For up-to-date reviews of every show at this year’s Ottawa Fringe Festival check our coverage at FullyFringed.ca – a co-production of the Wellington Oracle and Apartment613.

We’re really proud of the site; it’s the first time such ambitious coverage of Ottawa’s premier theatre festival has been attempted by anyone, and we’re thrilled to be the first media outlet giving full coverage to what we believe is the most creative annual event in the nation’s capital.

Theatre review by Jared Davidson

A suicide of a friend, rampant paranoia and loneliness punctuated by naughty comments from dirty old men – make no mistake, Heroes is a comedy. But there is more than a quick laugh to be had at Lise Ann Johnson’s production of this translated French play. At its core, the play contemplates suffering, life and death. It follows three old men as they attempt to escape their veteran’s group home while dealing with the consequences of the first world war and their growing disconnection from the world.

At the same time, it delivers some of the best laughs available anywhere. Truly, the effective delivery of such a funny script is an achievement in itself, but Peter Froehlich, John Koensgen and Paul Rainville go above and beyond in their interpretation of the characters. Each of them wonderfully portrays a different portion of the spectrum of aging. They never resort to stereotypes; their characters are well-rounded, realistic old men. It is their performances that make the play as engaging and hilarious as it is. Their control of the audience is remarkable; they skilfully guide the audience through the quick turns in the emotion of the play so that the play moves fluidly from laughter to sorrow and back again, which would be jarring were it not done so well.

The production contains strong themes of disconnection and friendship. The majority of the play involves three friends working together to achieve their goal: to reach the poplars outside the grounds of the veteran’s home. Brian Smith’s set design is beautifully engineered to capture these themes. It is as bare as the heroes lives. Three chairs and a stone dog are all that sit upon the cold stone stage. But even its is simplicity, there is great care taken, especially with regard to the design of the chairs, which are as unique as the characters who sit upon them. Behind the chairs, a wall. Behind the wall, the poplars, out of reach. The result is to contrast the drab experiences of the old men with the vibrant colours of the trees. It is very effective. As the characters gaze with longing at the poplars above the audience, the audience’s vision is drawn to the same trees behind the performers. The set as a whole adds greatly to the experience of the play.

The stone dog (the role is credited to the affectionately named Champion Granite of Mutability) deserves more than a passing mention. The dog very nearly steals the show. This is a testament to the actors’ ability to create a believable character out of granite, but it is also an example of the light-hearted hilarity with which Heroes underscores its heavy subject matter. Under excellent direction from Lise Ann Johnson, the show is at once moving and uproarious. The actors are a joy to watch, and it is hard to imagine better casting for the roles. There is nothing simple about this comedy. Though I recommend this show for the laughter it will provide, I could recommend it again for the discussion it begins.

“Heroes” directed by Lise-Ann Johnson plays the main stage of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre through June 27; consult the Great Canadian Theatre Company for showtimes and tickets

Photo of poplar grove near Arras, France, by OliBac

According to Judi Varga-Toth, her Credible Edibles café just may offer the “greenest lunch” in Ottawa. Already known for its use of locally-sourced organic ingredients, the café has recently teamed up with Gary Watson Cycling Courier to deliver school lunches to Turnbull School on Fisher Avenue.

Though her café just passed its first anniversary, it’s not the first green partnership for Varga-Toth’s young business. Since last summer, Credible has been a leader in the Green Buildings and Workplaces Challenge, a program run by local non-profit group Ecology Ottawa. The café has a reputation for putting the environment front and centre in its business practices, so much so that Jess Wells of Ecology Ottawa calls it a “shining example of a workplace committed to minimizing its ecological footprint however possible.”

Bike courier Gary Watson is a long-time courier who has been using pedal power to make deliveries since the 1980s, and recently added a cargo bike (shown above making a delivery on Wellington Street) to his fleet, enabling the kind bulk of delivery service needed by food service clients.

Business owners along the Wellington strip may be able to take advantage of Watson’s routing now that he has customers in the area. Delivery runs coming from Centretown to outlets like Herb and Spice currently see him returning empty to his Bank Street base “but we’d love to offer our east-bound capacity to Hintonburg and West Wellington businesses with customers downtown”, Watson says.

Close-up views of the cargo bike’s features can be seen here.

By Heather Marie Scheerschmidt

For most of us, the subject of airport security is all too familiar: the little plastic bags for liquids and gels, the ever-changing rules about carry-on luggage, lining up to go through metal detectors, being questioned by stern looking security officers, having bags opened and inspected, and these days, even full body scans. Hardly a week goes by without an airport security issue in the news. And the fear those stories produce means we put up with delays and inconveniences because we understand the system is in place to protect us.

But are we actually any safer?

That is the question raised in “Airport Security”, a new play from indie theatre company Gruppo Rubato.

Hot on the heels of his RBC Emerging Artist of the Year Award, Patrick Gauthier wears the playwright, producer, and director hats on this project. The last show he directed, “Countries Shaped Like Stars” for Mi Casa Theatre, recently took home “Outstanding Fringe Production” and “Outstanding New Creation” at the third annual Les Prix Rideau Awards. “What’s beautiful about using the topic of airports and airport security” Patrick tells me, “is that everybody has a story connected to it…so you can draw on that energy in the rehearsal hall but you can also then draw on that energy from the audience. Everyone has a story, and everyone’s interested in it.”

Gruppo Rubato is a company Patrick founded with Tania Levy and Gavriella Silverstone in 2002. Local actor Kris Joseph joined the company in 2004, and to date they have produced seven original shows – including 2007’s Fringe Festival hit, “Churchill Protocol” which won the Rideau Award that year for “Best New Creation”. The idea for “Airport Security” came during that tour, when they were spending a lot of time in airports, dealing with all of the inconveniences of air travel and watching the experiences of travellers around them. “Airport security is designed to do two things,” Patrick states, “it’s designed to actually make us safer, but I think it’s primary design is to make us feel safer; which I call the pageantry of security.”

This notion of safety versus the illusion of being safe, and the absurdity of extreme safety measures that may or may not actually be effective, is a subject rife with material for the theatre. Patrick has spent the last three years gathering and sifting this material, and developing the piece that will premier at the Irving Greenberg Centre on June 4th.

The three year development process for this script has included most of the current cast. “Everyone in this show was in the July 2009 workshop, and some were involved before that, so everyone has at least a three draft history with the play,” explains Patrick. Because of this history, the production is evolving out of a kind of shared creative memory. “What’s strange is that it makes the project feel enormous…we feel like it’s overwhelming because we all have a memory of scenes that have been cut, and scenes that have been filmed,” Patrick continues, “I’m credited as the playwright, but the play has really been created by this company.”

The audience for “Airport Security” has also been invested in its development. Through things like public readings, sneak previews, a fundraising party at Club Saw, web content both self-generated and aggregated from other sources, Gruppo Rubato has been building awareness around the subject matter and themes of “Airport Security”. At the centre of these community engagement initiatives, is company member and performer Kris Joseph: “If you’ve got something you want to say, and you want to get people involved with it, then you’ve got to open the door and let people in to see it.” A key part of the development process has been about creating the world of the play, and sharing that world with potential audiences. As Patrick explains, “we’ve been referring to this as the airport security project. The play is the main course of the project, but the webisodes are hopefully one hell of an appetizer, right? Then you’ve got the rest of the web content, the news aggregator; a constant stream on Twitter of news stories on this subject.” “For me,” Kris adds, “the world of the play is about how do we open up this process and say, yeah there are some questions we want to ask and a discussion that we want to have; but we don’t own this discussion…we don’t own the debate, and we don’t own the questions.” This approach is really important to the company, a core value that Kris describes this way: “In order for theatre to survive, to grow, it has to exist outside of the walls of the theatre, and there are easy and cheap ways for us to do that.”

In the play, airport security is used as a metaphor to explore issues around safety and individuality. As Kris explains, “ultimately “Airport Security” is a play about the balance between what is public and what is private; what is personal, and what is communal… there are questions about why these security systems exist, and then there are some questions about whether the fears, and some of the responses to those fears, are in fact rational.”

The script follows five main characters, who are unnamed as if to suggest their individuality has already been taken from them. It’s a fragmented narrative, in that we see pieces of these people’s lives, just as you would if you encountered them in an airport. People in airports are judged on fragments of their lives, just as these characters will be judged by their audience, based on what they see. “A lot of my plays end up being identity plays,” says Patrick, “and identity and airports are so intertwined – you have to have photo identification ready at a moment’s notice. You can disappear in an airport in the sense that you become one of the masses, one of the travellers, but you can become an individual in a second. You don’t want to be an individual in an airport. You want to go about your business unnoticed.”

As Kris points out, “on one level we’ve got a play about a bunch of people who are trying to travel; on another level there are questions that this play raises that are applicable to Facebook, they are applicable to government, they are applicable to skepticism about capitalism, world trade issues, hypocrisy and policy discussions – and that is, do you believe that what you’re being told is factual?”

Gruppo Rubato literally means a group who moves out of step with the beat. The company mandate: to present politically charged new work, aimed at a young urban audience. The fact they choose to focus on original creation, rather than interpreting existing plays, does set them apart from a lot of Ottawa theatre companies. And it makes sense, in the context of airport security, for Gruppo Rubato to explore the issue by asking what it means to stand out, to be different, when we are constantly being told that in order to be safe we must conform.

“One of the challenges of creating the piece is: tell me something I don’t already know” says Patrick, “what’s interesting to me is how you can take airport security, something that is universally understood, and use it as a metaphor; place it over other issues…I hope that people see this as a play about security and privacy in general, not just a play about an airport.”

After three years and countless drafts, “Airport Security” will finally premiere in Ottawa this week. “I see this production as the next step in the project, in the process of this show,” muses Patrick, “it’s funny to think of this as the end of the process. I think this is where it gets really interesting: where we get it up in front of an audience and see what happens.”

Airport Security features Ottawa actors Simon Bradshaw, Kris Joseph, Catriona Leger, Tania Levy, and Kate Smith. The show runs June 4 – 13 at the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre Studio Theatre. For tickets, call the box office at 613.236.5196 and for info please contact info@rubato.ca

photo: (L-R) John Koensgen, Kris Joseph and Sam Kalilieh star in "Facts" by Arthur Milner; directed by Patrick MacDonald. Costumes designed by Sarah Waghorn. Set and lighting design by Martin Conboy; with associate set designer, Yvan Cazabon. Photo by Steve Boyton of Paul Toogood Photography.

Theatre Review by Sterling Lynch

Arthur Milner’s latest play, Facts, begins as an engaging, intelligent, and character-driven murder mystery. Then, it jumps its narrative rails and careens into a sudden and unresolved ending. Watching this Great Canadian Theatre Company / New Theatre of Ottawa co-production is seventy minutes well-spent but the script probably needs seventy more minutes to finish the engaging journey Milner starts but does not finish.

In the early-going, Facts isn’t a play about the West Bank, even if it happens to be set in the West Bank. Instead, Milner expertly reveals to us what West Bank life is like, by letting us watch an Israeli detective and a Palestinian inspector discuss the unsolved murder of an American archaeologist.

The dialogue between Yossi HaCohen (John Koensgen) and Khalid Yassin (Sam Kalilieh) is fast, intelligent, and surprisingly funny. The characters are believable and the mystery is engaging and illuminating. Kalilieh, in particular, is excellent, giving a confident, nuanced, and engaging performance. Director Patrick McDonald uses a fine set to good effect. We’re very pleased to be the fly on this wall.

Then, by my eye and ear, when Danny (Kris Joseph), a Jewish settler arrives for interrogation, the script jumps its narrative rails. Suddenly, instead of a murder mystery, we’re watching a play that is very much about the conflict between secular and religious Zionists.

And as Yossi’s hatred for religious Zionists gets the better of him, the production team seems to pick a side. Danny comes across as inhuman and pernicious, Yossi becomes a thug, and Khalid seems almost angelic in comparison.

Whatever the production team’s opinion of West Bank politics may be, dramatically-speaking, once Danny is cast as the evil guy, Yossi as the well-intentioned bad guy, and Khalid as the innocent bystander, the events on stage become less engaging.

From there, the script careens headlong into an abrupt ending, without any clear resolution. Yossi shoots, changes his world forever and, for some reason, Milner prefers not to explore the consequences of this act. Instead, he gives us an ending that reduces the complicated politics of the West Bank to a cold-blooded execution in an interrogation room.

Meanwhile, upstairs at the Fritizi Gallery, The Cube’s Don Monet has curated an exhibit that, I think, directly and effectively dialogues with the events depicted on the main stage. Mark Seabrook’s vibrant acrylics on canvas are deeply informed by his personal history, which is filed with horror stories simply because he’s an Ojibwe living in Canada.

Because of this exhibit, I can’t help but wonder if the Canadian obsession with the ravages of colonialism overseas isn’t anything more than an excuse not to engage with our own devastating colonial legacy here at home. Our checkpoints and security walls are less apparent but they’re as obstructing and as devastating as anything on the West Bank.

I for one think we will only learn how to address this devastation — both here and abroad — when we possess the fortitude to investigate fully the consequences of our actions and of those who have come before us. I have to believe this because the only alternative to the story I imagine always seems to end with a gunshot and wordless indifference.

GCTC’s “Facts” by Arthur Milner is playing the mainstage of the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre through May 2; for tickets and showtimes call 613 236 5196