You take your chances at the Fringe. With nearly a hundred disparate programs, scattered citywide across a dozen venues and an avowed mission to showcase young up-and-coming talent, you never quite know just what you’re going to get in any given show.
You take your chances with the weather, too, for the fortnight-long festival recurring every September. At this season, in our Temperate Rainforest climate, you could wind up basking in “Indian” (or “First Nation” or “Indigenous”) summer or doused in the first wave of autumn rains.
Rain prevailed in 2019, as the 35-year-old Vancouver Fringe rounded on middle age. And the lowering skies found a reflection in this year’s program roster, with a preponderance of serious shows engaging Big Topics. Not that there weren’t plenty of laughs to be had as well, but even these shows had a thought-provoking edge.
One of the edgiest – and funniest – we saw was Comedy Central Comedian Bill Santiago’s monologue The Immaculate Big Bang at the False Creek gym.World-class stand-up, with all the customary tropes: long, manic, free-associative riffs punctuated by gapes of gobsmacked amazement. Except here the motor-mouth patter is all about the lightsome subject of cosmology. And nobody can pose cosmological conundra like a four-year-old.
So we start out on the swing set in Santiago’s native barrio in the Bronx. It’s the one-month anniversary of his father’s death – sort of Papi’s “birthday in heaven,” as he tries to explain to his toddler daughter. Santiago’s still contorting through the convoluted stages of grief, but the little girl cuts straight to the chase: “So will there be cake?” And where has Papi gone?
Why, back where he came from, the Great Nothing that we all come from. And just like that – Bang! Big Bang! – we’re off on a magical, mystery tour d’horizon of contemporary cosmological thought, right up to and including the probabilistic riddles of Quantum Physics and Shrodinger’s Cat, all spelled out with toddler-appropriate concision and drollery. But to buy into such paradoxes, he admits, needs a leap of faith as daring as his own Puerto Rican Mami’s credence in the rites of Santeria or the inerrancy of Catholic Scripture.
Not that Santiago has anything against Scripture, per se. As a pro storyteller, he admires the narrative thrust of its opening salvos, Genesis and Exodus. It loses its oomph, though, by Book Three, with all those rules and regs. Why not just toss Leviticus and sub in something spritelier, like his daughter’s favorite Doctor Seuss book. With preacherly solemnity he intones, “I Am Sam. Sam I Am,” aiming a Godly accusatory finger straight at the audience. He had me converted; a single-handed tour de force.
Another one-man tour de force across town at the Cultch. But this one was decidedly two-handed, with 10 twitchy digits emanating from the puff sleeves of monologist James Jordan’s thrift-store Beethoven costume. Playing the title character in his original script, Ludwig and the Hammerklavier, he spends much of the 75 minute production performing (by memory, no less!) some 30-odd demanding musical selections on an onstage spinet. Beethoven sonatas, mostly, with a sprinkling of symphonic transcriptions and snippets of Bach and Mozart.
And the hands don’t stop moving even when he steps away from the piano. Rather they flutter in mid-air as he paces the stage for a first-person account of the composer’s life and (very) hard times. Luckless in love, health and the vicissitudes of fame and fortune, Jordan’s Beethoven nevertheless forges on with sardonic cheer, fortified by goblets of lead-impregnated wine. We hear of his encounters with the likes of Mozart, Haydn and Goethe, as well as assorted numbskull blue-bloods, all punctuated with shrill cackles and Germanic harrumphs.
It’s clearly a labor of love and a music appreciation lesson par excellence; I’ll never hear the Appasionata quite the same again. With a voice more like Mozart’s and a physique more like Brahms’, Jordan – at least when he’s not at the piano – more nearly illuminates, rather than inhabits, the character of Beethoven.
More conventionally Beethovenesque – furrowed brow, unruly frizz of hair, brooding gaze – is Blake Valletta’s portrayal of the iconic Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko in John Logan’s Tony-award-winning script Red. Curiously, this look is a far cry from the historic Rothko, who, by the late 1950’s, when the story is set, appeared more like a bland and balding CPA.
But never mind; the Beethoven glower better befits the autocratic, solipsistic, hyper-intellectual, dyspeptic (and eventually suicidal) artiste depicted in the script. No wonder he so intimidates Ken (Andres Collantes), the callow Midwestern art student, newly landed in New York, whom he hires for studio scut work. Rothko nees a gofer as he tackles his first-ever, make-or-break bigtime art commission: a series of murals to grace the swanky ground floor restaurant of an iconic new Manhattan skyscraper by America’s top architect.
But the kid, scene-by-scene, gradually finds his footing in his new art world milieu and in independent adulthood until at last he dares to challenge Rothko on everything from the affective import of the color palette to what vinyl LP (classical piano or Reihardt/Grapelli?) to play on the studio turntable.
But when Ken challenges Rothko’s sell-out in producing high-end “overmantle” wall décor for philistine plutocrat diners in a swanky restaurant, it’s a bridge too far. Rothko phones up the celebrated architect, returns the fat commission fee (the equivalent of nearly half a million 2019 Canadian dollars, a pittance of what the paintings are worth today, but unprecedented at the time) and claims back the canvasses.
Among Rothko’s many quiddities was a declared aversion to natural light, and the Fringe rendition of Red in the Cultch’s blackbox Lab theatre brings home the claustrophobic “submarine” feel of his studio. The staging presumes that the masterpiece mural-in-progress, invisible to us but vivid to the protagonists, hangs on the proverbial “fourth wall” between the stage space and the audience.
So the two co-stars squint right up to it, reacting – right in our faces – to every presumed nuance of color and texture. They’re both incredibly talented young actors who’ve worked mostly in film, so they know how to handle this type of extreme close-up. But rarely does a movie – or indeed any script – call for such lengthy spoken meditations on such abstractions as the relationship of artwork to its creators, viewers, patrons, markets and historic antecedents. Heady stuff, handled with aplomb.
Bodily stuff – a lot of it – is the topic of Madeleine George’s The Most Massive Woman Wins, and it was treated with plenty of aplomb by a team of talented local co-stars (pictured above) on the Cultch Lab stage. The rather loose-fitting frame story tracks a quartet of women – Hilary Fillier, Joanna Rannelli, Sophia Paskalidis and Cecilia Davis – who meet in the waiting room of a liposuction clinic.
Through a series of micro-vignettes, we get an inkling of their backstories. We suffer with the women through parental fat-shaming, schoolyard taunts, dismissive job interviews, a gamut of eating disorders, self-scarring, date rapes, spousal abuse – all the many harms that overabundant flesh is heir to.
Director Mika Laulainen frames each sketch with ingenious staging (jump rope chants, cats’ cradle entanglements, volleyball rotations et al). Stephanie Wong’s flexible set facilitates the quick switches with just a couple of moveable benches and some gym gear. Keagan Elrick’s quick-flick lighting and Zoe Wessler’s puncy sound design (the women all wear whistles around their necks) help maintin the brisk, vaguely athletic, pacing. By the end of 45 minutes, you feel you’ve had quite a work out, emotionally and even physically.