Victoria Fringe is something I have grown to love. My first experience was on a last minute date to see a feminist show about Penis's, which turned into a really powerful story about domestic abuse. The year after I took a day to myself to go go around to a few shows, and there found out about the hosting program. Last year I hosted the indomitable Ian Ferrier, poet and musician for "For Body and Light". Myself and the Brunette saw a couple of shows, and I went to Ian's show solo. The latter was great, and completely not the sort of thing I'd have gone to normally. Spoken word, guitar loops, dance, and storytelling all wrapped up in a most atmospheric whole.
So, this year, I offered to host Ian again, and got a few free tickets for letting him use the spare room at Vic-In-Person towers. Result.
Ha! with Wes Borg
This is a 75-minute long one-man show about a young guy from Saskatoon becoming a comedian., based on the jokes written by his girlfriend. Wes does all the characters, ranging from a gruff Saskethwan farmer, a gay queen, and a big black Torontonian comedian. He flips between each voice rapidly, altering his pose and voice in a blurring whir. It's amazing to watch and not as hard to follow as you'd expect.
The story uses the audience to represent the audiences at each location the story takes us, describing the highs and lows of being on the road, away from a heavily pregnant wife. Many turns of luck show up for the meteoric rise, and of course, the inevitable fall. But this ends up being the making of our hero, and we end with the happy ending that makes Canadian sense after all.
Wes puts a lot into the show, he's manic for about 75 minutes, not letting up and must have lost about 10lbs in sweat. The anger, fear and panic he exudes feels real at times. The story loses itself somewhere in the middle, and could have been 10 minutes shorter, but it ends as well as it starts, and was well worth watching.
Porn and Pinochet with Andy Caneti
My favourite of the three shows I saw. This is an autobiographical story of growing up as a Chilean in Canada, and later as Canadian in Chile. Andy weaves his story through many different little anecdotes of his parents being something very different from the other parents he saw in Canada, and his own realization when he moved back to Chile how much different his own personality was from his classmates in Sasketchwan.
Along the way, he discusses whether he really did lose his virginity at age 13, his first experience with video-taped porn, having to keep on the good side of the pro-Pinochet supporters in Chilean, and his relationship with his parents.
While the narrator is a stand-up comedian by day, this is less stand-up and more story telling... though it's funny and there are many punchlines. There's also some insights into his life and some heartfelt moments of his own realizations. No spoilers but there is plenty of emotion along with the yuks towards the end.
Two by the Catador Theatre group
For some reason I thought this was a one-handed play, but it's a multi-part piece, which has two stories running side by side, using a simple point of divergence: a missed call on the cell phone. We watch the lead characters go through their day, intertwining with each other, and a couple of set pieces which show the tedium of their jobs at a coffee shop. These scenes had a lot of walking around on the set, and the heavy footsteps didn't add a rhythm to the show but instead made a distracting noise. They intertwined the two stories here a lot, but instead of being offset mirrors, they were a jumbled mess of action.
Then we get the best and the worst act. The noisy bar. The best, as the acting and writing here was compelling and interesting. The worst as I had to really strain to hear the dialogue over the background music in the bar. Which is a shame, as both sets of dialogue were well acted and well written, advancing what we knew about the central character and her relationships with other people that were not yet clear. This part, where the two parallel stories were the same but very different was good stuff.
Until the ending act. Which, as warned, contained scenes of violence and sexual assault. But it was both telegraphed earlier, and one dimensional. It just felt like an easy answer and ending (and a tragic ending too) without much examination, or even a build up of tension beforehand before the release. In the end, the story had good parts, but overall didn't hang together very well for me.
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