM ROLLS: ADVENTURES IN CANADIAN PARKING LOTS

Jem Rolls/Big Word

Planetarium Auditorium (Venue 9), to Saturday

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ½

Veteran English performance poet Jem Rolls has travelled “from concrete atoll to concrete atoll among the sea of green” on the Canadian fringe circuit for decades, and has spent many a day running lines, working out bits and figuring out phrasing in many a Canadian parking lot (a.k.a. talking to himself).

So, yes, it’s safe to say Rolls’ elbows are up in solidarity, but this isn’t a Canada-themed show. It’s a show about fringes — the festivals, yes, but also the ideas that happen in the margins, the magic of “a bunch of people with brilliant ideas, going for it.”

As audiences have come to expect from Rolls, this is another collection of richly observed poems animated by his gifts for propulsive rhythm, vivid imagery and comedic timing. His forays into science fiction are the standouts here, as is his own willingness to “go for it” with an improvised work that offers a glimpse into his process.

No matter the subject, it’s a pleasure to spend an hour in his brain.

— Jen Zoratti

MISTERMAN

Prairie Coast Productions

Centre culturel franco-manitobain (Venue 4), to Saturday

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ½

In a beautifully paced 70 minutes, local company Prairie Coast Productions presents master Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s stunning one-man show about the slow descent into madness of tormented Thomas Macgill.

Thomas, living with his sickly mother in a wasteland of a small Irish town, has dark impulses but he drowns them with his religious fervour and strange visions.

Walsh spares no quarter in drawing us into Thomas’s painful world, especially with his use throughout of Beckett-like recorded voices. The ending may seem as inevitable as it is horrible, but it can’t be avoided.

The direction by Ryan Bjornson is assured and insightful.

Above all there is Daniel Tompkins’ bold, impassioned, wrenching performance as Thomas and other inhabitants of the town who interact with him. Superb is a word too often casually tossed about but in Tompkins’ case, it’s the only word that fits.

— Rory Runnells

THE NAKED MENNONITE

Real Live Entertainment

The Rachel Browne Theatre (Venue 8), to Saturday

⭐⭐⭐ ½

There’s no shortage of skin or Mennonite sin at this storytelling show billed as “part gay burlesque, part history lesson.” Steinbach-based Alan Fehr’s character explores what it means to be Mennonite from the perspective of an “autistic-adjacent, closeted son” of Mennonite parents.

It’s the gay burlesque part that truly brings the performance to life. Not even a femoral hernia can slow Fehr down as he strips away religious constructs — and his clothing. He thrusts his hips to thumping bass and sultry red lighting, until only a bible shields his Menno manhood from the eyes of God.

This show would be stronger as a tighter 45-minute set, as the lengthy biblical history off the top slows the pacing and adds little to the overall story. That said, anyone who knows what it’s like to reckon with identity inside the often rigid confines of organized religion will likely appreciate this satirical story.

— Jeffrey Vallis

OUTSIDE, IN THE LANEWAY, UNDER THE STARS

Hard Times

Planetarium (Venue 9), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“It amazes me when people give the impression that they know who they are,” says monologist John Arthur Sweet, moments before he plainly labels his own brand of thinking as Cartesian.

The self-contained contradiction is noted and notable, and it arrives during the first minutes of the Perestroika portion of Sweet’s two-part debut at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, the half to which Sweet has affixed the title of Adulthood.

In Part 1, a sweet child in small-town Ontario opens his eyes, feeling like That Girl but looking nothing like Marlo Thomas. In Part 2, Sweet learns the truth at 17 before being schooled in method, in Meisner and in secrets. Both halves of Sweet’s story are about longing for place, of finding direction and of living in colour when so much of history was written in black and white. As a shrink once told him, “Thank god you found the theatre.”

— Ben Waldman

SEANCE SISTERS

Wickert & Arbogast

Son of Warehouse (Venue 5), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Try these mediums on for size. Spirited into Winnipeg from Minneapolis, the Seance Sisters are Sara Miller, Anya Naylor and Vivian Kampschroer. This trio summons the ghosts of the real-life Fox sisters, who astonished 19th-century audiences by purportedly communicating with the dead during nationwide spiritualist roadshows. Even sceptics stand to be converted into believers in one hour by this trio, whose dictions and physicalities are always precise, calculated and co-ordinated, just as any classic hoax should be.

Eerie sound, set and lighting design enable this production to float like a coffee table, giving the Son of Warehouse the feel of an ectoplasmic revival at Winnipeg’s historically haunted Hamilton House.

— Ben Waldman

THIRD PARTY

Brighter Dark Theatre

MTYP — Mainstage (Venue 21), to Sunday

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ½

Brett and Julie (Alanna McPherson and Dane Bjornson, both terrific), whose two-year-old relationship is already cracking under the pressure of cohabitation, confronts its most stressful episode yet: an intense collision with Marty Fink (Thomas McLeod), an intrusive investigator from Manitoba Public Insurance.

In the playwright McLeod’s followup to last year’s lauded House of Gold, he reunites with director Teresa Thomson for a 45-minute phone call that gives its talented cast every opportunity to get their story straight after a roundabout crash.

McLeod’s wisest move as a writer is to keep the conversation mostly confined to telephone lines, loading each of Julie and Brett’s responses with duplicitous winks of dishonesty and misdirection — of each other, of themselves, and of course, of the fanny-packed Fink, whose commitment to the Crown corporation as he paces through the theatre spills into insanity. “I go the extra mile,” he says in this new work, which, with a less abrupt ending, could easily find a home on any of the city’s major professional stages.

— Ben Waldman